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There are no jobs on a dead planet

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.

The French government told us a big lie, and we believed it

By Jonathan Neale - Global Climate Jobs, December 8, 2015

After the killings in Paris, the government immediately banned all public demonstrations under a state of emergency. They told the climate coalition we could not march. That seemed to make a sort of sense to most people in the climate movement. Isn’t it terrible, we said. But most people in Paris thought they understood why the French government was doing it.

Except, when the Charlie Hebdo killings happened earlier this year, the French government called for a massive demonstration. No one – not one person in the world – suggested that demonstration interfered with security.

And I have been in Paris for a week. This is not a city under martial law, or a state of emergency. Police presence is light – hardly noticeable in most walks of life. In reality only one thing is forbidden in Paris – protesting to save the world’s climate.

The French government did not want a march of 500,000 in Paris on November 29. They saw their chance. They forbade the march. They used the deaths of all those people to stop us trying to save hundreds of millions more. Most of us were sick at heart, and shaken, and some of us were afraid. So they fooled us.

Why did they do that? Because this COP will end with an agreement that will make sure that global emissions rise next year, and in 2017, and in 2018, and in every year until 2030. At the end of the COP on Saturday the French government, the American, the Chinese, and all the rest, plan to trumpet that disaster in triumph across the world. To do that, they had to make sure we were not heard.

The French government have also ordered us not to demonstrate on Saturday at the end of the COP. But we have decided: we will protest together on Saturday in Paris. We hope you will protest or hold vigils – whatever you can do – across the world, to say this is not the end of the planet, we will fight on, in the living hope that we will win.

There will be trade unionists on that demonstration too, for many reasons. But one of them is that the right to free assembly, the right to meet in groups of more than two, the right to protest, is bedrock for trade unionism. Without those rights, working people cannot defend themselves.

Please join us.

COPing out: what will it take to overcome the environmental movement’s impasse?

By Nicholas Beuret - Novara Media, December 4, 2015

The activist part of me is pissed off at the French government for banning the protest marches that planned to target the UN Climate Change conference (known as the COP21) in Paris this December. It would have been amazing to see thousands of people taking to the streets demanding climate justice and breaking the stale grey commentary surrounding international climate change politics. That bit of me hopes the protests still go ahead.

But another part of me hopes no one turns up at all, and is actually glad the marches won’t happen. Not out of despair, or in some sneering ultra-left sense, but because the environmental movement is stuck and protests like the ones planned for the COP are part of the reason for the current impasse. I hope people don’t turn up because, in the end, spectacular protests such as these are making things worse.

Despite 20 years of activism…

We are heading towards a 3-4C global temperature rise. Despite creative actions, grassroots climate movements and committed NGO campaigns (and even some government action) climate change hasn’t been stopped. Sure enough, we shouldn’t dismiss what has been achieved. That climate change might be limited to 3-4C is actually an achievement, which has happened largely due to the campaigns of environmentalists and the emergence of a strong public belief that climate change has to be tackled by governments. But it’s not enough, not by a long shot. It is not enough according to the standards governments, scientists and activists hold themselves to. A 3-4C rise in global temperatures is actually disastrously bad.

The red line many in the climate movement have been pushing is a maximum increase of no more than 2C – a rise which is possibly too dangerous already. The maths of staying below 2C relies on global emissions peaking this year. What is becoming increasingly clear is that it is probably too late to stay below a 2C rise in global temperatures.

Despite 20 years of activism climate politics is stuck. Climate change is a problem so big, so complicated (everything has to change) and so urgent (it has to happen now, now, now) that for the most part the environmental movement finds itself with few options for action. Because climate change means changing everything, any progress on a small, local or even regional scale feels inadequate. Because it’s so complicated it seems resistant to democratic politics – just imagine what it is going to take to get everyone to agree on how we are going to solve the problem, even on a local scale. Because it’s so urgent there is no time for negotiating with people, a third of whom don’t think climate change is all that serious anyway. It is for all these messy, difficult reasons that climate change protests take the form of mass spectacular actions like the ones planned for the Paris COP21.

