Reimagine Appalachia Charts Sustainable Path for the Region | Article

A coalition of policy leaders and organizations are coming together in support of an ambitious new plan for a green transition for the region of Appalachia. The project is called Reimagine Appalachia, and its coalition of over 60 supporters include activists, businesses, think tanks, and community organizations from across Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

It remains unclear what the scope of national climate policy will be in the coming years. But Amanda Woodrum, a senior researcher with Policy Matters Ohio (a think tank helping head up Reimagine Appalachia), is confident that ambitious federal climate investments are on the way. For her, the question is not if, but when they will pass.

“We don’t know if it’s six months from now or five years from now, but it will happen,” Woodrum said.

The project aims to create “a New Deal that works for us,” echoing growing calls for a “Green New Deal” and harkening back to the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the region. The New Deal sought to revive the U.S. economy after the Great Depression, and included programs like the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), which brought electricity to hundreds of thousands of households by creating rural electric cooperatives that communities continue to rely on today.

Reimagine Appalachia promises to “expand opportunity through public investments,” “build a 21st century sustainable Appalachia,” and “rebuild the middle class” with its programs. These include an ambitious suite of proposals for federal investments in regenerative agriculture, manufacturing green energy technology, modernizing the electrical grid with green energy sources, expanding sustainable transit options like high-speed rail, building dams and levees to enhance flood resilience, and restoring damaged areas and ecosystems. The restoration projects are aimed directly at repairing the damage done by extractive industries, and include plans to reclaim abandoned coal mines, repurpose coal plants into green manufacturing sites, plug orphaned oil and gas wells, and restore native plants to forests and wetlands. Echoing the New Deal, reforestation and land restoration projects would be completed with a proposed federal Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the green investments would be accompanied by a rural broadband expansion program recalling the legacy of the REA.

The project emphasizes principles of just transition while also arguing that a fossil fuel-based economy has never delivered on its promises for the region. The Reimagine Appalachia blueprint points out that despite Appalachia’s immense natural resources, the region today suffers from high rates of unemployment and poverty, while much of its resources have been depleted and pollution is a widespread problem. The blueprint calls for institutions, including labor unions and local ownership structures, to help ensure that workers and communities are able to capture the benefits of the transition.

Reimagine Appalachia has recently partnered with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to release two reports assessing job creation prospects for its programs. According to the reports, the initiative would create 235,000 jobs sustained over 10 years in Ohio and 251,980 jobs over 10 years in Pennsylvania. These include direct jobs, indirect jobs, and induced jobs—jobs created directly through projects, indirectly through supply lines, and jobs in other sectors “induced” by the new economic activity. In each state, most jobs—by a wide margin—would come from electrical grid modernization projects. These projects are estimated to generate upwards of 140,000 jobs in Ohio and 170,000 in Pennsylvania. In both states, the reports indicate that workers in most of the new jobs would earn robust middle-class salaries of $50,000 to $70,000 per year.

Ohio and Pennsylvania each have roughly 10,000 fossil fuel workers, and the report expects that about 5,000 in each state will lose their jobs as a result of the shift away from fossil fuel production (based on the age of the workers, most of the remaining workers are expected to retire voluntarily). To assist them, the report advocates for retraining programs and strong wage insurance to ensure that they do not make less in their new jobs. Woodrum of Policy Matters Ohio emphasized that these workers will not be an afterthought to a larger plan, but rather an essential part of the transition.

“This is not about retraining and relocating our skilled workforce for jobs they don’t want in places they don’t want to go to,” Woodrum stated in an o nline webina r . “We need coal miners and coal plant workers as well as workers in oil and gas industries to help us build the Appalachia we want to live in.”

Reimagine Appalachia seeks to demonstrate how economic growth, the green energy transition, and the revitalization of communities go hand in hand. As momentum builds behind federal climate policy, Reimagine Appalachia’s wide-ranging slate of proposals charts a feasible path forward from decades of underinvestment in the region.

Author: Joseph Glandorf