The fossil fuel industry touches just about everything. Its most visible effects are pockmarked across the land as coalfields and oilfields, or blown into the air as smoke from factories and power plants. But its economic impacts spread across many sectors and regions. For that reason, decarbonizing the economy will affect more than miners and drillers. The changes will ripple through heavy industries that employ hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of laborers, many of whom may be dislocated by these changes and need help adapting to the post-carbon world.
When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, many communities with faltering coal mines and oil derricks realized they were poised to benefit from it. The legislation provides billions in tax incentives and grants to help “energy communities” — those towns and counties with brownfield sites, previously dependent on now-shuttered coal mines or coal-fired power plants, or otherwise having high tax revenue from fossil fuel extraction. Such places also must have an unemployment rate higher than the national average to qu... Read more
