Earth Day

By Gareth Dale - Green European Journal, June 12, 2024

Inspiration for decarbonising industry and creating green jobs is within the hands of those already facing precarity in today’s economically unstable times. A resilient history of workers’ initiatives overcoming redundancies, alongside recent activist, trade-union, and workforce collaborations, provides concrete examples for empowered transitioning.

In 2023, when Europe was blasted by a record-breaking heatwave named after Cerberus (the three-headed hound of Hades), workers organised to demand protection from the extreme heat. In Athens, employees at the Acropolis and other historical sites went on strike for four hours each day. In Rome, refuse collectors threatened to strike if they were forced to work during periods of peak heat. Elsewhere in Italy, public transport workers demanded air-conditioned vehicles, and workers at a battery plant in Abruzzo issued a strike threat in protest at the imposition of working in “asphyxiating heat”. 

One could almost say that the Ancient Greeks foretold today’s climate crisis when they euphemistically referred to Hades, god of the dead, as “Plouton” (giver of wealth). The reference is to the materials – in their day, silver, in ours, fossil fuels and critical minerals – that, after extraction from the Underworld, line the pockets of plutocrats. Modern society’s plutocratic structure explains the astonishingly sluggish response to climate breakdown. The much-touted green transition is barely taking place, at least if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is taken as a yardstick. These continue to rise, even accelerate, and likewise the rate of global heating. The transition remains in the grip of powerful and wealthy institutions that – even if we leave aside motivations of avarice or greed for status – are systemically constrained to put the accumulation of capital above the habitability of the planet.

Against this backdrop, the politics of transition is class struggle beyond that of workers defending themselves and their communities against weather emergencies. That is part of the picture, of course. But class struggle is, above all, evident in the liberal establishment seeking to displace transition costs onto the masses, even as it presides over ever crasser wealth polarisation. From this, resistance inevitably flows. The question is, what form will it take? 

Some takes the form of an anti-environmental backlash, instigated or colonised by conservative and far-right forces. While posing as allies of “working families”, they denigrate the most fundamental of workers’ needs: for a habitable planet. Some takes a progressive form, the classic case being the gilets jaunes in France. When Emmanuel Macron’s government hiked “green taxes” on fossil fuels as a signal for consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars, the rural working poor and lower-middle classes, unable to afford the switch, donned yellow safety vests and rose in revolt. Although France’s labour-movement radicals joined the cause, they were unable to cohere into a political force capable of offering alternative solutions to the social and environmental crises.

By Jon Queally - Common Dreams, April 22, 2023

"As the government continues to fan the flames of the climate and biodiversity crisis it's clear that only a collective effort can put it out," said the head of Greenpeace UK.

Tens of thousands demonstrated with a defiant yet jubilant spirit in London on Saturday to mark the second day of 'The Big One' climate protests aimed at getting the U.K. government to finally take bold action on the planetary emergency of greenhouse gas emissions.

A nonviolent die-in action was held outside Parliament, but the day of demonstration was billed as a "family-friendly" day of action meant to foster inclusion and participation as opposed to disruption or civil disobedience.

By Todd E. Vachon and Ayesha T. Qazi-Lampert - Common Dreams, April 22, 2023

The pathway to a Green New Deal for Education runs through teachers, school leaders, students, and organized communities willing to embrace a bold vision for learning and a more sustainable future.

The Earth is burning, and our schools are crumbling. Investments in healthy, sustainable, green schools can help solve both problems.

As a result of human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, generated primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels, the global climate is now about 1°C (nearly 2°F) warmer than the historical climate in which modern civilization emerged. Every amount of GHG emitted into the atmosphere worsens the global climate crisis, leading to real and increasingly measurable risks to human and ecosystem health, to the economy, and to global security. Predominantly Black and Brown communities and economically disadvantaged communities are at the frontlines of the impacts of the crisis.

At the same time, our nation’s public schools are drastically in need of improvements. According to the Aspen Institute, there are nearly 100,000 public schools in the U.S. They are, on average, 50 years old and emit 78 million metric tons of CO2 per year at an energy cost of about $8 billion annually. Investments in school infrastructure and climate mitigation, including the replacement of outdated and ineffective heating and cooling systems, improvements to ventilation and insulation, the installation of rooftop solar, and the remediation of asbestos, lead, and mold will not only improve the school environment for students and staff, but will also address historical injustices along the lines of race and class. These investments will also contribute to stabilizing the Earth’s climate.

That's why this Earth Week (April 17-22), students, educators, parents, school staff, and community members around the U.S. are taking action to demand healthy, green schools now.

By Johanna Chao Kreilick - Portside, April 22, 2022

Happy Earth Day! I was only four years old when the first Earth Day took place. But as I began to work on climate change, I found it inspiring to look back at the photos from April 1970 and learn about what motivated 20 million people to action—and the impact of public mobilization on policy and practice in the years that followed.

Many of my friends in the climate movement are understandably cynical about what Earth Day has become today—in many ways, it has been reduced to calls for small individual acts (like picking up trash or composting coffee grounds) over the larger systemic changes and solutions that require much harder choices and trade-offs. Some companies have co-opted the day to sell more “environmentally friendly” products, or worse, to provide polluters with an opportunity to greenwash their miserable track records. But as a lifelong student of history and an unbridled optimist, I still find hope and inspiration in its radical roots.

By Joe Uehlein - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 21, 2021

The approach of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 provides us an opportunity to reflect on the “long, strange trip” shared by the environmental movement and the labor movement over four decades here on Spaceship Earth.

A billion people participate in Earth Day events, making it the largest secular civic event in the world. But when it was founded in 1970, according to Earth Day’s first national coordinator Denis Hayes, “Without the UAW, the first Earth Day would have likely flopped!”

Less than a week after he first announced the idea for Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson presented his proposal to the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO. Walter Ruther, President of the UAW, enthusiastically donated $2000 to help kick the effort off ““ to be followed by much more. Hayes recalls:

“The UAW was by far the largest contributor to the first Earth Day, and its support went beyond the merely financial. It printed and mailed all our materials at its expense — even those critical of pollution-belching cars. Its organizers turned out workers in every city where it has a presence. And, of course, Walter then endorsed the Clear Air Act that the Big Four were doing their damnedest to kill or gut.”

Some people may be surprised to learn that a labor union played such a significant role in the emergence of the modern environmental movement. When they think of organized labor, they think of things like support for coal and nuclear power plants and opposition to auto emissions standards.

When it comes to the environment, organized labor has two hearts beating within a single breast. On the one hand, the millions of union members are people and citizens like everybody else, threatened by air and water pollution, dependent of fossil fuels, and threatened by the devastating consequences of climate change. On the other hand, unions are responsible for protecting the jobs of their members, and efforts to protect the environment sometimes may threaten workers’ jobs. First as a working class kid and then as a labor official, I’ve been dealing with the two sides of this question my whole life.