The COP21 protest isn’t so different to the actions that happened at COP15 in 2009, or any of the ones before that. It’s also not so different from Climate Camp or, going further back, most of the summit protests of the anti-globalisation movement. In each case you had a symbol of a global problem around which people could mobilise, and in each case you had no real opportunity to affect the thing being protested against. What happened in each case – and what will continue to happen – is what we could call ‘militant lobbying’. These actions were/are stunts intending to put pressure on governments to act, even when carried out in the name of anti-state politics or anti-authoritarian practice. They can’t be anything else.

While they are almost always billed as direct actions, what makes an action ‘direct’ is its capacity to disrupt or stop something without recourse to some other power. A useful example would be the anti-roads movement in the UK. The government of the day had scheduled a massive programme of road construction, often through existing neighbourhoods or woods. People banded together to form local campaigns against the specific roads, and created a number of action camps which physically blocked road construction. One by one the camps fell, but not before costing the government large sums of money and slowing the project down immensely. In the end the disruption became too much and the government cancelled most of the programme.

We can contrast the anti-roads movement with the planned actions at COP21. In Paris, at best they will block some delegates from leaving a meeting that will have concluded, the content of which will have largely been decided over the prior months of negotiations. Which means the planned protests won’t affect the outcome, and won’t affect climate change in any way directly either. The action is and can only be intended to put pressure on governments to make a stronger agreement. But then, given the scale, complexity and urgency of climate change, who else could possibly deal with it as an issue?

At Paris Trade Union Forum: A call to ban fracking worldwide

By Blake Deppe - People's World, December 4, 2015

PARIS -- In the Climate Generations event area here at COP 21, the Trade Union Forum on Climate and Jobs presented on Dec. 3 an event called Resisting Extreme Extraction. Labor organizations including the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), the Argentine Workers' Central Union (CTA), and the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) addressed the audience with a clear declaration: that fracking, in every country and every part of the world, has got to go.

These organizations are part of the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, an initiative coordinated by the International Program for Labor, Climate and Environment (IPLCE). Their call for a global moratorium on the harmful natural gas extraction process is bolstered by the findings of Robert Howarth, the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University. He published his findings about the disastrous effects of fracking in an article titled A bridge to nowhere: methane emissions and the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas, and shared them at COP 21.

"Natural gas is widely promoted as a 'bridge fuel,' " Howarth said, referencing the publication. "It is said that it allows continued use of fossil fuels while reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared to oil or coal. And since 2009, over 40 percent of natural gas has come from shale gas, which is such a driver for climate change, because of methane. Most climate scientists, in their studies, are focusing on carbon, but methane is 120 times more powerful while both gases are in the atmosphere."

He explained that carbon, of course, is the larger instigator behind climate change, as there is more of it in the atmosphere, but in terms of actually slowing global warming, there is a key difference between the two. "Because of its long residence time," he said, "reductions in carbon emissions can only slowly change the atmospheric concentration." On the other hand, "methane emissions reductions lead to almost immediate reductions in atmospheric concentration. If we cut methane emissions today, we could really slow warming and prevent the [planet] from exceeding that two degree mark."

What Howarth is referring to is the very goal of COP 21: to avert a planetary warming of two degrees Celsius. This is a slightly more realistic ambition - in comparison with last year's climate conference in Copenhagen, which sought to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming - and one based on assessments made on global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But curbing that methane output can best be done by putting an end to fracking, and increased transparency, based on recent studies not funded by the fossil fuel industry, is shifting public opinion on this false 'energy alternative.' "There have been about 32 new research papers published on fracking recently," said Hogarth. This, he conveyed, provides an excellent counterbalance to the problematic studies carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Environmental Defense Fund, with the latter in particular notorious for its biased and industry-collaborative approach. He said that both the agency and the EDF "misuse their instruments during their studies, and thus draw unrealistic conclusions about fracking. The truth is, it is globally warming the planet today."

COP21: How to Ramp Down Fossil Fuels Fast—Without Leaving People Behind

By Kate Aronoff - Yes! Magazine, December 4, 2015

In just a few months at the beginning of WWII, the U.S. auto industry converted to a war machine. We need that kind of rapid, driven transition to get away from fossil fuels. Here's the just way to do it.

