Keystone XL Jobs Are Not the Good Jobs Tribes Were Promised

By Mark Trahant, Yes! Magazine

12 April 17

After the construction phase of the Keystone XL, only 35 employees would be needed to operate the pipeline.

couple of years ago a tribal leader showed me an abandoned lumber mill near the village of Tyonek, Alaska. The company promised jobs. And, for a time, for a couple of decades, there were those jobs. But after the resource was consumed, the mill closed, the company disappeared, and the shell of the enterprise remains today.

This same story could be told in tribal communities across North America. Sometimes the resource was timber. Other times gas and oil. Or coal.

The lucky communities were left with a small toxic dump site. More often there was major cleanup work required after (plus a few more jobs). And in the worst case scenario, a Superfund site was left behind requiring government supervision and a major cleanup.

But all along, and in each case, the accompanying idea was that jobs would be a part of the deal.

There would be construction jobs to build the mine, pipeline, or processing plant. Then there would be truck-driving jobs moving materials, a few executive jobs (especially in public and community relations), and, of course, the eventual supervision of the cleanup, especially if the tribal government had its own environmental protection agency.

That was the old deal.

But that’s no longer how it works. Now the resource is extracted, pipelines are built, and toxic waste is left behind—and the promised jobs are limited to the initial construction jobs.

The renewed effort to build the Keystone XL pipeline is an example of this shift. When President Donald Trump signed the executive order to approve the project, he promised “thousands of jobs.” That’s true enough for the construction phase, but only 35 employees would be needed to operate the pipeline, according to the State Department report.

Keystone, at least, is prospective jobs. New ones. But here’s the bigger challenge for the Navajo Nation, the Crow Nation, and some 30 tribes with coal reserves or power plants: This new deal for resource-extraction infrastructure does not create as many jobs.

The numbers are stark.

The U.S. Energy and Employment Outlook 2017 shows that electricity from coal declined 53 percent between 2006 and 2016. Over that same period, electricity from natural gas increased by 33 percent and from solar by 5,000 percent.

Coal is still a major source of energy, but it’s in decline. Coal and natural gas add up to two-thirds of all electricity generation in the U.S. That’s expected to remain the case until at least 2040, when the market share projection declines to a little more than half.

But because the market is in decline, tribes that develop coal will not share in the rewards of either major profits or in a spike in jobs. The only hope for this shrinking industry is to export the coal to other countries (something that will be extremely difficult because so many other nations have already agreed to the Paris climate targets). As Clark Williams-Derry has reported for the Sightline Institute:

Robust, sustainable Asian coal markets were never a realistic hope for U.S. coal exporters: the transportation costs were too high, the competition too fierce, and the demand too unstable. So the coal industry’s PR flacks may continue to spin tales about endless riches in the Asian coal market, the financials are telling a much more sobering story: that the coal export pipe dream continues to fade away, leaving a bad hangover on the coal industry’s balance sheets and a lingering bad taste in the mouths of coal investors and executives alike.

On top of all that, Derry-Williams points out that China’s coal consumption has fallen for three consecutive years.

And the international context is that coal is the most polluting of the three types of fossil fuels. More than 80 percent of the world’s known coal reserves need to stay in the ground to meet global warming targets.

There are jobs in the energy field, but as the Department of Energy report puts it: “Employment in electric power generation now totals 860,869 … [and] the number of jobs is projected to grow by another 7 percent, but the majority will be in construction to build and install new renewable energy capacity.”

The green economy is taking over, Trump or no Trump.

The extractive economy (like the farm economy a generation ago) reached its peak, probably back in 2014. Oil and gas employed 514,000 people a year. Today it’s 388,000. Coal and extraction-related jobs peaked at 90,000, and that number has dropped to about 53,000.

Indian Country’s development of coal—or not—has been the story so far in the Trump era.

Last month, new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke lifted restrictions on federal coal leasing. He said the “war on coal is over.” Then he quoted Crow Tribal Chairman Darrin Old Coyote saying, “There are no jobs like coal jobs.”

