green jobs

By David Le Page - Fossil Free South Africa, February 2017

More jobs: Yes, the fossil fuel industry creates jobs, but it also creates climate change, air and water pollution, substantial corruption, wars, social instability, economic crises and fuel shortages, and destroys arable land — all of which destroy jobs and human wellbeing. A greener economy will create more, better, safer jobs. According to the International Labour Organisation (https://goo.gl/rSryng): “…most studies show that a transition to a low-carbon economy will lead to a net increase in employment”. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has argued for “a planned closure of coal power stations – along with both a jobs and energy plan for the country”, saying it will “create a more prosperous and diversified economy”. (https://goo.gl/k4da08). Renewable energy is now capable of powering developing economies, indeed the whole world, without all the terrible costs of fossil fuels.

Threatened investments: Investments in fossil fuels are losing value in many markets. Even if they do not embrace the moral arguments for divestment, unions still have a fiduciary duty to the members whose funds they manage to understand, manage, and where appropriate, divest, to avoid the multiplying threats to investments in the fossil fuel industry. According to BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager: “Investors can no longer ignore climate change. Some may question the science behind it, but all are faced with a swelling tide of climate-related regulations and technological disruption.”

Health and the right to life: Researchers at UCT’s Energy Research Centre estimate that 27,000 premature deaths across South Africa annually (7.4% of all deaths) are currently due to high levels of fine PM (microscopic particles), mostly from burning fossil fuels… and often in poorer communities. Even without climate change, we would still need to shut down the fossil fuel industry.

Human and worker rights: Climate change is a profound threat to Africa. Climate change is a human rights issue, already killing hundreds of thousands of African children every year through malnutrition and disease. Climate change threatens food security. It threatens economic growth and stability, and thereby threatens workers’ job and savings.

The fossil fuel industry is facing multiple, critical threats:

• Renewable energy (especially wind & solar) is now the fastest growing energy industry in the world.
• China is moving fast to phase out coal, and its coal use has already peaked.
• By some predictions, electric cars will mostly replace petrol/diesel in 20 years’ time.
• The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change saw most countries agree to phase out fossil fuels.
• Even without these changes, in 50-100 years time at the most, all accessible fossil fuel reserves will be exhausted anyway.
• Transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable, but a managed, just transition is preferable.

Solidarity and tradition: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” The global divestment movement is led by many people of colour and people of faith, constituencies which overlap strongly with the union movement. The union movement has a social and historical responsibility to stand up for social justice, human rights and good governance. The fossil fuel industry, on the other hand, is extremely corrupt, threatening good governance and worker’s rights as well as human health and the environment.

By Sophie Yeo - Carbon Brief, January 4, 2017

Tackling climate change is good for the economy, good for business and good for people. This is the narrative often pushed out by campaigners, researchers and governments around the world.

But while measures to curb emissions and reduce the impacts of rising temperatures will be good for the many, the few who work in industries affected by climate policies risk losing their livelihoods as the economy leans increasingly upon renewable energy.

Around the world, there is a growing movement demanding a “just transition” for the workforce, so that workers are not left in the cold as fossil fuels become consigned to the past.

Peabody and the Navajo tribe

Arizona’s Navajo tribe is one example of a community already fighting for a just transition. This Native American group signed a lease in 1964 allowing Peabody Energy, America’s largest coal company, to mine for coal on reservation lands. Now, 50 years later, many are battling against the impacts of this deal.

When they signed the lease, the company agreed to “employ Navajo Indians when available in all positions for which…they are qualified”. Since then, Peabody has been a major employer of tribe members — 90% of the 430-person workforce of its Kayenta mine are native people.

Yet, while Peabody has provided jobs and money, poverty rates on the Navajo Nation Reservation are more than twice as high as the Arizona state average, and benefits have come at the expense of the local environment.

The Navajo tribe has seen their water sources dwindle as Peabody has used the reservation’s aquifer to turn coal into slurry and pump it down a pipeline. Coal plants surrounding the reservation have polluted the air, clouding the view of the nearby Grand Canyon and other national parks. It is also a source of CO2, the primary contributor of human-caused climate change.

Members of the Navajo tribe, alongside the Hopi tribe that also lives in the area, are calling for a “just transition” away from coal — one that will see old jobs tied to the polluting coal industry replaced with clean and profitable work.

One group, the Black Mesa Water Coalition, is trying to create economic opportunities that will help to release the community from its reliance on coal. For instance, they have tried to revive the traditional Navajo wool market, developing partnerships with wool buyers and organising an annual Wool Buy.

It has also started a solar project, which aims to install a series of 20MW to 200MW solar installations on abandoned coal mining land, transforming the reservation’s old role as an energy provider.

