green jobs

Al Weinrub - Yes! Magazine, November 12, 2015

On September 21, Pa Dwe, a 16-year-old student at Oakland’s Street Academy, spoke out against the export of coal through the Port of Oakland to City Council members: “I’m opposed to this coal export because it will make my community in West Oakland sick. I support jobs, but not the kind of jobs that make us sick. There are clean job alternatives, like Community Choice energy, and this will be good for the health of my community. This is my generation; I want to have a healthy life.” 

Pa’s comments exemplify a growing awareness that the people of California can only successfully address climate change by breaking with fossil fuels and the state’s investor-owned utility companies.

These utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), control about 75 percent of the electricity market in California, with the other 25 percent being supplied by public (municipal) utilities.

By creating slick, misleading ad campaigns about how green they are, the monopoly utilities have done their best to fight renewable energy programs. This often happens behind the scenes, and with the willing assistance of the scandal-ridden California Public Utilities Commission—the agency that is supposed to regulate these behemoth energy enterprises.

Back in 2002, in the wake of the Enron-induced crash of California's electricity system—which to this day has left rate-payers bailing out the utility companies— California passed AB 117, the Community Choice Aggregation law. This law allows a city, county, or any grouping of cities and counties, to “aggregate” electricity customers in their jurisdictions for the purpose of procuring electricity on their behalf. Under this arrangement, a public agency—the newly formed Community Choice program—decides where electricity will come from, while the incumbent utility delivers the electricity, maintains the electric lines, and bills customers.

The new program is a hybrid between a public agency and a private utility. The utility owns the distribution infrastructure, but the public is in the driver’s seat regarding energy decisions.

“It puts our community in control of the most important part of our electricity system,” explains Woody Hastings of the Center for Climate Protection in Sonoma County, one of the jurisdictions that has opted for a Community Choice energy program. “That means we can purchase more renewable and greenhouse-gas-free energy on the market than PG&E offered us. But more importantly, we can build renewable energy assets right here in the County. We not only get the benefits of low carbon electricity, but we get the economic benefits—the business opportunities and clean energy jobs—that come from investing in our own community.”

Sonoma County’s Community Choice customers get power that is 30 percent lower in greenhouse gases than PG&E. They also pay up to 9 percent less on average than PG&E customers. In addition, electricity net revenues go back into the community rather than into the pockets of PG&E shareholders and overpaid executives.

By Mateo Nube - Movement Generation, November 4, 2015

Marissa Mommaerts: I’m so happy this teleseminar is happening, because personally I believe that making social justice more explicit in our work is not only the right thing to do, it’s also the only way our movement is going to become powerful enough to rise to the challenges of our time. And I’m very excited to welcome a friend and mentor, someone I deeply respect and admire, Mateo Nube of Movement Generation, to lead today’s call.

Mateo is one of the co-founders of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project. He was born and grew up in La Paz, Bolivia. Since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, he has worked in the labor, environmental justice and international solidarity movements. Mateo has spent the last two decade integrating concepts of popular education into his movement work. He is also a member of the Latin rock band Los Nadies.

We’re grateful Mateo has agreed to lead today’s teleseminar, because we respect and appreciate the work of Movement Generation and the other organizations he will be talking about - and because we recognize the need for more conversations on the link between Transition and social justice.

Our team at Transition US has begun exploring the connections between race, class, and ecology, as have a number of local initiatives and regional hubs in the US and around the world. And in doing this work, we’ve learned that it can bring up a lot of assumptions. So I to get the most out of today’s call, I invite us all to participate with an open mind and heart, in the spirit of reflection and collaboration.

And with that, I will turn it over to Mateo:

Mateo Nube: Thank you Marissa and Carolyne. I’m excited and humbled and flattered to be having this conversation with folks from – if I gather correctly – not just the United States but also a few folks calling in from around the world. I have a lot of admiration for the work of the Transition Towns movement, and a special respect for both Marissa and Carolyne for the work of Transition US. And as has been expressed, what I will be talking about today is the concept of a “Just Transition.” I will both speak to it conceptually and give examples. As you may hear in the background, the garbage truck is passing by our office. It makes it real – I will be talking about zero waste among other concepts – it’s the Ecology Center truck from Berkeley, California where our office is located.*

I will start by stating what I think is obvious and will serve as a platform of sorts for the conversation we will be having today, which is that Transition is inevitable. It’s upon us, and it’s why those of us who are on this call are compelled to be doing the work we’re already doing: because we’re living at a highly pivotal moment in our planetary history, or human history as it relates to human impact on the planet.

So Transition is inevitable, but justice is not. And that’s what the conversation today is meant to really focus on: how is it that we ensure that the lens we’re bringing to the work we’re doing, that is so important and pivotal, is really centered around this concept of a Just Transition.

