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A supplement to Eco Unionist News:
Image, right: Alameda County AFL-CIO Central Labor Council president, Josie Camacho, flanked by dozens of Bay Area union leaders and members, representing 21 Bay Area unions (including the Bay Area IWW), join in with Oakland residents to oppose coal handling, storage, shipment, and exports in the Port of Oakland at a special City Council hearing, held June 27, 2016. At the conclusion of the meeting, the City Council voted unanimously, 7-0 with one member absent, in support of the coal ban. 
Author's note: this article is an update to an earlier piece, titled 
(in 2015), the Norwegian Parliament took a historic decision to move the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) out of thermal coal. The Parliament determined that companies should be excluded if they “base 30% or more of their activities on coal, and/or derive 30% of their revenues from coal.”1Thiswas an important break-through as the 30% threshold established a new benchmark for divestment actions of large investors. Only months after the Norwegian decision, the world’s largest insurance company, Allianz, undertook a coal divestment action of its own based on the GPFG’s 30% threshold.2And other investors such as KLP and Storebrand, which had already undertaken divestment actions, have now tightened their thresholds to keep up with the trail blazed by the Norwegian Parliament.
This report documents massive exports of federally owned coal from 2000-15. The US Bureau of Land Management sold private companies the right to mine this coal for a pittance—in some cases, for less than 20 cents per ton. And when Asian demand was red-hot, these companies made massive profits selling millions of tons of federal coal overseas. Nonetheless, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has essentially ignored export economics when setting the “fair market value” that it will accept for federal coal leases. Now that the Department of Interior has placed a three-year moratorium on new coal leases pending a thorough review of federal coal policies, BLM has an ideal opportunity for a thorough review of the economics of exports. And our report points to evidence that by ignoring exports, the BLM has been selling many federal coal leases at just a fraction of their true economic value.
There is a suggestion called a Just Transition that is floating around parts of the labor and environmental communities. To fully understand this term, we as workers, community members, union members and activists would need to explore,The Fine Print I:
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The Fine Print II:
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