Throw a stick at COP 21 and you’re likely to hit something bearing the word “renewable,” written in one language or another. The expansive Climate Generations Area, an official portion of the La Bourget compound open to the general public, is somewhere between an Ikea and a high-production-value science fair. Flanked by booths hosted by a spread of global organizations—from the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance to the Surfrider Foundation—the conference center is full of corporate-sponsored solutions and borderline gimmicky items like bike-powered “power stations” for charging cell phones.

But how can those following the talks start to parse out genuine from greenwashed solutions at COP21? At the Trade Union Forum on Climate and Jobs on Dec. 3, an unlikely international group of greens—trade unionists—came together to make their pitch for one option: energy democracy.

The concept of energy democracy is rooted in calls for democratic rights, a well-funded public sphere, and renewable energy. According to the International Labor Organization, a just transition away from fossil fuels and toward a greener economy means the process must include all stakeholders: The inevitable impacts on society and jobs must be shared by all of us. 

Peter Knowlton, general president of the United Electrical Workers (UE) and a veteran of the anti-nuclear movement, likened the coming transition away from fossil fuels to the periods before and after the Second World War.

“When the U.S. entered into the war, within a period of three months they had completely transformed the auto industry into a war machine,” he said, noting that just 150 cars were produced in the United States from 1942 through 1945. “An entire industry was transformed overnight, from one of producing peacetime vehicles into a war machine. From our perspective, this is the kind of effort that is going to be required in the United States and elsewhere in order to save ourselves from ourselves.”

Nurses join with partner environmental groups to demand climate justice now

Press Release - National Nurses United, December 3, 2015

More than 1,200 California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee registered nurses, environmental and healthcare activists, and students on Dec. 3 marched and rallied in Los Angeles to demand that the world’s leaders, now convening in Paris for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, adopt a binding and enforceable climate treaty, commit resources to fund the transformation to clean, renewable energy including a just transition program for those who now work in the fossil fuel industry, and call on wealthy, developed countries to provide resources for the less-developed countries to act on climate, with funding coming from a carbon tax and the Robin Hood tax.

“I’m a registered nurse and our planet is my patient, and it is on life support,” said Malinda Markowitz, RN and a CNA/NNOC copresident and vice-president of National Nurses United, to the crowd assembled in downtown Los Angeles’ Pershing Square. “As nurses, we see the health consequences from the effects of pollution created by fossil fuels. We deal with the human fallout of climate injustice. Enough is enough. As nurses we know we must respond by giving care and by protest, protest, protest! We will never stop protesting.”

In a march leading up to the rally, nurses chanted “No more Chevron, No BP! Energy democracy!” and “Hey hey! Ho ho! Fossil fuel has got to go!” As they crossed the 110 freeway, they dropped a banner from the overpass that read, “Last exit ahead. Climate action now!” to underscore how dire the crisis has become.

The public health dimensions of the global climate crisis are extensive and far-reaching, nurses say. According to the World Health Organization, more than 8 million deaths worldwide are directly attributable to air pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels and lack of access to clean energy. Infectious and vector-born diseases, such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and Lyme, will spike as temperatures increase. Further global warming and climate change will magnify the already catastrophic health impacts of: fossil fuel pollution, hunger and malnutrition due to desertification and devastation and displacement from severe weather events and sea level rise.

At COP21, unions sow the seeds of labor to yield green jobs

By Blake Deppe - People's World, December 3, 2015

Photo: Left to right - Clara Paillard, Tony Clark, Andreas Ytterstad. | Blake Deppe/PW

PARIS: As the UN Climate Conference (COP 21) continues, the Trade Union Forum on Climate and Jobs debuted today at Climate Generations. Trade unions gathered with their allies and with one another to discuss the ever-looming dark cloud that is climate change, and how to find a silver lining within it, by creating clean jobs that sustain the labor movement and reduce or eliminate harm to the environment. While that's no easy task and there's a long road ahead for workers and activists, labor leaders presented real plans and logical solutions.

The key word today was "transition," and the ensuing question was, how do workers prepare for the adjustments that will have to be made as the world moves away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy? It was a question that had to be asked, and the Trade Union Forum, an event that began today and which will last through Dec. 7, did just that. First posing that query were members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who shared an assessment report based on their research to reaffirm, once again, that climate change is a real and portentous threat.

