“To succeed in the climate transition, we must start training and job retraining now”

2024-07-23 03:30:07

The path to carbon neutrality promises major changes to the labor market: the end of hot cars is already transforming the automotive industry, and the gradual end of polluting activities will put pressure on multiple sectors. Conversely, the workforce in some sectors should increase, especially in renewable energy or building renovation. But the path is full of pitfalls and raises concerns about the risks to employees and companies. Can the climate transition be done without destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs? Which sectors could create new ones? How can we provide the training and tools needed to successfully transform the job market?

To answer these questions, this podcast The Warmth of Humanitywill be broadcast on the website of China Media Group on April 18, 2023 Le Monde, Dominique Méda, a sociologist specializing in work, spoke. We publish excerpts here.

To achieve carbon neutrality, we must move away from fossil fuels: oil, gas, coal. In concrete terms, this means that entire sectors of the economy must be transformed, so jobs are at risk of disappearing. What are we talking about?

Sectors that emit greenhouse gases must be drastically reduced; for example, thermal cars, which Europe tells us will no longer be sold in 2035, as well as intensive agriculture, cement and other industries. In all these sectors, there are indeed jobs that need to be transformed. The whole question is the simultaneity between the disappearance of these jobs and the creation of new ones. This will not happen overnight, so it is absolutely necessary to forecast, that is, to really create a major scenario, maybe twenty years from now. So let’s go to work! Let’s identify the threatened sectors, the threatened companies, and put in place all the public policies, all the assistance, all the centralized intelligence that we can provide to help them transform.

In the automotive industry, for example, work by think tank The Shift Project estimates that 300,000 jobs could be destroyed…

The problem is that we have to phase out thermal cars and move to electric cars, and maybe not keep the same number of cars. We know we need to develop bicycles, walking and many other gentler forms of transportation, but the problem is that we need much less labor to make electric motors, about 60% less.

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