The “laborless fuel”: Landscape,energy transitions and natural gas in the postwar U.S.

Abstract

The dire need for an energy transition to mitigate and reverse global warming is inspiring scholars to reexamine political influences on technological systems. The multi-level perspective of the socio-technical transitions framework acknowledges how technological systems are affected by the social and political landscapes where they are built. Energy landscapes literatures elaborate on the socio-technical transitions framework by explaining how the boundaries of landscapes are negotiated in the context of energy transitions. Energy scholars have found that negotiations over the form and purpose of energy landscapes frequently skew in favor of capital accumulation instead of social reproduction. Studies of landscapes in human geography and labor history have shown how the power imbalance energy scholars observed can be corrected by workers and their communities struggling against business owners and the state. Using archival data, I show how U.S. natural gas legislation in the postwar period was intended to limit coalminers’ demands for landscapes of social reproduction. This point matters because the vulnerabilities of industrial capitalism to energy worker organization could be exploited to push for a just and sustainable energy transition like the Green New Deal.

Keywords

Energy transition labor landscape natural gas social reproduction

Introduction

In the 1970s, labor unions in the U.S. were suffering from speedup, automation, and the flow of manufacturing investment and employment to unorganized labor markets like the Sunbelt (Brenner et al., 2010). Even under these pressures, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was organizing alongside tribe members of the Navajo nation to resist unrestricted energy development in the Southwest (Markusen, 1978). While coal companies and state authorities were turning the Navajo Nation into a sacrifice zone (Needham, 2014), the UMWA was organizing in solidarity with the Navajo people (Markusen, 1978).

The UMWA’s capacity to organize for the common good, while struggling against coal companies, models a confident, inclusive, labor movement that is sorely needed today. A Green New Deal (GND) has been proposed to address global warming at the scale of the problem, while reducing economic inequality, protecting frontline communities, and requiring free, prior and informed consent for development on indigenous peoples’ land (Galvin and Healy, 2020). This radical proposal would have to be forced through intransigent political administrations and withstand heavy opposition by fossil fuel companies and carbon-intensive industries (Sica, 2020). Organized workers, prepared to strike until their demands for a radical GND are met, play an essential role in applying pressure on political and economic elites (Aronoff et al., 2019; Klein, 2019).

The UMWA could afford to be confident because industrial economies depended on coal for generating electricity and process heat. Across North America, Europe, and Asia, strikes at coal mines paralyzed high-volume manufacturing plants, trade and logistics hubs, and deprived stores, institutions, and homes of light and heat (Mitchell, 2011; Painter, 1984, 2009; Podobnik, 2006). Strike waves won miners some of the highest wages of any industry (Podobnik, 2006: 88) and pressured governments into expanding suffrage, levying progressive taxes, and providing public welfare (Mitchell, 2011: 236). Coal companies retaliated against miners’ strikes by mechanizing mining and shifting investment towards unorganized labor markets (Podobnik, 2006: 83–84).

The UMWA can no longer afford to be confident because the U.S. economy does not depend on coal as much as it once did (Thurber, 2019). Coal overtook fuelwood as the most significant source of energy for the U.S. in the 1880s (Landsberg and Schurr, 1968: 30). Oil and natural gas overtook coal in 1946 (Landsberg and Schurr, 1968: 31) and maintained that status up to the present day (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2020). Coal continued to be an important fuel for generating electricity until it was displaced by cheap natural gas from shale between 2005 and 2015 (Thurber, 2019: 141).

Despite the coal to oil and gas transition weakening the UMWA’s power to make radical demands, the overall dependency of the U.S. economy on high-volume energy consumption remains. The capacities of organized labor in the energy sector to push for radical change (cf. Atabaki et al., 2018; Mitchell, 2011; Painter, 1984, 2009; Podobnik, 2006) therefore deserve greater acknowledgment in the research on socially just and sustainable energy transitions (Avelino et al., 2016; Lawhon and Murphy, 2011; Meadowcroft, 2009; Scrase and Smith, 2009; Shove and Walker, 2007; Smith and Kern, 2009; Turnheim and Geels, 2012). Research on energy landscapes (Broto, 2019; Carton, 2017; Pasqualetti, 2000, 2011a, 2011b) and landscape more generally (Breitbach, 2007; Mitchell, 2003) can help explain the tremendous power of energy workers to demand that social reproduction be prioritized over capital accumulation.