Sustainable future a prerequisite for progress

"Climate change is real. The consensus on this is stronger than the consensus that smoking causes cancer," said Jonathan Lynn, head of communications and media relations for the IPCC. "World public opinion has shifted and there is now a greater understanding of this. So a pathway for a sustainable future is a prerequisite for progress. We have to have greener jobs, but at the same time, they have to be unionized and made available to those who become displaced from other work. But we've pissed away a lot of the time we had, and now our window to do this is closing. Unfortunately, there's a lot of money to be made in destroying the planet. Companies like Exxon or people like the Koch Brothers will not deliver a sustainable future."

On the other hand, those who possibly can bring about such a future took center stage as the next phase of the forum, Climate Jobs Now, began. Here, union leaders spoke about the One Million Climate Jobs Campaign, organized by the Campaign Against Climate Change trade union group and supported by eight national unions. Its goal is to create one million green jobs, which would help shift the energy industry to one based on renewables and clean alternatives and which could kick-start the economy.

Breaking the Climate Mold: Fighting for the Planet and Justice

By Ahmad Gaya - CounterPunch, November 30, 2015

Image: Shutterstock

In the past two years, the way the climate movement talks about itself has changed dramatically. Seemingly overnight, there are no more ‘climate activists’, and everyone is a ‘Climate Justice’ campaigner. Mainstream environmental groups issued statements of solidarity with Ferguson and Baltimore and the blogosphere is filled with articles patiently explaining how global warming connects to struggles for racial, economic and migrant justice.

As a South Asian organizer who has called the environmental movement home for a decade, I’m happy to see this shift. Fifteen years ago the idea of Climate Justice was posed as a challenge to the corporate solutions pushed by ‘big green’ groups in international negotiations. The fact that those same groups are adopting our language and analysis shows real progress.

But rhetoric and analysis is not enough. While the speakers and rally photo-ops have changed, I still find myself and other people of color in the movement speaking to nearly all-white crowds. Big green groups that have “Climate Justice” campaigns can be found pushing cap and trade and other corporate policies that the Climate Justice movement was birthed to oppose. I still find myself in meetings where people go around in circles asking “how do we make this movement/event/group more diverse” or “where are all the brown people?”

The answer to that question is simple if you look around. People of color in the United States are engaged in some of the boldest, most aggressive movements for survival and liberation in recent memory. Black people are rising up against systemic oppression and a violent police state in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere; Indigenous peoples are blocking trains and freeways under the banner of Idle No More; low-income people of color are leading the fight for a just economy; and undocumented people are putting themselves at extreme risk blocking deportation buses, occupying offices and even publicly crossing the border.

More than ever we need a thriving climate justice movement. But it can’t be committed to justice in name only. Enough statements of solidarity have been written. It’s time for us to get into the streets, take action and make real sacrifices for these struggles.

Last May, Rising Tide North America issued a challenge to the movement. We called for people to ‘Flood the System’ with blockades, occupations and mass civil disobedience. We challenged groups to move beyond the narrow frame of organizing against fossil fuel infrastructure, and engage in direct action at police stations, prisons, I.C.E. offices, detention centers and banks. We asked climate activists to find the intersections of our struggles–focusing on the logic of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and extractive economies that creates all our crises–instead of merely inviting our allies into the climate fight.

It’s our belief that one of the best ways to show our commitment to the intersection of struggles is by putting our bodies into the gears that drive oppression.

Climate change and the summit smokescreen

Ian Angus interviewed by Phil Gasper - Socialist Worker, December 2, 2015 (this article also appeared on Climate and Capitalism)

President Barack Obama joined world leaders at the UN climate summit--officially called the 21st Congress of the Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP 21--in Paris this week, and promised to work for an "ambitious" agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. But climate justice activists who are trying to put forward an alternative vision--in spite of a ban on protests by the French government after the November 13 terror attacks--say that much more is needed than the leaders of the world's most powerful governments are willing to consider.

Ian Angus is a Canadian activist, editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate and Capitalism and co-author of Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis. He talked to Phil Gasper about what to expect from the Paris summit and what the climate justice movement will need to take up next.

