Memo: A Brief History of Worker Displacement

By

Brian Callaci, Fellow - Data for Progress
Mark Paul, Senior Fellow - Data for Progress

Executive Summary:

As the ice thaws and the temperatures rise, the embers of the climate crisis are heating up. There’s simply no denying it anymore: The climate crisis will be the defining issue of our time. But how we, as a society, will address it remains an open question. The biggest fear is that we’ll simply fail to act until it’s too late, locking in 4, 5, or even upward of 8 degrees Celsius of warming—the consequences of which would be simply devastating. Thanks to growing pressure from the scientific community and grassroots activists on the immediate need to address the climate crisis, we’ve seen a growing number of policy proposals laying out some of the most detailed climate plans ever. While many of these plans aim to avert the climate crisis, we’re left asking if they’ll create another crisis: a crisis for fossil fuel workers and communities.

This memo serves as a primer on the ways in which displacement has impacted workers in the past to draws lessons for a Green New Deal.

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