Of course, the committed activist reporter who wrote the story concludes by basically saying, “eff ’em. We’re going to destroy their livelihoods but we feel bad about it.”
Climate advocates tend to lump solutions to all of these issues under an umbrella term: “just transition.” Not like, “just get on with this transition already.” “Just” as in fair.Gray, the man who called CNN, doesn’t see anything fair about it.“People are getting left behind,” he told me.He and others I met in Gillette want the rest of the country to realize that they’ve worked hard, for decades, to supply the United States with electricity.They didn’t own the companies that got rich off the boom in coal and other fossil fuels — companies that hid research showing the disastrous effects of climate change, or that funded disinformation campaigns.They were just working.Working in an industry created by federal policies that failed to price carbon pollution — that encouraged the mining of coal on land owned by the US government.And now they’re being asked to stop.Both by markets, which value cheaper energy sources.And, importantly, by climate advocates like myself, who understand, based on science that’s been amassing for decades, that global warming poses an existential threat to humanity.What do we owe Gillette and its workers?