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Help us identify ways to turn today’s environmental challenges into job-creating and economic opportunities!Industrial transformation can roll back economic inequality and reverse the slide in wages, benefits, and workers’ rights that has undermined workers and their communities for decades.
The Challenge
The industrial sector is the only source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that is projected to rise in the coming decades. Industry is also responsible for toxic air pollution that exposes a quarter of a million people to elevated cancer risks each year, disproportionately in Black communities.
Other nations are going first in modernizing heavy industry. They are demonstrating cutting edge, low-carbon processes for producing energy-intensive basic materials and fuels. If the United States hopes to compete and to lead, we need to invest in transforming our manufacturing and industrial sectors at the same or greater scale and pace.
The Opportunity
Transforming energy intensive industries to produce essential materials with far lower emissions can ensure that domestic action on climate change doesn’t drive jobs or pollution overseas. Done right, industrial transformation can also help roll back economic inequality and reverse the slide in wages, benefits, and workers’ rights that has undermined workers and their communities for decades.
It is an issue of global economic competitiveness. Prioritizing investments in modernizing basic industry will not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it will create and retain good jobs. A significant proportion of industrial emission reductions can be achieved by reducing energy waste, which saves money that manufacturers can invest in their workforce or capital improvements. New jobs will also be created in the installation of energy efficiency technologies. Additionally, U.S. manufacturers’ ability to produce clean technologies and to use cleaner processes will allow them to adapt to a global economy in which market demand is shifting to favor low-carbon products.
Until recently, investment in reducing industrial emissions in the United States was relatively limited. However, the Inflation Reduction Act establishes and expands investment programs to reduce emissions in energy-intensive industries—such as steel, aluminum, and cement. The law also launches a first-of-its-kind program to propel commercial-scale deployment of emissions-reducing technology at U.S. manufacturing facilities, expands a tax credit for industrial transformation projects, and lays the groundwork for public purchasing of clean construction materials.
Key Facts
120,000 Jobs A $6 billion Inflation Reduction Act program to help manufacturers carry out emissions-reducing upgrades at steel, aluminum, cement, and other energy-intensive industrial facilities will create an estimated 120,000 jobs over five years. (Source)
30% Including electricity use, the industrial sector’s share of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as of 2020 was 30%. (Source)
4th Ranking of the U.S. steel industry’s CO2 emissions intensity among 15 major steel producing countries. (Source)