In the subsequent sections, I detail how a focus on energy workers in the landscape can contribute to research on sustainable energy transitions. Using the U.S. Congressional Record and the archival records of the UMWA at Penn State, I show how U.S. natural gas policy was intended to limit the UMWA’s power to demand landscapes for social reproduction. Empirically, this case study expands the scholarship on labor in the coal to oil and natural gas transition from a focus on oil (Mitchell, 2011; Painter, 1984, 2009; Podobnik, 2006) to include more analysis of natural gas. Additionally, it contributes a study of the coal to oil and natural gas transition in the U.S. to socio-technical transition scholarship, which has been U.K.-centric (Turnheim and Geels, 2012).

The power of workers in energy landscapes

Much of the scholarship on energy in the social sciences and humanities engages with socio-technical transition theory (Araújo, 2014; Betsill and Stevis, 2016; Broto, 2016; Sovacool, 2017), specifically its multi-level perspective (MLP). Practitioners of the MLP organize types of social influences on technological systems into three categories: technical regimes, technological niches, and the socio-technical landscape (Geels, 2002, 2005, 2018; Geels and Schot, 2007). Regimes are incumbent technologies, niches are disruptive technologies, and the landscape encapsulates the broader politics that influence technological systems (Geels, 2005: 78).

Landscapes in the MLP describe the social setting where the prospects for energy transitions depend on the balance of political, economic, and social forces.¹ Across developed landscapes, policy makers and corporate executives conserve the inertia of unsustainable regimes and dodge opportunities to scale up sustainable niches (Bayulgen and Ladewig, 2017; Fouquet, 2010; Juisto, 2009; Kern and Smith, 2008; Meadowcroft, 2009; Scrase and Smith, 2009; Turnheim and Geels, 2012). In underdeveloped landscapes, governments struggle to establish technical regimes that can provision adequate and reliable energy supplies (Newell and Mulvaney, 2013; Podobnik, 2002). In both settings, private elites have vested interests in resisting change to technical regimes and public officials avoid encouraging technological niches that might disincentivize investment in the landscape they oversee (Bridge et al., 2013; Goldthau and Sovacool, 2012; Lockwood et al., 2017). Workers can disrupt the conservation of the technical regime, which prompts firms to adopt technological niches that reduce the influence of labor in the landscape (Baker et al., 2014; Geels, 2006; Juisto, 2009; Kern and Markard, 2016; Turnheim and Geels, 2012). Social movements can also advance technological niches through markets, advocacy, and mobilizing for greater influence within the political landscape (Meadowcroft, 2009; Paul, 2018; Scrase and Smith, 2009).

Interdisciplinary research on energy landscapes complements the MLP by explaining how landscapes’ form and purpose are negotiated by the actors involved in energy transitions (Broto and Baker, 2018; Carton, 2017; Kirshner et al., 2019a; Pasqualetti, 2000, 2011a, 2011b). In most cases, multinational corporations and governments seek to develop or reconfigure rural areas into energy landscapes and must bargain with local communities’ demands, e.g., for employment, revenue-sharing, and infrastructure ownership and control (Frolova et al., 2015; Leibenath and Lintz, 2018; Nadaï and Van der Horst, 2010a, 2010b). Frequently, these negotiations repress local and household energy needs in favor of energy development that facilitates economic growth, trade, and integration with global supply chains (Broto, 2019; Kirshner et al., 2019b).

Broto et al.’s findings (Broto, 2019; Kirshner et al., 2019b), i.e., that negotiations over the form and purpose of energy landscapes skew in favor of capital accumulation over social reproduction, is supported by earlier studies of landscapes in human geography and labor history (Mitchell, 1996, 2003, 2012; Olwig and Mitchell, 2007). Breitbach (2007) observed that workers and their communities depend on earning an adequate income from wages to afford social reproduction, which gives wage-paying capitalists enormous power in industrial landscapes.² Cooke (2017) noted that oil workers disrupted the energy landscape of industrializing Los Angeles to win better wages to support social reproduction for their dependents and wider communities. Thatcher’s administration repressed the UK’s National Union of Mine Workers to stop miners from opposing capital accumulation in favor of social democracy (Spooner, 1999). The U.S. National Guard waged war against coal miners in early 20th-century Colorado because strikes for better living conditions in mining camps were shutting down the factories and cities of the industrializing West (Andrews, 2008).