The idea has gone global. In Ghana, for instance, the government has developed a programme to plant more trees, simultaneously improving the landscape, providing jobs, and offering a diversified source of livelihoods for farmers. Peasant farmers and the rural unemployed were involved in planting species such as teak, eucalyptus, cassia and mahogany, generating 12,595 full-time jobs.

In Port Augusta, a town of 14,000 people in South Australia, there is a plan underway to install a solar thermal plant to replace the town’s coal industry. This became even more urgent after the Alinta power station announced that it would close, potentially putting 250 jobs at risk.

By Hillary Wainwright - Red Pepper, November 2016

Back in the 1970s, with unemployment rising and British industry contracting, workers at the arms company Lucas Aerospace came up with a pioneering plan to retain jobs by proposing alternative, socially-useful applications of the company’s technology and their own skills. The ‘Lucas Plan’ remains one of the most radical and forward thinking attempts ever made by workers to take the steering wheel and directly drive the direction of change.

Forty years later, we are facing a convergence of crises: militarism and nuclear weapons, climate chaos and the destruction of jobs by new technologies and automation. These crises mean we have to start thinking about technology as political, as the Lucas Aerospace workers did, and reopen the debate about industrial conversion and economic democracy.

‘What so inspires me about the Lucas Plan is the democratic egalitarianism which runs through its every part – the work processes, the products and even the very technology they propose.’

This egalitarian ethic inspired Laurence Hall to make the Lucas Plan the focus of a recent national gathering of Young Quakers in Lancaster, up the line from the Trident nuclear submarine yards in Barrow. Eurig Scandrett from the Scottish Green Party made it the theme for Green Party trade unionists because ‘it is the most inspiring example of workers on the shop floor who get self-organised and demand to make what humanity needs.’

The fact that the plan was defeated has not diluted its capacity to inspire. For Eurig Scandrett, its defeat demonstrated that ‘it is the vested interests of the military-industrial machine which is the problem, and that workers liberating their collective brain is where the solution lies.’

The broad outline of the Lucas Aerospace workers’ story was familiar enough in the mid-1970s. Workers faced redundancies, got organised, resisted and insisted that their skills and machinery were not redundant. But here they went further. They drew together alternative ideas with those of supportive academics and, with the encouragement of Tony Benn (then industry secretary in the Labour government), produced their ‘Alternative Corporate Plan for Socially Useful Production’, illustrated with prototypes. Management refused to negotiate. The government, under pressure from the CBI and the City, made gestures of a willingness to talk, but would not move against management. The plan was never implemented, or even seriously considered, although commercial companies elsewhere picked up some of the ideas.

So what are the lessons we can draw from this past experience of ‘ordinary’ people organising and sharing their practical knowledge and skills to illustrate in the present the changes of which we dream? Some of the main ones are discussed below.

By Lyndsey Easton - Iron and Earth, Novemver 1, 2016

EDMONTON — A group of oil-and-gas workers has a plan to create job opportunities and retrain workers for clean energy projects, and they are calling on the federal government to step up.

The Workers’ Climate Plan was released today by Iron & Earth after four months of consultations with workers and industry. The tangible four-point plan stands in contrast to recent publicity stunts involving “roughneck” workers on Parliament Hill.

“This isn’t about taking jobs away from people, this is about opening up sustainable opportunities for skilled workers so their families can thrive,” said Lliam Hildebrand, executive director of Iron & Earth. “We’re giving a voice to real oil and gas workers who deserve a say in these issues and who want a better future.”

“Workers deserve something sustainable, so we don’t find ourselves in this boom-and-bust mess ever again,” said Kerry Oxford, mechanical engineering technologist and member of Iron & Earth. “That’s why we’re taking time out of our lives to work on this problem together. That’s why we spent four months talking with colleagues, coming up with a plan that works for the long term.”

Iron & Earth released the plan at a solar panel installation training facility in Edmonton — the kind of place where tradespeople and skilled labourers could find new opportunities in the energy transition. Making the switch is possible: of the energy workers surveyed for the Workers’ Climate Plan, the overwhelming majority say they could switch to renewable energy projects with minimal retraining, or sometimes no retraining at all.

The Workers’ Climate Plan identifies the four most important needs the government must address:

1. Upskilling for the energy sector workforce
2. More manufacturing capacity for renewable energy in Canada
3. Support for contractors and unions that want to transition to renewables
4. Integrating renewable technologies into existing energy projects

A draft of the plan was sent to the federal government during its climate change consultations in September. They’re asking the government to address their four-point plan in the federal climate strategy to be released in early December.

Iron & Earth has also submitted the Solar Skills proposal  to upskill 1,000 tradespeople for renewable energy jobs. The initiative would give them the skills to work on solar, energy efficiency and electrical vehicle installation projects. As these industries grow, out-of-work tradespeople are looking for help to make a transition.