By Martin Empson - One Million Climate Jobs, December 28, 2015

In 2015 Britain has seen repeated flooding causing large-scale damage. Tens of thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes, suffered days without power and seen their homes and businesses destroyed as storms repeatedly hit the country. In the latest bout of flooding, thousands of people in Manchester, Leeds and York have been hit, sometimes with the worst floods ever, as rivers broke banks.

Trade unions that represent workers in the emergency services have repeatedly warned of the impacts of austerity measures on their ability to deal with flooding and other severe weather.

Unison, for instance, which represents workers at the Environment Agency, reported how cuts would reduce its ability to prevent and respond to flooding and tidal surges. In 2012/13 the grant was £124 million less than in 2009/10.

Staff numbers at the Agency have been reduced by around 1000. The November 2015 autumn statement pledged that the Agency would have its funding for flood defences “preserved”, but the rest of its budget would decrease by 15%. The government claims that it is protecting front line services that respond to emergencies and help prevent flooding, but cutting behind the scenes staff and resources hit the ability of workers to deal with crises, and the ability to make long term plans for future, worsening, weather.

The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has also highlighted the way that cuts will affect its ability to respond to emergencies such as flooding. In response to the most recent floods the FBU said that “threats posed by such large scale floods are beyond the capacity of local services to cope. The impact of massive cuts to funding of the country’s fire and rescue service is being felt by all firefighters, including those who are aiding flood rescue.”

Simon Hickman, Manchester FBU Brigade Organiser, whose members were on the front line dealing with floods in Salford said, “We’re stretched to the limit with the lack of resources due to the cuts, and we’ve just been told that £15.8 million is to be cut locally. It is bad enough this time but it will be far worse next time. We had 56 fire engines available, the majority were committed to incidents. Yet we are told we may be cut down to as few as 30 at night time, which will remove any resilience in the future”.

Even Coastguard services have been cut back.

Prime Minister David Cameron has expressed sympathy with victims, and celebrated the work of the emergency workers. But his government’s policies have made the situation far worse. Back in 2011, the then Tory-Liberal coalition government announced an 8 percent cut (£540 million) in spending on flood defences. Government policies that favour the fossil fuel industry, such as fracking, will only increase emissions leading to further climate change and more frequent floods.

The government is well aware of the increased risks of flooding because of climate change.  Almost a decade ago, in 2006, Nicolas Stern wrote an extensive report into the economic impacts of climate change for the then Labour government which warned that “Infrastructure damage from flooding and storms is expected to increase substantially” unless there were flood management policies that could avoid this. In purely economic terms, Stern saw the situation as getting far worse as global warming increased, warning that

“The costs of flooding in Europe are likely to increase, unless flood management is strengthened in line with the rising risk. In the UK, annual flood losses could increase from around 0.1% of GDP today to 0.2 – 0.4% of GDP once global temperature increases reach 3 to 4°C.”

These floods are not “unprecedented” they are the new norm. Climate change means that we are going to see more frequent and more extreme flooding. In order to protect lives, homes and businesses we need to reverse the cuts to emergency services and the Environmental Agency and increase funding.

We also need investment that can reduce the impact of climate change. Writing in The Guardian, environmental campaigner George Monbiot has shown that planting trees can help the soil absorb water. Rather than cuts, we should be creating jobs that can save lives, protect property and reduce the impact of climate change.

But we also need to drastically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. This is why the Campaign against Climate Change, with seven national trade unions, and the National Union of Students are calling for One Million Climate Jobs. The creation of such jobs, through investment in renewable energy, insulation schemes, public transport and energy reduction could reduce emissions from the UK by 86% in twenty years. The trade union movement recognises that climate change is no longer an abstract discussion, but a reality. Dealing with it can help create jobs and improve society.

In 2014 David Cameron told flooded communities in the South-West that “money was no object” in helping them recover from that year’s floods. In 2016 we must hold him to that statement and demand the sort of investment that can prevent future disasters.

By Jonathan Neale - Global Climate Jobs, December 18, 2015

This post looks at the results of the Paris climate talks, and says what the climate movement and the social movements need to do next, how climate jobs fit into that, and what you can do to help build a campaign for climate jobs in your country.

The Paris Climate Talks

Many have hailed the result of the UN climate talks as a breakthrough, for two reasons. One: all of the countries of the world signed an agreement about climate change. Two: there are some good abstract hopes in that agreement.

But there are also concrete promises about emissions. Some countries have promised to cut emissions by a little in the next fifteen years. They may, or may not, keep their promises. Many more countries, with more emissions, have promised to increase their emissions by a lot. Taken together, these are promises to increase emissions every year between now and 2030. That’s the bottom line. (For the details, see our earlier post, Paris: World Promises to Increase Emissions.)