A day later the Northern Cheyenne tribe filed suit. The tribe said the Interior Department did not consult the tribe prior to lifting the restrictions. “It is alarming and unacceptable for the United States, which has a solemn obligation as the Northern Cheyenne’s trustee, to sign up for many decades of harmful coal mining near and around our homeland without first consulting with our Nation or evaluating the impacts to our Reservation and our residents,” Northern Cheyenne tribe President L. Jace Killsback said in a news release. There are 426 million tons of coal located near the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation at the Decker and Spring Creek mines.

Meanwhile in Alaska, another coal project was put to rest in a tribal community. The village of Tyonek has been opposed to the Chuitna Coal Project. After a decade of planning, PacRim Coal suspended the project last month because an investor backed out. Although the project could be brought back to life, that’s not likely because coal is a losing bet for any investor.

According to Alaska Public Media, that meant a joyful celebration in Tyonek.

The president of the village Native Council, Arthur Stanifer said, “What it means for us is our fish will continue to be here for future generations. Also our wildlife, like the bears and the moose and the other animals, will be secure, and they’ll be here. They’ll have a safe place to be.”

And what of the jobs?

That’s the hard part. The prospects for extraction-related jobs are about to be hit by even more disruptive forces. For example, in the oil fields of North Dakota, one of the great paying jobs is truck driving—moving material back and forth. But already in Europe companies are experimenting and will soon begin the shift to self-driving vehicles. It’s only a matter of time before that trend takes jobs, because it fits the model of efficient capitalism. Self-driving trucks don’t need rest breaks. They consume less fuel and have fewer accidents.

That same automation disruption is occurring across the employment spectrum. Jobs that can be done by machines will be done by machines.

So if jobs are no longer part of the equation, how does natural resource extraction benefit tribal communities?

The answer ought to include a plan where the United States government and tribes work together to replace these jobs: Retrain workers and invest in the energy sector that is growing—renewable fuels.

But that’s not likely to happen in the Trump Era.

United's Unfriendly Skies

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

12 April 17

hat is just not right,” a woman on board United Flight 3411, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, said, when two members of the police department began tugging an older, Asian man from his seat. Seconds later, as captured in a video recorded by another passenger, her cries (“My God, what are you doing?”), along with those of the man and of others on the plane, became more urgent, as the deputies pulled him up and, without pausing to register that they had banged his head on an armrest, dragged him down the aisle. The man’s shirt is pulled up, exposing his stomach: his dignity got as little consideration from the authorities as did his safety, or the fact that he had a ticket. The woman screamed, “No, this is wrong! Oh, my God, look at what you did to him!” The officers didn’t seem to notice that there was blood on his face, although the sight of it made a man next to the woman recoil and bury his head in his hands, and elicited an untranscribable gasp from a third passenger.

What happened on Flight 3411, which was scheduled to fly from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky? United overbooked it; that happens all the time. The airline let everybody board, and then decided that it needed four more seats to get some crew members to Louisville for work the next morning. In the real, non-airline world, where markets function, there would be some recognition that United couldn’t just give those crew members something that it had already sold to someone else, namely, a seat on the plane. United is an airline, a logistics company, in contact with other airlines—and in a better position than most to find a backup when a flight is full. Or it could have just offered to pay ticket holders a price that they viewed as worthwhile to get off. Theoretically, that price might have been astronomical, higher than the cost to United of not having the crew in Louisville, in which case it might have looked for other options, like a car. (“Can’t the pilots drive to Louisville?” the woman asked. It would have taken five or six hours but still, in retrospect, would have been better for all concerned.) But we’ll never know, since, after offering an eight-hundred-dollar flight voucher, and maybe a hotel room, United decided to take people off the flight.

How did they decide which ones? This is going to be a crucial question. A United representative reportedly told passengers that it was random. But an airline spokesman later suggested that the airline prioritized (or exempted) certain categories of passengers, such as those who might miss connections, and many airlines use other customer-loyalty algorithms. That might make sense, but it wouldn’t be correctly described as “random.”