Combining these insights from research on energy landscapes and landscapes more broadly, I argue that workers in energy landscapes have tremendous power to demand that the form and purpose of landscapes serve social reproduction over capital accumulation. Political ecologists have long argued that productive assets like machinery, computers, and logistics systems require massive amounts of energy to function (Altvater, 2006; Christie, 1980; Huber, 2009; Malm, 2016; Sica, 2020). Organized workers can use energy scarcity to demand better landscapes for social reproduction from business owners and governments. Should workers organize and force demands upon the state, that vulnerability could be leveraged to win a more socially just and environmentally sustainable future. As the following case shows, the U.S. coal to oil and natural gas transition was pursued, in part, to stop coalminers from forcing a renegotiation of the form and purpose of energy landscapes. The logic behind that decision was to neutralize the confidence organized labor had to direct socio-technical transitions towards producing landscapes of social reproduction.

The laborless fuel: Punishing the coal miner for striking

In her research on landscapes of social reproduction, Carrie Breitbach (2007) discovered that once thriving communities in post-war South Dakota were decimated by the consolidation of the meatpacking industry. As meat processing concentrated into the hands of one firm (Tyson Foods, Inc.), high-wage, union-protected jobs were replaced with low-wage, non-unionized employment undertaken by vulnerable immigrants (Breitbach, 2007: 545). The loss of well-paid employment led to outmigration, declining school enrollments, and a shift in retail purchasing from locally owned businesses to big-box retailers like Wal-Mart. The erosion of organized workers’ power made it harder for residents of these small towns to provision their needs locally and maintain community ties.

Coalmining communities have experienced the same erosion of “landscapes of social reproduction” that Breitbach observed, in part because of the ongoing coal to oil and natural gas transition. In 1964, a survey funded by the UMWA revealed that coalminers bought $1.8 billion worth of food, housing, apparel, transportation, healthcare, personal care, recreation, and other goods and services in the seven major coal-producing states, and spread $1.3 billion in purchases across 25 other states.³ The report identified federal regulations that incentivized natural gas consumption as a threat to these income flows because of their “adverse effect on creation of new coal mining and railroad jobs.”⁴

The UMWA framed its resistance to the entry of natural gas into coal markets in terms of the destructive impact it would have on employment, dignity, and survival of workers’ communities. John P Busarello, of UMWA district five, wrote a letter to Pennsylvania’s governor asking, “in the name of humanity,” for Harrisburg to resist natural gas’s intrusion into the state.⁵

Any project that will result in the elimination of the use of coal for consumption will be to the detriment of every citizen of the state of Pennsylvania. In the name of humanity use your good offices to protect the miners’ jobs and to stop this dastardly move on the part of selfish interests whose only purpose is to feather their own nests at the expense of the coal operators and miners. The miners want no relief – they want work. The gasification of homes and industries will produce hardships, poverty and even starvation.

UMWA officials and politicians from Pennsylvania testified that if natural gas entered the eastern fuel markets, it would destroy thousands of jobs in their state.⁶ The UMWA presented the impacts of the coal to oil and natural gas transition in terms of the income that coal miners and related industries would lose.⁷

In so doing [using natural gas in place of coal] we throw out of work hundreds – and if the trend increases – thousands of workers in the gas industry [coal gas, also known as town gas], in the coal mining industry, on the railroads, and in trucking. This proposed substitution would have the effect of stopping the use of more than 300,000 tons of coal. It would throw out of employment nearly 300 men in the local gas [again, coal gas] works. It would render 400 miners idle who are now engaged in producing this amount of coal. It would cause the layoff of 415 railroad employes (sic) who are transporting this coal to St. Louis. It will lead indirectly to unemployment for approximately 300 other workers all having to do in some form or other with all these operations. This means a total of nearly 1,400 men and a total annual payroll of some $1,520,000. (Source: see endnote 7)

UMWA officials referred to natural gas sales to industries and electrical utilities as fuel “dumping” that risked loss of dignity and family-sustaining wages for men and women (see Figure 1).⁸

Figure 1.

