California’s False Promise of a ‘Just Transition’

I grew up in a union household. My father was a Teamster who worked in the downtown Los Angeles produce markets for 41 years, alongside many coworkers who barely had a high school diploma. We were a blue-collar family, and by the time I entered the fourth grade, I had the highest level of education in my home.

It was my father’s job, not a college degree, that paid the bills, kept medical insurance in place, put food on the table, and gave my parents a secure retirement. That job offered dignity, stability, and a middle-class life.

Today, California’s oil industry offers that same pathway to the middle class. Many of its workers, even those with only a high school diploma, earn an average of $123,000 a year. This industry also opens the door for second-chancers, people who have rebuilt their lives after incarceration. It’s one of the few industries left where a person’s background doesn’t define their future.

But that future is under direct attack. Environmental activists, some Hollywood celebrities, regulators, and legislators talk about a “just transition” away from these jobs. They speak as though there’s a plan—some mystical orderly path from good-paying oil and gas jobs into equally good-paying “clean energy” jobs. But here’s the truth: there is no such thing as a “just transition” when all you’re doing is shutting down local oil production and replacing it with foreign oil imports.

Where are the $123,000-a-year jobs these 55,000 workers will walk into?

Show us the postings. Show us the career ladders. Show us the benefits and the retirement plans. If any did exist, they are few and far between. Most “just transition” talk boils down to: we are going to shut down your industry, take your job, maybe train you for something else that pays less than half of your current salary, and then you’re on your own.

And here’s what makes it worse: California’s demand for oil hasn’t dropped, but our willingness to produce our own energy has.

California’s oil demand has remained steady in the past decade. Californians still consume roughly 1.8 million barrels of oil every day. But instead of producing more of it here, under the strictest environmental, health, and labor standards in the world, we import it.

California now imports more oil from the Amazon rainforest than it produces at home. The oil this state imports comes from countries where environmental protections are weak or nonexistent, where drilling destroys ecosystems and displaces communities, and where spills are rarely cleaned up.

Worse still, we import oil from nations that execute LGBTQ+ people, deny women basic rights, and exploit workers. 

In the name of “climate justice,” we’re putting our own people out of work while paying $25 billion a year to foreign countries, many of whom don’t share our values.

That $25 billion should stay here, supporting California families, strengthening our tax base, and helping cities and counties that are struggling with deficits. Instead, it leaves our state while we lose good-paying jobs, weaken our energy security, and pretend we’re leading on climate.

If that’s a “just transition,” then words have lost their meaning.

To the legislators and their staff, especially those representing working-class and minority communities, look closely at what’s being done in your name. This is not a transition. It’s a trade: California jobs for foreign oil. 

California’s 55,000 oil workers aren’t asking for handouts. They’re asking for the chance to keep earning an honest living, providing for their families, and retiring with dignity.

Show them the “just” part of this transition, because right now, all we see is the injustice. And if you’re going to take their jobs away, have the courage to tell them what comes next.