PITTSBURGH — Speaking at a concrete plant here Monday, a Pennsylvania union leader reprised a central Democratic campaign message: Voters no longer have to choose between the environment and the economy.
Darrin Kelly was celebrating the $396 million that Pennsylvania will receive in federal climate grants to help industrial facilities decarbonize. EPA announced the grants — part of $4.3 billion from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law — just one day after Biden announced he wouldn’t seek reelection.
“This right here finally puts to bed the issue that we’ve always talked about that you can’t have both,” Kelly told the crowd. “Yes, we can. Stop making us choose.”
Pennsylvania is ground zero for testing the political viability of that message. After former President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by pledging to revive coal, Biden bested him four years later with a promise to create a new generation of blue collar jobs in clean energy.
Now, Kamala Harris will need to win over the state if, as expected, she replaces Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. The vice president’s ability to marry two key Democratic constituencies — organized labor and environmentalists — will go a long way toward determining whether she wins this decisive state and the presidency come November.
Bridging the divide is especially important in Pennsylvania, where a boom in natural gas production in recent years has animated a series of pitched political battles between union members who want the jobs associated with the gas industry and environmentalists worried it would degrade local air and water quality while contributing to climate change.
As a native of Scranton, Biden was uniquely suited to press the case that the state could have jobs and climate action. But that task now looks like it will fall to Harris, a former California senator who supported a ban on fracking as a presidential candidate in 2020.
Monday provided an initial glimpse of the task ahead of her. Though national labor unions quickly rallied behind Harris — along with top Democrats — union leaders in Pennsylvania were notably hesitant to give her their stamp of approval.
Kelly, who leads the AFL-CIO’s Allegheny/Fayette Central Labor Council, declined to comment. He said needed to wait for the group’s national leadership to take a stance before commenting on the vice president’s candidacy. (The AFL-CIO endorsed Harris later Monday.)
A short drive up Interstate 79, in Butler County, Steamfitters Local 449 Business Manager Kenneth Broadbent said his union would likely fall in behind Harris if Democrats make her the party’s nominee. But he expressed a preference for an open nomination process, saying, “I think the average citizen wants to see it done that way.”
Asked about Harris, Broadbent said, ”I don’t know what her stance is on energy.” He then expressed hope that Pennsylvania could build additional pipelines across the state to support a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Philadelphia.
“The Democratic Party, if Harris is the president, they’ve got to use common sense and build stuff as pollution-free as possible but still make sure that we keep a thriving economy,” he said.
Broadbent was sitting in a gleaming $18.5 million training center paid for with the money the union made helping build a cracker plant in nearby Beaver County. The Shell facility turns natural gas into the feedstock needed to make plastic products.
The cracker plant’s construction employed some 2,700 Steamfitters, the vast majority of whom hailed from western Pennsylvania. And it left the Steamfitters in an initially uncomfortable position, supporting the energy policies of a party it often finds itself in opposition to on labor issues.
“It puts us in a dilemma because we are pro-energy. We find ourselves having closer ideology with the Republican Party than the Democrats because of pro energy and creating jobs,” Broadbent said. “We can’t let other countries pollute the air and generate electricity and make steel when we’re not doing it. It’s just economically not the right thing for us.”
Concrete benefits
Broadbent called Biden “one of the best union presidents that we’ve ever had,” citing his work to protect union pensions and strengthen the National Labor Relations Board. And he expressed hope that laws like the Inflation Reduction Act would lead to a new wave of industrial jobs in the region, helping address a recent slowdown of gasfield work.
The Steamfitters are part of a local coalition hoping to benefit from the IRA’s tax credits by capturing methane leaking from local coal mines and using it to make hydrogen for sustainable aviation fuel. But that project remains subject to the Biden administration’s finalization of tax guidance for how to administer the hydrogen credits.
It also is years away.
Broadbent said his members need to see jobs today to see the benefits of the president’s agenda.
“People need to see these projects. They need to hear what’s coming,” he said. “Biden passed all this great legislation, but if people can’t see it — or they’re not working on it — they might not necessarily buy into it.”
In the next building over, Frank Gray grew increasingly animated as he contemplated the second Trump term. A fourth-generation Steamfitter who works as an instructor at the training facility, Gray sees Trump as a threat to unions and to democracy.
Yet many of the young students in his classes support the former president. Gray, 60, says he constantly reminds them that Trump once pledged to sign a national “right to work” law, which would weaken unions, and asks them, “How much less are you willing to work for?”
Gray gets equally animated talking about Biden, whom he predicted would go down as “one of the best presidents ever in history.” He said the next president would benefit from laws like the IRA and the CHIPS Act, which is intended to spur construction of semiconductor factories.
Harris, he said, “might be a little bit too far left for what I want but she’s way better than the alternative choice if she continues on what her and Biden have been doing.”
Back in Pittsburgh, federal and state officials touted the investments EPA was making in the state with money from the IRA. Josh Shapiro, the popular Democratic governor, told the crowd that the $396 million marked the second-largest federal investment in the state after a bridge project in Harrisburg announced by the administration last week.
He said the money would help companies like Castle Builders Supply, a concrete-maker that served host to Monday’s event, purchase more energy efficient machinery that would cut pollution and costs.
“You see here in Pennsylvania, we understand that reducing pollution means creating jobs. We understand how the two go hand in hand,” Shapiro said.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the grants were part of the largest climate investment ever made in the country’s history, saying it would help “reduce air pollution, advance environmental justice and help accelerate America’s clean energy transition.”
Harris’ name was not mentioned until a press conference following the event, where journalists peppered Shapiro with questions on whether he would accept an offer to serve as vice president. The governor cheerfully demurred, saying he was focused on his current job.
As the event wound down and the dignitaries filed out, a Castle Builders Supply employee started to climb into one of a pair of excavators that had held up a giant blue banner reading “President Joe Biden” and below that, “Investing in America.”
The employee declined to give his name for fear of talking politics at work, but he expressed unease at the direction of the country. He said an election between Harris and Trump was effectively a contest between an “absent politician and a Twitter.”
But when push came to shove, he said, he planned to vote for Trump this fall.