The man, at any rate, refused—not on the principle of having bought a ticket and having some right to use it but because, he said, he was a doctor and had patients to see in the morning. That is a good reason, and one that was worth more than eight hundred dollars to the doctor as well as to, presumably, his patients. The airline seems to have disagreed; that’s when it called the cops for a forcible removal. Or, as the airline put it, in a tweeted statement that ignored the ordinary meaning of the words it used, “After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate.” In a statement released a bit later, after the pictures of the bloodied man had circulated, United’s C.E.O., Oscar Munoz, added that the whole experience had been “upsetting” to everyone at United and that the company was “reaching out.” “I apologize for having to re-accommodate these passengers,” Munoz said. Later, in a message to United employees, Munoz called the passenger “belligerent” and “disruptive.”

In Chicago, the doctor’s emphatic “no” appears to have moved him into a category of non-compliant, troublemaking passengers, whom the airlines have, with what appears to be increasing indifference, treated as they see fit. (These passengers may then become subject to scrutiny of their past. The tale will no doubt grow more convoluted as additional details emerge; these things tend to.) The incident recalls the scene, earlier this year, of airport security force-marching former Senator Al D’Amato off a plane headed from Fort Lauderdale to J.F.K., for allegedly inciting a passenger rebellion on a flight that had been delayed more than six hours. That ouster, too, was documented in cell-phone videos on which passengers can be heard attesting to the injustice. A number of them followed D’Amato off the plane. A discussion worth having about the Chicago flight is what racial and cultural factors might have been at play in the decision to escalate to law enforcement, and in the decision of the police to act as forcefully as they did. (United has denied that race played a role.) Questions about profiling have come up, for example, in the case of the dark-haired man who, last May, was removed from an American Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse, because a fellow-passenger became suspicious of his foreign airs and his strange, coded writing—was it Arabic? It was math: that man, Guido Menzio, originally from Italy, is an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. None of this is going to get better if a Trump Administration travel ban goes into effect.

The Chicago Police Department, in its statement, said that it had been summoned because the man had become “irate,” and was “yelling to voice his displeasure.” In explaining how he was injured, the police said that they “had attempted to carry him off the flight when he fell.” That is an interesting use of the word “fell”: in addition to not fitting the action in the video, it suggests that the man’s clumsiness alone was to blame. The doctor, still bloody, briefly got back on board Flight 3411—it’s not clear how—before apparently collapsing and being brought out on a stretcher. (The police statement notes that the man was later taken to the hospital for “non-life-threatening injuries.”) By then, according to an account that a passenger gave to the Washington Post, there were a few more seats available, because the chaperone of a high-school group had taken the kids off the flight. The adult reportedly said, “They don’t need to see this anymore.”

There is another way that this story is more than a customer-service absurdity, suggested by a connection that the journalist Josh Barro pointed out on Twitter. C.E.O. Munoz is in this job because his predecessor resigned after he was caught up, along with New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie and his Administration, in the Bridgegate scandal. That tangled story has to do with the airline offering one of Christie’s cohort at the Port Authority a special flight that made his commute easier, in the hopes of getting better gate assignments at Newark—a transaction that, from beginning to end, speaks to the sorry state of American air travel and, indeed, the larger infrastructure system. (The offense at the center of Bridgegate, after all, relied on the ability of the governor’s office to cause tumult to an entire town by closing a few traffic lanes.) United claimed that the failure to get just four crew members to Louisville would have caused thousands more people to be delayed, and surely a factor in the Flight 3411 passengers’ calculations was the lack of trust in what would happen to them next, if they left the plane for the purgatory of the terminal. Infrastructure, and our ability to rely on getting from one place to the other, seems poised on a knife’s edge. This was painfully obvious last week, with multi-day delays up and down the East Coast as the result of a very minor derailment at New York’s Penn Station. (Christie has played a role in Penn Station’s troubles, too, by helping to kill a Hudson River tunnel project.) When President Donald Trump was elected, he raised hopes just by talking about addressing infrastructure. He has offered no viable plan so far. Meanwhile, airlines talk about reaccommodation, disruptiveness, and crypto-volunteerism, while passengers, holding on to their seats and tickets, get angrier and angrier.