The Equity Factor

Will Obama’s Climate Change Plan Create Jobs or Kill Them?

Obama announced his new climate change plan yesterday. What we really need is strong legislation.

Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

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Obama announced his plans for action on climate change yesterday afternoon. The plan, which you can read here, lays out measures to reduce green house gas emissions and foster the development of clean energy technology.

Republicans are already crying about jobs lost and the potential damage to states that rely heavily on the coal industry. Republican representative Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia said the proposal, “could deliver an unrecoverable blow to coal-rich states.”

It remains to be seen what effect Obama’s plan will have on coal plants and the economy of those towns, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction to fight climate change. You could also make the argument that if, as the president hopes, there is an uptick or boom in clean energy that will create jobs and/or replace some of the potential job loss from coal plants that might shutter. It’s worth noting that there was very little about transportation in the plan.

Matt Yglesias makes a strong point at Slate that what we really need is strong climate change legislation — not just an action plan from the president — and a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system that “can curb emissions while blunting the negative impact on poor people and carbon-intensive regions.” But that’ll never happen in our current political climate. So we’re left to see what happens in coal-reliant communities after the regulations from the executive branch play out.

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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Tags: economic developmentclimate changeequity factorbarack obama

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