Robert Pollin interviewed by Sharmini Peries - The Real News Network, October 24, 2016

By Jonathan Neale - Global Climate Jobs, October 16, 2016

Mika Minio Paluello has written a very useful and detailed report for the Scottish Green Party. It begins:

The North Sea oil industry says jobs are threatened by falling oil prices. But a better future for Scotland is possible. More and better jobs. A safer and more stable economy. Stronger communities. A long-term future as an energy exporter. Moving from energy colonialism to energy democracy.

This better future won’t come with tax cuts for oil corporations and trying to extract every last barrel. It means changing direction – towards a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. This will require a wholescale change of UK economic policy away from austerity and toward investment in the new economy.

This report shows that sustainable sectors in the new economy can employ significantly more people than currently work in fossil fuel industries. Scotland can create stable jobs for those who need them, wipe out fuel poverty, do its bit to stem climate change and re-localise economies.

We researched and analysed existing and potential employment in offshore wind and marine energy, forestry and sustainable biomass, retrofitting buildings, decommissioning the North Sea, synthetic gas, and training and research. Projections were built on conservative estimates of the jobs required for a rapid and ambitious energy transition.

We didn’t include new jobs in public transport, solar, waste, renewing the electricity grid, energy storage or climate adaptation.

Our calculations show that there are 156,000 workers employed in fossil fuel extraction in Scotland, of which one third are export-oriented jobs. The new economy could in comparison employ more than 200,000 in 2035.

The transition proposed is ambitious and would involve major hiring programmes and a drastic reduction in Scottish unemployment. This paper lays out the necessary policy proposals to maximise job creation and a just transition. These jobs in the new economy should be better jobs for the workers and for all of us: jobs in an industry which is growing not declining, which create a safer, rather than a more dangerous world. For workers employed in North Sea oil or part of the supply chain, concerns about job losses are legitimate. Hence we have analysed and compared not only job totals between fossil fuels and the new economy, but also the skills components and likely locations.

The transformation we are proposing involves reducing dependency on distant multinationals, and centring the public sector, workers and energy-users co-operatives as well as small and medium Scottish companies. Building a non-extractive future in every sense: the pollution stays in the ground, and the money and skills stay in the community.

Unions and shopfloor workers need to be at the centre of this transition, redesigning supply chains and guiding the transformation. Energy workers laid the foundations of parliamentary democracy in the UK, played a central role in the formation of unions and won crucial struggles over workplace rights. Today’s energy workers in Scotland will play a crucial role in building the new Scotland, both as individuals with essential skills and collective groups. We can’t afford to squander the creativity, knowledge and abilities of engineers, skilled trades and production workers.

By Adam Scott and Matt Maiorana - Oil Change International, September 12, 2016

There’s a clear logic to the global challenge of addressing climate change: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. If we’re serious about tackling the global climate crisis, we need to stop exploring for, developing, and ultimately producing and consuming fossil fuels. This inevitably leads to the decline of the oil, gas, and coal industries.

This leaves us with two clear options. Either we carefully manage the decline of the fossil fuel industry to ensure a smooth and just transition, or we let the chips fall where they may and risk decimating communities that are reliant on the fossil fuel economy. The path we choose will make all the difference to those communities as the decline of fossil fuels becomes inevitable.

A textbook example of how NOT to manage the decline can be found in the painful history of the Newfoundland cod fishery.

One of eastern Canada’s premier industries, the cod fishery defined the economy and the culture of coastline communities for centuries. Commercial fishing off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland dates back as far as 1500, but it wasn’t until factory trawlers were introduced around 1950 that catches became increasingly unsustainable. At its peak in 1968, the catch of northern cod in the Atlantic reached 1.9 million tons. However, the impact of overfishing soon became apparent.

In the 1980s, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans received increasingly dire warnings about the rapidly diminishing fish stock from fishermen and scientists, but these were largely ignored. Much like climate science models today, these marine science models were often ignored when setting quotas and planning for future catches. These plans weren’t set by the scientific models, but instead by politicians. Despite mounting evidence, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans continued to boost catch quotas without regard to the impacts of their actions. A 1992 Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans audit found that the science regarding the health and management of cod stocks “was gruesomely mangled and corrupted to meet political ends.” As a result, fish stocks continued to plummet.

By Julie Douglas and Peter McGhee - Briefing Papers, July 5, 2016

We [unions] have to stop running away from the climate crisis, stop leaving it to the environmentalist, and look at it. Let ourselves absorb the fact that the industrial revolution that led to our society’s prosperity is now destabilizing the natural systems on which all of life depends – Naomi Klein

Climate change is perhaps the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced. Indeed, this year is predicted to be the hottest on record since pre-industrial levels. The signing of the Paris COP21 agreement in March in 2016 behoves all countries to take urgent action to reduce carbon emissions. New Zealand is a signatory to the agreement, which clearly accepts that climate action is not the responsibility of governments alone and that all affected parties have a role in developing a response to climate change. Aside from environmental impacts from climate change there will be significant social, economic and political impacts as well. Work and workplaces, at the centre of the economy and social life, are important sites for responding to climate change. Employment is core to providing a livelihood and prospects on an individual level, and contributing to society as a whole.

