CAN BIDEN ADD ENERGY JOBS? HOPE MIXES WITH DOUBT

Good-paying jobs — many of them.

That’s the seductive idea around which President Joe Biden is proposing a vast transformation of the energy sector, with the promise of making it far more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. As Biden portrays it, his plan to invest in infrastructure — and accelerate a shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles, to more efficient homes and upgrades to the power grid — would produce jobs at least as good as the ones that might be lost in the process.

His plans call for 100% renewable energy in the power sector by 2035. To people who have devoted careers to the fossil fuel industries, those plans may look more like a dire threat. To the president, though, out-of-work oil workers could be shifted to other jobs — plugging uncapped oil wells, for example — and thousands more positions would be created to help string power lines and build electric vehicles and their components.

“We think that’s a lot of jobs to fill, and one of the key questions is: How do we build the right skill base that can help fill those jobs?” said Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, a labor market analytics firm.

The outlook for the energy industry’s coming decades, as Biden’s plan would have it, includes good wages and good benefits, reinforced by a revival of labor unions.

“I’m a union guy,” he said at a union training center in Pittsburgh. “I support unions, unions built the middle class, and it’s about time they started to get a piece of the action.”