THE COP 21 talks are starting in Paris. What can we expect from these? Is there any chance there will be a significant agreement that comes out of them?

MY GUESS is that they will try to produce something that looks better than the Copenhagen accord, and there's a good chance that they'll succeed. The real issue is whether the agreement means much in practice.

All of the major countries have announced targets for emissions reductions. But as many people have pointed out, first of all, even if every single one of those targets is achieved--and we know we won't be--the temperature increase will still be way over two degrees Celsius. In addition, most of the countries that have put in those submissions haven't actually made concrete plans to do anything. They've announced goals, but there's no program for achieving them.

It remains to be seen whether anything serious is adopted. I don't think we will get mandatory reductions--that seems extremely unlikely. And of course, there's always the possibility that the whole thing could blow up, but that also seems unlikely. I think Obama wants to get something at this point in his career, so I suspect we will get good theater and something that looks okay on paper, and not much will happen as a result.

WHY IS it so difficult for them to come up with a serious proposal that will actually make a difference to the climate situation?

FUNDAMENTALLY, GOVERNMENT negotiators say "we'll reduce emissions," but they don't say "we will reduce our use of fossil fuels," which is what they must do to reduce emissions seriously and long term.

Fossil fuels are so fundamental to the operation of capitalism and the world today that serious reductions, if they were even tried under capitalism, would lead to a period of extraordinary economic disruption. Entire industries would have to stop functioning while they retool, and other industries would just have to disappear.

The only time we've had significant reductions in emissions in a major country was after the break-up of the Soviet Union, when the economy of Russia collapsed. And even that didn't produce the level of emissions reductions we'd like to see. So the difficulty in reaching agreement is, ultimately, that they aren't willing to reorient their economies away from fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are embedded in the way capitalism works.

#ClimateChange and the fight for #ClimateJobs

By the Admin - A Green Trade Unionist in Bristol, December 1, 2015

Author's Note: This is a talk I prepared for a NEON (the New Economy Organising Network) event to prepare for Bristol Climate March:

Climate change as we know is the most serious long-term challenge facing both our society, and our planet in general.  We are on the verge of reaching the point of no return, the tipping point beyond which catastrophic warming of the planet will be unavoidable, and the habitability of our world serverely undermined.

But as well as a challenge of almost unimaginable horror, climate change is also an opportunity.  As Naomi Klein has recently persuasively argued Climate Change can provide movements for social and environmental justice with a ‘collective lens’, a shared conceptual framework, sense of purpose and set of arguments for moving beyond the extreme Free-Market Capitalism (conventionally labelled NeoLiberalism) that is so impoverishing both our planet and our communities.

For decades the arguments of the alter-globalisation movement – that Free Market fundamentalism was causing spiralling inequality and social stratification – have fallen on death ears.  We now know those exact same policies have greatly exacerbated our excessive consumption of resources and our output of greenhouse gases, endangering life as we know it.

It also presents an opportunity in terms practice solutions it requires.  I don’t want to understand the scale of the problem and the response it needs.  To do our part in preventing catastrophic climate change the few decades we have left to actually do something about it, we need to rapidly transition to a zero-carbon economy.  Tinkering around the edges with carbon trading, taxes and offsetting just won’t cut it.

The amount of carbon already in the atmosphere means that even if we stopped polluting tomorrow we’ve still locked in considerable warming, we have to act now to prevent temperature rises above 2 degrees (which would have extreme consequences across the world).

We need to cut CO2 emissions by around 75-80%.
We can achieve this if we cut our energy usage by half (very achievable with an aggressive program of energy efficiency and home insulation – Britain has the worst insulated homes in Europe, which contribute to an estimated 20,000 death every winter, as well as huge amounts of wasted energy) and supply at least half of that energy from renewable sources.

This will mean the end of many jobs in polluting and fossil fuel dependent industries (an estimated 350,000).  But it will also require millions of new jobs in building new infrastructure, renewable energy, home insulation, public transport and energy efficiency.  The Campaign Against Climate Change, have created a rough blueprint laying out how this might happen.  They estimate that nationally we need to create 1 Million Climate Jobs to do all this work.

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