Story by Sammy Roth and photographs by Jay Calderon, The Desert Sun | April 13, 2016

As the reality of human-caused climate change has become harder to deny, opponents of climate action have adopted a new talking point. Replacing fossil fuels with clean energy, they say, would devastate the American economy, sending electricity prices through the roof, forcing people to abandon their cars and putting millions of people out of work.

​There's one problem: Researchers who have studied the clean energy transition disagree. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions wouldn't have the dire economic consequences critics have predicted, several comprehensive studies have found. On the contrary, experts say, dramatic action to slash carbon emissions would be relatively inexpensive, if not a money-saver — and that's without accounting for the long-term benefits of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Some people and communities would suffer, especially in regions whose economies are driven by fossil fuel development. Coal mine employment dropped from 91,600 in 2011 to 74,900 in 2014, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and that trend is expected to continue. About 180,000 Americans work in oil or natural gas extraction, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But fighting global warming is an economic imperative for all Americans, experts say, even if it causes some pain in the short term.

"There's a cost to doing nothing that we have to understand," said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who ran the Environmental Protection Agency for two years under President George W. Bush. "All the scientific journals and studies are telling us that there's a huge potential problem coming at us pretty fast, and in fact it's something that is going to cost a lot of money."

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Those costs are already being incurred, in the form of rising seas, extreme weather events and more rampant disease. But avoiding or minimizing those impacts might be relatively inexpensive, even in the short term.

One recent analysis found that cutting U.S. carbon emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 — President Barack Obama's goal — would cost just $36 per household, per month. That's less than most people pay for Internet service, and less than half the average cost of cable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that if all developed countries achieve an 80 percent reduction, the world might be able to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, the target adopted by 195 nations at a summit in Paris last year.

The U.S. cost analysis was conducted by Energy and Environmental Economics, a San Francisco-based consulting group, for the United Nations' Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project. In general, studies have found that transitioning the world to clean energy would cost about 1 percent of gross world product — and possibly less, said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which co-founded the deep decarbonization project.

"What you buy for that is not only climate safety, but a lot cleaner air and improved performance of our infrastructure," Sachs said. "This 1 percent of national income or less is a bargain in terms of assuring safe, green, clean and higher-quality services in the future."

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While many households would have to spend money up front on new technology — including rooftop solar panels, energy-efficient appliances and electric cars — they'd recoup some of their investment because they'd no longer be paying for home heating fuels or gasoline, researchers found.

The transition wouldn't entail major lifestyle changes, said Jim Williams, chief scientist at Energy and Environmental Economics and lead author of the U.S. deep decarbonization report. People wouldn't need to drive less, eat less meat or wear sweaters to limit the use of home heating systems, although those changes could make the clean energy transition even cheaper.

Williams called the $36-per-month figure a conservative estimate, based on relatively pessimistic assumptions about the development of clean energy and battery technologies. It's possible the transition will end up saving people money, he said. And that's without factoring in the benefits from reducing climate change, or from limiting the economy's vulnerability to oil price swings.

"If you factor those in, it sounds like a bargain to me," Williams said.

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A recent study from Stanford University engineering professor Mark Jacobson is also optimistic. Jacobson's Solutions Project provides a state-by-state road map for abandoning fossil fuels, outlining the costs and benefits to each state. The plan excludes nuclear power, which doesn't emit carbon but which many environmentalists consider unsafe. (The deep decarbonization plan evaluates nuclear as an option that could potentially bring costs even lower than $36 per month.)

By 2050, Jacobson estimated, electricity would be cheaper than it is now in most states, to the tune of $444 in average annual savings per person. If cost savings from reducing climate change and local air pollution are taken into account, Jacobson found, his plan could pay for itself in just two years, while averting 44,000 air pollution-related deaths per year.

Like Williams' plan, Jacobson's strategy wouldn't require major technological breakthroughs. Even though solar farms and wind turbines only provide energy when the sun shines or the wind blows, it's possible to run an affordable, reliable electric grid without fossil fuels, Jacobson said. Both groups of researchers spent a lot of time studying reliability concerns, and they found that the creative use of commercial and near-commercial technologies could ensure that the lights stay on.

"The biggest barrier to implementing large-scale clean energy plans is information. Most people aren't aware of what's possible," Jacobson said. "We don't need new technology, new inventions."

Williams criticized Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has said that the world needs an "energy miracle" to address climate change, and who pledged last year to commit $2 billion to clean energy research.