Oil and natural gas “dumping” crushes coal, and with it, the power of organized coalminers (source: UMWA, 1962).

We are going to ask that the government of the United Statees (sic) help the citizens of our great republic who live in depressed areas. These men and women do not seek charity. They demand the right to provide for their families by useful labor. We do not feel that it is too much to ask our own government to help people help themselves.⁹

Repeated entreaties to Congress, such as this one, by coal companies, the UMWA, railroads, and others, were consistently denied by the Federal Power Commission, which declined to intervene in matters of inter-fuel competition¹⁰ (Castaneda, 1993, 1999; Sanders, 1981).

Until the Second World War, coal maintained its status as a top source of total energy supply in the U.S. because natural gas was not yet available in all coal markets. This situation did not last. Between 1942 and 1943, the U.S. Army cooperated with private companies to build two long-distance, large-diameter pipelines for shipping oil to the European theatre (Castaneda, 1993) (see Figure 2). In 1947, the War Assets Administration (WAA) sold them to Texas Eastern Corporation, which used them to introduce natural gas into markets previously served by coal, primarily in the industrial Midwest, Northeastern cities, and their suburbs (Castaneda, 1993; Podobnik, 2006). As Senator Francis Myers (Democrat from Pennsylvania) explained on the floor of the U.S. Senate, the WAA was using pipelines to punish coalminers (U.S. Congress, 1947).

Figure 2.

Pipelines built by the government and private sector to transport oil during Second World War were later sold by the War Assets Administration to natural gas companies to introduce gas into coal markets and punish coalminers for striking (source: Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation, 2000: 1).

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to introduce a joint resolution dealing with the disposition of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipe lines (sic) … The reason for my action at this time, …, is that the War Assets Administration is once again asking for bids for these pipe lines, (sic) and has indicated it will give natural gas equal priority with petroleum products in considering sale awards. This is an about face by War Assets to its previous position, … The decision was reached, I am afraid, as a result of the excitement and near hysteria which accompanied the last work stoppage in the bituminous coal mines. Strident demands were made at that time that the pipe lines (sic) be converted to natural gas in order, so the proponents maintained, to help alleviate the coal shortage. … In order to punish John Lewis and his United Mine Workers, for that seems to be the philosophy largely behind the effort to introduce natural gas through the pipe lines to the east coast, some articulate groups in this country would disrupt and perhaps ruin a Pennsylvania industry providing the livelihood of nearly 2,000,000 Pennsylvanians

The UMWA’s United Mine Workers Journal reported on the WAA’s decision in an article titled “80th Congress Knifed Labor at Every Turn in Serving Powerful Interests of Reaction.”¹¹

Following failure of Congress to heed pleas of coal, railroad and other industries to postpone sale of the Big and Little Inch Pipelines, the War Assets Administration proceeded with plans for the sale of the lines to private interests for transportation of petroleum or natural gas. Taking advantage of the terrific propaganda of the Administration, press and radio against the United Mine Workers of America and their leaders, proponents for the use of Big and Little Inch Pipelines put terrific pressure on the (sic) Congress to shelve the legislation to delay their sale. Claiming the use of the pipelines for natural gas would keep the Nation from being cold, prevent industry from shutting down and punish the coal miner for striking, they succeeded in killing resolutions by Congressman Walter (Democrat, Pennsylvania) before the House Interstate Commerce Committee, and Senator O’Mahoney (Democrat, Wyoming) before the Senate Armed Services Committee, to delay the sale until six months after the submission to Congress of a natural gas study by the Federal Power Commission.

New Deal administrator Harold Ickes also wrote that using the pipelines to transport natural gas would “end John L. Lewis’ stranglehold on the economy of the United States” (Castaneda, 1993: 81). Under the leadership of John L Lewis, the UMWA had struck and won concessions from coal companies throughout the Second World War (Castaneda, 1993).

