The Green New Deal is a Jobs Engine, Despite Trump
In the United States and globally, the Green New Deal will continue to achieve critical gains, regardless of whatever the current administration says or does.
Left Hook Economics
The Green New Deal is a Jobs Engine, Despite Trump
In the United States and globally, the Green New Deal will continue to achieve critical gains, regardless of whatever the current administration says or does.
4 min read
One of President Donald Trump’s top-tier fixations is to heap ridicule on both climate science and all projects committed to combatting the global climate crisis. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last September, Trump declared that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” For good measure, Trump regularly invokes “The Green New Scam” as a go-to epithet.
Despite this, some of Trump’s most important priorities, especially his war of choice in Iran, are generating the unintended effect of bringing new levels of support for the very climate stabilization/green transition project he scorns. Thus, a Financial Times article from early May titled “Donald Trump’s Green New Deal” reports that the spike in oil prices caused by the Iran war has produced the strongest month of electric vehicle (EV) sales on record in Europe, a 20% jump in search traffic for EVs in the United States, and the highest level of solar panel installations in the United Kingdom since 2012.
As such Green New Deal developments continue to gather momentum globally—now benefitting from Trump’s unintended assistance and despite his fully intended hostility—it is critical that the project maintains a first-order commitment not only to producing abundant clean energy, but, equally, to advancing the well-being of the U.S. working class.
President Trump regularly claims that Green New Deal policies are job killers, while he battles valiantly to protect the miners in “America’s beautiful clean coal industry.” It is certainly imperative to supplant our existing fossil-fuel dominant global energy infrastructure with an energy system dominated by high efficiency and renewable energy sources. This is because burning oil, coal, and natural gas to produce energy is, by far, the largest source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are, in turn, the main factor driving the climate crisis.
It follows that this clean energy transition will entail job losses for coal miners and all other workers now employed in the oil, coal, and natural gas industries, in the United States and everywhere else. But what Trump and his minions ignore is that the investments to build the new clean energy infrastructure will create far more jobs than the jobs that will be lost through phasing out fossil fuels. Moreover, any Green New Deal program worthy of the name will include generous transition provisions for the fossil fuel industry dependent workers whose jobs will be phased out.
With coworkers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), I have published a series of studies that addresses these issues in detail. This includes nine separate studies over the past decade that develop programs for individual U.S. states to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. With each of these state-level programs, we estimate the overall employment effects of reaching zero emissions by the 2050 climate goal. Our most recent study, for the state of Michigan, was published last week. This study builds from the program developed in 2022 by the state government itself, titled the MI Healthy Climate Plan.
The main results from our Michigan study, which are consistent with our previous projects, include the following:
- Investments in Michigan in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and battery storage will require investments at about 2% of Michigan’s GDP every year until 2050. For 2027, this level of investment would amount to about $15 billion.
- These clean energy investments will generate an average of between 85,000–100,000 jobs per year between 2027–2050 within Michigan, equal to about 2% of Michigan’s current workforce. These will include jobs across all occupations in the state, including, for example, roofers, machinists, accountants, office managers and assistants, truck drivers, and wind turbine engineers. This level of job creation will continue as long as the state continues to invest 2% of its GDP on clean energy projects.
- On average, these jobs pay about 6% more than the average for the current Michigan workforce overall, at about $39 an hour versus $37 an hour. At the same time, a disproportionate share of the clean energy jobs are available to people without higher education credentials. In other words, clean energy investments, in Michigan and elsewhere, create greater opportunities for people without college degrees to get relatively well-paying jobs.
On the negative side, white males hold a much larger share of these clean energy jobs than is the case for Michigan’s overall economy. At present, women account for only about 27% of the clean energy jobs in Michigan, as opposed to holding 48% of jobs in Michigan’s overall economy. Still, as large-scale clean energy investments, subsidized with public funding, expand in Michigan, this can create new leverage for workers and their union representatives to fight for gender and racial equity, along with better wages and benefits.
Job losses for Michigan’s fossil fuel-based workers will remain unavoidable. At present, there are about 21,000 people in Michigan’s fossil fuel-based industries, amounting to only 0.5% of the state’s current workforce. Virtually all of these jobs will be phased out between now and 2050. If we assume that the phaseout proceeds in more or less steady increments between 2026–2050, and we also take account of workers voluntarily retiring over the next 25 years, then we end up with only about 350 workers getting laid off every year. This compares with our lower-end estimate that about 85,000 jobs will be created in Michigan as long as the state invests 2% of GDP per year on clean energy projects.
Still, each of the 350 workers who will be displaced every year needs to receive generous transitional support. This should include pension guarantees, guaranteed re-employment at their previous pay levels, as well as job retraining and relocation support as needed. We estimate that a generous package of such transitional support measures would cost about $45 million per year. That is less than 0.01% of Michigan’s 2025 GDP.
Through advancing this full package of large-scale clean energy investments and generous transitional support for laid-off fossil fuel industry workers, the Green New Deal, in the United States and globally, will continue to achieve critical gains, regardless of whatever Trump says or does.
Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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