There needs to be a tripartite approach to climate action in the workplace. Of the key direct stakeholders (state, employers and unions), unions represent around 18.6 percent of all workers (359,782 members) in New Zealand and therefore also constitutes our largest democratic body. A body of this size which has the structure in place to educate and organise through both the peak union body, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU), and individual unions, must logically become an important partner in strategic discussions at both a government, industry and firm level.

The union movement in New Zealand has a long history of leading debate and resistance around issues of social justice, from taking a stand against Spain’s fascist Franco to refusing to assist in the loading of ships carrying New Zealand police officers to Samoa in 1929 who went on to kill many Samoans in the Mau movement. With this pedigree of social conscience and history of taking action it should follow that the union movement and its members would again rise and offer leadership to the latest challenge to social order and justice, and indeed potential catastrophic change to the planet.

Not only will jobs, occupations and industries disappear or change but the health and safety of workers will be threatened and more broadly, food and water security compromised. The initial challenge to unions then, is to see these threats as core to union work and why action is imperative to ensure their unions are ready to respond, educate members, and also to work with firms to develop strategies which allow for a just transition to a more sustainable workplace and world.  Unfortunately, such transformation does not appear to be forthcoming.

A recent study we conducted interviewed leaders from eleven of the affiliated unions to the NZCTU (representing 75 percent of all members in affiliated unions). These interviews sought information on what actions, if any, the unions had put in place to respond to climate change, and also the role they saw unions having in climate action and just transition. All of the interviewees articulated a strong personal position of concern about impending climate change and need for action. They all saw the union movement and the NZCTU as important stakeholders and leaders in the action required. However, when looking at the unions themselves the results were sobering. None were in a well-prepared position to face the future regarding climate change. Two had begun to develop some basic policies and plans but did not consider themselves in anyway ready; seven respondents indicated that they personally saw the issue as important but that their unions had done nothing in this area yet and that there were no conversations within the formal structure of their organisation about this issue; and the remaining two union respondents clearly articulated that climate change was not on their union’s radar and there was no indication this was likely to change. Across these unions only two respondents indicated that there had been interest raised by their membership.

This is a fairly bleak outlook for society especially if it places its hope of action on the largest democratic body in the country. Why are unions so unprepared? There are some identifiable reasons, but not excuses, for this. Firstly, we must look at the current socio-political environment unions operate under in New Zealand. As a result of the neo liberal paradigm shift in the 1980s and consequent legislation changes (such as the Employment Contracts Act 1991), union membership dramatically fell, and since 2008 unions have sustained a consistent undermining of rights such as workplace access. The role that unions play in the lives of workers – including their members – has narrowed as a result.

Secondly, unions’ core work is the preservation and enhancement of workers’ wages and conditions. It is for this reason that workers join unions and many of the union leaders we interviewed indicated they were concerned that a shift towards long-term social issues such as climate change could affect membership numbers. The irony being that the continued focus on the short gains of wages and conditions will be pointless if in the middle to long term members’ jobs ceased to exist. That said though, research from the US indicated that union members were more likely to be concerned with environment issues and therefore may well embrace their union engaging with climate change strategies[1]. Despite this finding, it is perhaps unsurprising that none of the unions interviewed had actively surveyed or begun widespread conversations about climate change within their unions and therefore were unaware of their members’ position or wishes on the issue. While it was true that some unions had improved sustainability measures in specific firms and, in one instance, got an organisation to divest in fossil fuel investment, this still stopped well short of a unified approach.

System justification theory postulates that human’s tend to view the wider systems on which they depend in a favourable light. As Johnson notes, upholding the status quo encourages feelings of security, purpose and relatedness through a shared reality. Unions, and their members are no different. They advocate for improved employment outcomes within a capitalist system that rewards self-interest and promotes economic growth as central to human well-being (usually at the expense of the environment). Unfortunately, climate change is a consequence of that same system. Perhaps this explains unions’ reluctance to engage in any meaningful way. To embrace climate change shifts the focus from short-term economic benefits for workers to that of uniting ‘all labouring men and women for a truly different order of things’.[2] Such a move could help unions become truly social democratic movements contributing to the flourishing of all.

[1] Vachon, T., & Brecher, J. (2016). Are union members more or less likely to be environmentalists? Labor Studies Journal. Doi:10.1177/0160449×16643323

[2] Leeson, R. (1971). United We Stand: British Trade Union Emblems (p. 32). London: Adams and Dart.