"The spin that we need an energy miracle to achieve climate goals couldn't be further from what our results show," Williams said in an email. "We should be careful about making pronouncements that aren't backed up by analysis."

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Whitman, who led the EPA under Bush, sees climate action as something the Republican Party should be able to get behind, even as its presidential candidates — and its leaders in Congress — reject or question climate science. She pointed to the long history of Republican presidents protecting the environment, including Teddy Roosevelt's push for lands conservation and the establishment of the EPA under Richard Nixon. Nixon also signed the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and major updates to the Clean Air Act. Those initiatives helped the environment and improved public health without slowing economic growth, Whitman said.

In California, policymakers are trying to prove that fighting climate change doesn't lead to economic doom.

The Golden State gets a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind, a shift accelerated by a clean energy mandate and a cap-and-trade system that requires polluters to pay for the carbon they emit. Policies to discourage gasoline consumption have led to cleaner fuels and helped put 200,000 fully electric cars on the road. Californians use the same amount of energy today as they did in the 1970s, even as per-person energy use has spiked across most of the country.

Those initiatives are paying off: California's greenhouse gas emissions fell by about 7 percent from 2007 to 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the California Air Resources Board. Over the same period, the state's gross domestic product grew more than 18 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. The state has outpaced the rest of the country in job and GDP growth since the height of the Great Recession.

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But not every state is as economically diverse at California, where fossil fuel development accounts for a small percentage of the state's economy. Coal-rich states like Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming are already bleeding jobs as cheap natural gas and government regulations reduce demand for coal, a trend that's set to continue. The Environmental Protection Agency projects that Obama's Clean Power Plan — which is expected to force many coal-fired power plants to shut down — will lead to between 31,000 and 34,000 job losses by 2030, if it's ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.

If the United States keeps working to limit climate change, oil and gas jobs are likely to start disappearing as well. That would impact states like Colorado, North Dakota and Pennsylvania, where advances in hydraulic fracturing technology — also known as fracking — have spurred economic growth over the last decade.

That issue hits close to home for Will Munger, an anti-fossil fuel activist with Canyon Country Rising Tide in Moab, Utah. Munger has organized protests and civil disobedience actions against tar sands mining and fracking. But he also grew up in rural Utah, and he knows that if his movement succeeds in limiting fossil fuel extraction, it'll put a lot of people out of work.

Like many climate activists, Munger sees the rapidly growing renewable energy industry as a source of new jobs. Training former fossil fuel workers to build and operate solar and wind farms, he said, could be a win-win, supporting rural communities and alleviating climate change.

"We have to have options for rural people to be able to meet their needs, but not destroy the climate, water and air," he said.

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Obama has tried to accelerate that kind of transition, proposing $3 billion in his 2016 budget to help coal communities transition to the clean energy economy. That money would go toward reclaiming abandoned mine lands, promoting the development of "carbon capture" technology that might allow some coal plants to keep operating, and training former coal workers for new careers. But the Republican-controlled Congress hasn't approved the funding. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Obama's proposal should be "seriously considered," but called it "cold comfort" for families struggling in his state.

Bill McKibben — an environmental activist who co-founded 350.org and led the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — accused the fossil fuel industry of holding its employees as political "hostages."

"There's a group of people who through no fault of their own have spent their lives engaged in what was important work, providing energy for our civilization. And just because we can no longer burn that energy doesn't mean they should be put on a breadline somewhere," McKibben said.

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Even as employment in the fossil fuel sector declines, the clean energy industry is catching up, driven by the falling cost of solar panels. The nonprofit Solar Foundation reported earlier this year that the U.S. solar industry employed 209,000 people in 2015, more than oil and gas extraction combined. The American Wind Energy Association, meanwhile, says there were 88,000 people working in wind-related jobs at the start of 2016 — more than the number of people who work in coal mining.

Those numbers are a source of hope for Kaitlin Butler, a Salt Lake City-based researcher with the Science and Environmental Health Network. Butler supports the "keep it in the ground" movement to limit coal, oil and gas extraction. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, she said, reflects a fundamental economic reality: "Jobs transition all the time."

"We don't have people burying phone lines anymore. We don't have people setting up land lines very much," Butler said. "We could get mired in this conversation about, 'Look at all the jobs that are going to be lost in Utah.' But the fact of the matter is, those jobs are already under threat…those work spaces are already unhealthy. So why not have a more fun discussion about how we can be getting these people into cleaner, more long-standing jobs?"

Sammy Roth writes about energy and the environment for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.