What We Need to do Now

The good news is that we have a growing and increasingly radical global climate movement. And the organisations who think the agreement is a breakthrough also think it is only a beginning. In addition most people in the climate movement saw the result of Paris coming, so we do not have a demoralised movement.

As we return from Paris, it is clear that the leaders of all the countries in the world have failed us. They did so because nowhere did we have the political and social power to make them take decisive action on climate. So now we have to build that power, country by country. The only force we have on our side is seven billion people. We have to mobilise them.

This will not be an easy or quick task. We all know that. After all, we need cuts of 80% in global emissions, as soon as possible. That means deep changes in energy use and society.

Two kinds of campaigns will be central. One is fighting to leave the coal, gas and oil in the soil. There will be a global day of action against fossil fuels in May; national campaigns; local resistance to pipelines, new mines, new drilling, new power stations, extreme energy, fossil few sponsorship, and investments in fossil fuels.

The other kind of campaign will be to build an alternative. If we are to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, we have to do four things. We need to replace fossil fuels almost entirely with renewable energy. To do that we need renewable energy for all our electricity. We need a switch from cars to public transport, and almost all transport run on renewable electricity. We need conversions of all homes and buildings to save energy, and then to heat and cool all buildings with renewable electricity. And we need to protect and extend the great forests.

We need to do thousands of other things, but those four things will make most of the difference. All that will take a lot of work – we estimate at least 120 million new jobs worldwide each year for 20 years. This is what we mean by ‘climate jobs’ – jobs that have a direct effect in cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

(For more detailed explanation in English, French or Spanish, see our booklet on Global Climate Jobs here.)

Moreover, we want government climate jobs programs to ensure a retraining and a permanent job to anyone who loses a high carbon job during the transition. That is only fair, and if we don’t do it we will split unions and communities.

By Tabby Spence - New Internationalist, December 16, 2015

The dust has settled in Paris, where hundreds of thousands of delegates, journalists and activists spent the last two weeks buzzing around on little sleep and carrying heavy agendas. Despite the news of a ‘historic, world-saving agreement’ flooding the airwaves, tens of thousands flooded the streets on Saturday to express grief, despair, anger, defiance, and a commitment to continue strengthening the climate justice movement. According to the activists, who were literally drawing massive red lines through central Paris (and in other places around the world), the Paris Agreement permits governments to cross many important red lines representing the basic requirements for a just and liveable planet (you can see more detailed analysis on just how bad the deal really is here).

Given the decades of international meetings not yielding any cuts in greenhouse gas emissions (but rather growth by 63%), most of the civil-society groups were prepared for another epic failure at COP21. Yet many of these groups are developing strategies to drive scientifically adequate and historically fair transformations at local and national scales. A diversity of groups are working to remove the social licence of polluting corporations, the legality of company fiduciary duty over human lives and ecological systems, and the political and economic incentives granted to climate-warming industries.

While some of these groups have gained notoriety on social media for their creative actions, trade union groups and allies have been working quietly and diligently in their own locales to develop rapid phase-out plans for fossil fuel-emitting industries and vamping up renewables, as well as increasing energy efficiency in buildings, and reducing emissions in transport, food production and other important areas.

Jonathan Neale of the One Million Climate Jobs campaign in the UK explains, ‘These plans aim for a just transition – with the public creation of the climate jobs needed, a training programme for people leaving fossil sectors and moving into the new industries, and guaranteed work with decent pay for working people.’

Members of the Global Climate Jobs campaigns active in South Africa, Norway, Canada, the Philippines, the UK, New York State, and Mauritius held a number of workshops over the duration of the two weeks in Paris to explain how the existing campaigns in particular national contexts were developed, and to offer support for people who want to begin climate-jobs campaigns in their own countries. New campaigns are being launched in countries all over the world as a result of these discussions.

Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), like many of the climate jobs campaigns, emphasize the need for the jobs created to be public-sector jobs, and for the carbon-free energy, transportation and housing to be affordable and accessible for all.

The way forward is with ‘social ownership and democratic control of energy’, Sean Sweeney, founder of the Global Labor Institute, said at a sold-out event in Paris, titled ‘Now is not the time for small steps: solutions to the climate crisis and the role of trade unions’. Clara Paillard, who is the National Executive Secretary of the UK-based Public and Commercial Services Union, elaborated, emphasizing that addressing climate change is too important to be left to the market, and that the transition needs to be managed across scales by the public, not for short-term, private gains.

Leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn and renowned writer and activist Naomi Klein joined for the lively conversation of the crucial link between the imperatives for social, economic and political transformation in the context of a warming climate. One of the panellists, leading trade unionist Josua Mata of Sentro (Philippines), posed one of the most salient and challenging questions: ‘If the deal is going to be so bad, why don’t we just reject it? Isn’t no deal better than a bad deal?’ Naomi Klein’s response was that, even if we want to, we don’t get to reject it.