In industrialized countries, switching from coal to natural gas usually occurs in response to declining prices of alternative fuels (Landsberg and Schurr, 1968; Nyden, 2010; Parker, 2000; Turnheim and Geels, 2012) in combination with public health concerns over air pollution (Melosi, 2001). In the mid-20th century U.S., coal and natural gas were substitutable so the essential advantage of gas over coal was its cheapness (Olds and Draper, 1948: 55). A UMWA planning document outlining “the future of coal” blamed the “use of natural gas” for taking “markets previously served by the coal industry.”¹² It was cheaper to transport natural gas by pipeline than to haul coal by rail,¹³ but it was the “small amount of labor involved in its production, transportation and distribution” that made gas the “strongest competitor for any business that it wants” (Olds and Draper, 1948: 295). The cost of oil and gas labor totaled only 10% of production costs, while mining labor represented over 70% of coal’s final cost (Podobnik, 2006: 48). Union representatives referred to gas as a “laborless fuel” which was threatening coal miners’ jobs with each new natural gas hookup.¹⁴

The coal to oil and natural gas transition was not simply the result of the relatively lower price of natural gas compared to coal. As shown here, government policy that made natural gas available in coal markets was intended to weaken the power of energy workers. Natural gas – the laborless fuel – was introduced into coal markets because relying on coal meant relying on organized laborers. To the WAA, natural gas legislation was an instrument for limiting the UMWA’s power to force renegotiation of the form and purpose of energy landscapes. When miners disrupted coal mines through strikes, sit-ins, and slowdowns, capital accumulation across broad swathes of the U.S. economy ground to a halt. Coalminers used industrial capitalism’s dependency on high-volume energy consumption to demand that more wages, taxes, and other income flows be redirected away from capital accumulation and towards landscapes of social reproduction.

Conclusion

I have argued that the coal to oil and natural gas transition in the U.S. was pursued, in part, to stop coalminers from forcing a renegotiation of the form and purpose of energy landscapes. Although coal was replaced by natural gas in other contexts through price competition, the WAA made gas available in coal markets of the U.S. to punish coalminers for striking. The sale of oil pipelines to gas companies was made despite repeated pleas by miners that introducing natural gas into coal markets would destroy their livelihoods and threaten the survival of their communities. Landscapes of social reproduction in coalmining communities were put at risk by the loss of unionized employment through the coal-to-oil and natural gas transition.

I used this case to argue that energy workers can alter the form and purpose of landscapes, which integrates important research findings from landscape studies with analysis of energy landscapes more specifically. By blending insights from human geography and energy studies, I have explained how workers can transform landscapes, which are seen as the setting where technological change happens in the MLP. Future studies by practitioners of the MLP can use this analysis to understand how energy workers can leverage industrial capitalism’s dependency on high-volume energy consumption to change the landscapes where energy transitions occur.

Energy workers, and their power in the landscape, matters because the U.S. economy is still dependent on massive energy consumption, which means energy workers can still press for radical change. My case study shows that coalminers could confidently demand more resources from coal companies and the state because the wider economy depended on energy from coal. My finding that the WAA used the oil and natural gas transition to neutralize organized labor speaks to the significance of labor’s power in energy landscapes. The confidence of organized labor – and energy labor especially – is needed again today, to struggle for landscapes of social reproduction that include a socially just, sustainable, energy transition.

Highlights

Researchers have been studying how energy systems can be decarbonized to address climate change.

Many see the social and political landscapes where energy systems are built to have an impact on sustainable transitions.

Organized labor in energy landscapes has, in the past, had an enormous impact on energy transitions.

Specifically this case study examines how the U.S. government used a transition from coal to natural gas to weaken coalminers.

This matters because, in future, energy workers could use their structural leverage to push for energy landscapes of social reproduction.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you Matt Huber for commenting on this paper many times while it was a dissertation chapter. Thanks also to Jamie Winders, Don Mitchell, Tod Rutherford, Antonio Ioris, and Mark Rupert for commenting while it was in my dissertation. Thank you Conor Harrison, Sarah Kelly-Richards, James McCarthy, and Sarah Knuth for organizing the American Association of Geographers session where I presented a draft of this article. Thanks especially to Conor Harrison for commenting on it as a discussant in that session. Thank you, Anne and Alan Sica for research assistance in the Penn State archives. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers and Nik Heynen for many constructive concerns and comments. All errors are my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Carlo Sica

Notes

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