Nearly ten times as many people in America now work at Starbucks than dig for coal. Coal mining has long been a canary of America’s energy transition—it lost hundreds of thousands of workers in the 20th century, and has shrunk in half again since 2012. 

Losing dirty, dangerous coal jobs is one thing, but the wholesale dismantling of our fossil fuel economy promises to be far more disruptive. True, but there’s a huge caveat. The bright light on the horizon is that most estimates of new clean energy jobs dwarf even the largest oil refineries and auto plants. 

That’s easy to celebrate from the sidelines but harder to stomach if your livelihood is on the line. With that in mind, we look at where jobs are being created, where they are going up in smoke, and whether there are ways to engineer a softer, fairer transition. 

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Winners

1. Everyone (on average). 2021 was a big year for energy jobs globally—it was the first time that more people around the world were working in clean energy jobs than fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Authority (IEA). While the US is still lagging behind that curve, clean energy jobs here are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the energy sector, says the Department of Energy (DOE). And the future looks rosy. Researchers at Dartmouth College calculate that a low carbon economy in the US would create two or even three green energy jobs for every fossil fuel job lost. (That fits with an earlier study out of Berkeley, which found that renewable and sustainable power sources inherently require more people per gigawatt hour of electricity generated, compared to fossil fuel plants).

2. Solar installers and battery makers. Photovoltaic and energy storage companies have been on a tear, adding tens of thousands of workers last year in the US. When considered along with wind, EVs, heat pumps and critical minerals supply, solar power and batteries accounted for over half of all job growth in global energy production since 2019. And the IEA expects these sectors to add tens of millions more jobs by the end of the decade.

3. Some surprise hires. Don’t count out Big Oil and Big Auto just yet. Both the IEA and the DOE expect the fossil fuel industry (particularly natural gas) to hire more workers in the immediate future, albeit at slower rates than clean energy jobs and tailing off in years to come. The IEA notes that if fossil fuel companies could successfully transition to hydrogen, carbon capture, geothermal and biofuels processing, they could almost offset decreases in core oil and gas employment all the way to 2030. It also expects car makers to pivot to EV production, retraining workers and safeguarding many jobs.

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Losers

1. Oil workers. Changing careers means more than just a quick retraining session. Morgan Frank at the University of Pittsburgh went down the rabbit hole of what transferring US fossil fuel employment to green jobs would actually mean, and the answer isn’t pretty. His team’s paper in Nature found that green energy jobs are not co-located with today’s oil and gas workers, leading them to predict that almost 99% of extraction workers would not transition to green jobs. And any workers that do make the change face a financial hit. The IEA notes that workers moving from oil and gas to wind, solar and hydrogen today would see pay cuts of 15 to 30%.

2. Petro-states. The shift to green energy will be difficult for economies that rely heavily on fossil fuel extraction and processing. Consultancy EY has an illuminating, interactive webpage allowing you to compare employment in regions around the world, under different decarbonization scenarios. Spoiler alert—oil producing nations in the Middle East and Australia are likely to see employment slump, and even Africa could experience a destabilizing wobble unless it accelerates production of green hydrogen and EV battery materials. “Due to the transition, socio-economic sustainability risks will likely increase as the employment rate drops,” warns author Catherine Friday.

3. Homer Simpson. Some low-carbon energy sectors aren’t exactly booming. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects the employment of nuclear technicians to decline 6% from 2023 to 2033. The US hit peak nuclear power stations in 2012 and has been declining ever since, as facilities age into decommissioning without being replaced. Meanwhile, a planned new generation of safer, cheaper and more efficient fission reactors continues to suffer cost overruns, red tape and delays, and commercial nuclear fusion remains a decades-distant dream. D’oh!

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What To Keep An Eye On

1. Labor shortages. Workers skilled in green energy jobs won’t just appear from nowhere. Projects are already facing delays in the EU and the US from labor shortages. Biden’s omnibus Inflation Reduction Act included incentives for partnering with apprentice programs and other funding that could be used to train maintenance workers, and installers for clean energy projects. But millions of workers will be needed, and in short order.

2. Carbon capture. The IPCC estimates that between 350 and 1200 gigatons of CO2 will need to be captured and stored this century. No one really knows yet what the technologies needed to achieve that will look like, but they will likely involve a lot of new workers. Climate research firm Rhodium Group estimated that each gigaton captured could translate to 1.5 million construction and 500,000 operation jobs.

3. Chat (and other) bots for hire. Any predictions about the future workplace should be taken with a large pinch of AI and robotics. The BLS just issued a report that shows dozens of occupations employing hundreds of thousands of Americans are likely to shrink in the years ahead. Top of the list are clerks and supervisors, but there are plenty of manufacturing and production roles at risk, too, that could affect the green energy roll-out.

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