renewable energy

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, June 26, 2024

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 Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, June 5, 2024

By Caroline Drischel, Todd Smith, Nidhi Pant, Rachael Ross, and Hannah Boomgaarden - Safe Landing, May 20, 2024

By Anthony F. Pipa - The Brookings Institution, May 14, 2024

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By Isabella Pimentel Pincelli, Jim Hinkley, and Alan Brent - Royal Society of New Zealand, May 14, 2024

In recognition of deeper insights into the implications of wind farm deployments, this paper addresses the need for an updated Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for onshore wind generation systems, using 4.3 MW wind turbines and direct drive permanent magnet synchronous generators. The environmental and energy performances were estimated through an LCA for an onshore wind plant under construction in Aotearoa New Zealand with a total nameplate capacity of 176 MW. This study used real construction data showing literature data overestimates civil works and underestimates transportation contributions in the wind farm footprint. Further, different end-of-life management alternatives for turbine blades are analysed: landfill, mechanical recycling, and chemical recycling. The results indicate a carbon footprint of 10.8–9.7 gCO_2eq/kWh, a greenhouse gas payback time of 1.5–1.7 years for avoided combined cycle gas turbines, and an energy payback time of 0.4–0.5 years, in which the chemical recycling of the blades is the lower emission solution overall. The outcomes underscore the environmental efficiency of onshore wind farms and their important role in the energy transition. Notably, the manufacturing of wind turbines is the primary contributor to the carbon and energy footprints, highlighting a critical area for targeted environmental mitigation strategies.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Finlay Asher - Safe Landing, May 9, 2024

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 30, 2024

For two years, the GKN auto parts plant in Florence, Italy, has been occupied by laid-off workers. In late March, thousands of people from all over Italy marched in solidarity with workers from the plant. The call for the March 25 demonstration was signed by hundreds of organizations.

The workers issued a plan for “reindustrialization from below” with reconversion toward sustainable mobility and renewable energy. A Reindustrialization Group has identified the skills of the workers, mapped the factory’s layout, and inventoried its machinery and infrastructure. It is now seeking projects to make use of their machinery and skills. The workers are negotiating with a company that specializes in clean energy production to explore the possibility of producing cutting-edge photovoltaic panels and batteries at the plant. Meanwhile, an “Ex GKN for Future” crowdfunding campaign is laying the groundwork for a future based on “popular shareholding.” It raised nearly 60,000 Euros in the first two weeks – anyone can invest.

To learn more: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/italy-gkn-factory-occupation-transform-production-workers-jobs-climate-change

For the crowdfunding campaign portal (in English, French, German, and Spanish, and Italian): https://www.produzionidalbasso.com/project/gkn-for-future/

By Sabrina Fernandes, Hamza Hamouchene, Miriam Lang, and John Feffer - Institute for Policy Studies, April 21, 2024

By Clara P, Lorenzo Feltrin, Dario Salvetti, Sara, et. al. - Climate Justice Coalition, April 3, 2024