The lack of democracy and the hold of powerful countries and interests over the international processes means that the local and national scales are the actual planes at which we can operate to bring about large-scale changes.

Many of the climate-jobs campaigns are gaining traction and, thanks to the tireless work of trade unionists, allies and other organizers for social justice, it looks like we may see large-scale 'operationalization of the first climate-jobs campaign in Canada within the year. The strategy of developing transitional blueprints on national or local scales, with an aim to put power back into the hands of the public, may be the best bet we have to massively rejig the world as quickly and democratically as possible.

By John Evans - Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC), December 6, 2015

A structural shift to a low-carbon economy will entail gains in jobs, but also losses, and the first jobs to be lost are not those that you think. A just energy transition will be needed, but how? 

Climate action is a trade union issue. That is why the international trade union movement under the umbrella of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), working closely with us at TUAC, is prioritising our advocacy on climate issues. From the protection of jobs and livelihoods that are in the front lines of climate change impacts, to organising new quality jobs in the emerging green economy, to fighting for what we refer to as a “just transition”, so that workers gain and are not left behind when their sectors move to achieve a zero-carbon world. Climate change is clearly an immense challenge for workers and their families globally, but so is the transition. Practical policy solutions and targets that reinforce and go beyond COP21 will be needed.

Make no mistake: climate catastrophes and extreme weather conditions, including cyclones, floods, drought, fires, melting glaciers, season changes, threats to agriculture and more, are increasing and impacting working people everywhere.

In the United States, Hurricane Sandy left 150 000 workers displaced and employment was overall reduced by 11 000 workers in New Jersey alone in 2012. In Bangladesh, Cyclone Sidr disrupted several thousand small businesses and adversely affected 567 000 jobs in 2007. Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in November 2013 affected around 800 000 workers, with their source of livelihood damaged or displaced overnight. The effects of these weather events rippled through international supply chains, affecting workers in other countries.

Over the next 10-15 years, we will face ever more serious impacts across the board, which will destroy whole communities and their jobs, if not their lives. The disruption will be socially and economically destabilising across whole regions, and will be worse than anything we have witnessed so far. That’s what catastrophic climate change means, and unless we prevent it, then decent work, social protection and rights for all will remain an illusion, particularly for the most vulnerable.

Much has been said about the potential for climate action to deliver on job creation. The trade union movement has strongly supported this enthusiastic view. We will certainly see jobs created in renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transport and organic agriculture among others. They may even outnumber those which might be lost in sectors that are not compatible with fighting climate change. The question of their quality (in terms of wages, benefits and working conditions, unions have launched a dedicated organising strategy to ensure that the jobs we consider critical for the future bring gender impact, etc.) remains to be assessed. Still, trade unions have launched a dedicated organising strategy to ensure that the jobs we consider critical for the future bring together the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability.

Leave no one behind

All economic sectors must change. But if there is something we can learn from past economic transitions since the Industrial Revolution, it is that they have been far from fair in terms of social justice. Some might think: then there is no need to do things differently and all should just stay the same. This is a false and dangerous assumption. Governments face opposition to climate action. Often it is from actors with vested interests. Sometimes opposition comes from working people who are afraid of losing their jobs or part of their income. It is an understandable fear. However, it can be addressed and resolved. Trade unions are convinced that a proactive, fair approach to this transition can accelerate change and keep us on course to stay below the 2°C limit. We want to see the transition happen on the ground with investment in skills and lifelong learning, income protection and other social protection measures for workers in sectors hit by climate policies. We believe that dialogue and participation have to be ensured to secure workers’ involvement in the design of future jobs and adequate funding for transforming local economies and communities.

And COP21 in all of this? For the ITUC and TUAC, COP21 must respond adequately to these challenges. An agreement in Paris needs to ensure that country commitments are reviewed through an effective process so that the gap in emission reductions is absorbed fairly and quickly.

COP21 needs to make clear that financing commitments to the most vulnerable countries are not being given away as charity, but are the logical and considered international response to climate change and how it risks both undermining the development progress these countries have made in the last 20 years and hampering their ongoing efforts to achieve prosperity and decent work for all. Finally, COP21 needs to send a political message to workers: not only will governments commit to achieving a zero-carbon world, but they will also commit to a “just transition” for all workers concerned.

These three policy imperatives are still on the negotiating table. The way in which they will be addressed in December will be a crucial indicator in judging the final outcome.

For the labour movement, climate change is a challenge that puts everything we care about at risk. Workers must be fully involved in shaping that “just transition”, in which their rights and prosperity are paramount and where they are able to build and decide their own future. Workers need strong policies on climate. Low climate ambitions would be a social progress killer.