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I’m reminded of the Copenhagen climate summit more than a decade ago, which was heralded as the most important gathering in modern history, but which ended in collapse–an utter failure to reach a binding agreement to reduce fossil fuel emissions. It was preceded by the failure of the U.S. to pass climate protection legislation. The past decade of escalating climate catastrophe was the consequence of these failures.

It is unlikely, however, that Glasgow will be followed by the same kind of climate inertia as followed Copenhagen. Scientists are expressing “the utmost alarm about the state of our climate system.” And the effects of climate change are affecting people’s daily lives. Young people in particular see climate inaction turning their futures to rubbish. It is no surprise that they are responding with a new wave of global youth climate strikes. As Greta Thunberg put it, “If we want to ensure a safe present and future on planet earth we need to be active democratic citizens and go out on the streets like we are doing today.” Sky News, September 24, 2021.

Indeed, Washington, D.C. has just seen the largest climate mobilization and civil disobedience action in years, with 655 people arrested in People vs. Fossil Fuels. Even if world leaders in Glasgow and the U.S. Congress agree to serious climate protection targets, it will take a powerful popular pressure to force them to realize those commitments.

The American labor movement will be a crucial arena for that struggle. As two veteran labor leaders recently put it, if the labor movement does not take the lead in pushing for a fair and just transition, either the world will fail to make the transition to renewable energy and scorch us all, or the working class will once again be forced to make all of the sacrifices in the transition. Fortunately, a growing number of unions are developing concrete plans to cut fossil-fuel emissions while protecting and expanding good jobs. As California oil refinery worker Norman Rogers recently wrote, “We can create good new jobs for fossil fuel workers and others by investing in California’s climate goals.”

Glasgow and Build Back Better are not the end of the struggle for a climate transformation that creates jobs and expands justice. They are just the beginning.

Photo: From Transit Equity Day 2019, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 443 President/Business Agent Veronica Chavers (center), pictured with former Stamford, Conn. Mayor David Martin (to the left). President Chavers was one of the first local union leaders to host a Transit Equity Day event that included reserving a seat for Rosa Parks and hosting an educational event/reception aboard one of her local's buses.

Join us on Friday, Feb. 4, 2022, Rosa Parks’ birthday, as we Educate. Agitate. Organize. and recognize transit equity as a civil right.

This year, while a global pandemic persists, transit workers continue to struggle for hazard pay and safe working conditions, riders deal with lack of access and transit agencies have not hired back to pre-COVID levels, we will organize toward: Getting Transit on Track for Our Future.

Ready to hop on board? Click below to learn more and get started:

• History of Transit Equity Day
• What you can do right now
• Register your action
• Sponsor Transit Equity Day
• Tips for Local Unions
• Draft Resolution

We will also:

• Debut brand new videos capturing highlights from the Community Hearing on Transit Equity, which you can use for your own Transit Equity Day outreach
• Talk about our goals both locally and federally for the upcoming TED
• Provide an overview of the TED organizing toolkit
• Offer tools for digital amplification

We look forward to seeing all of you! Register here.

Photo Credit: "Lost Hills Oil Fields" by www78 is licensed with CC BY-NC 2.0. View a copy of this license.

by Norman Rogers, United Steelworkers Local 675

I’ve worked at a Los Angeles oil refinery for over 22 years as a member of United Steelworkers Local 675. USW represents thousands of workers across Los Angeles, Kern and Contra Costa counties who run refineries, oil wells, pipelines and terminals.

As California pursues our goal of cutting emissions 40% by 2030, the resulting closure of the oil and gas industry means about 37,000 fossil fuel workers will need reemployment, while an additional 20,000 workers or so will voluntarily retire in the next nine years.

California needs to establish an Equitable Transition Fund for fossil fuel workers covering wage replacement, income and pension guarantees, healthcare benefits, relocation and peer counseling for professional and personal support. It should also provide access to education and training for existing and future jobs that are safe and healthy. California also needs to account for the funding gaps communities face when their tax bases shrink, so schools and libraries can stay open.

We can create good new jobs for fossil fuel workers and others by investing in California’s climate goals. USW Local 675 was one of 20 unions, including three fossil fuel unions, that endorsed the California Climate Jobs Plan, a study published in June and led by economist Robert Pollin.

With money from California’s budget, federal funds, bonds and new revenue sources, the plan outlines $70 billion of public investments annually in safety net programs as well as renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, infrastructure upgrades and ecological agriculture. The goal is to reduce emissions and create 1 million new jobs in California by 2030.

–Excerpted from "If our oil jobs are ending, we need safety nets and good replacement work," Los Angeles Times, Oct. 23, 2021 

Photo: From IUE-CWA on Facebook.

A group of unions, environmentalists, veterans and activists have launched a campaign calling on General Electric to cease their offshoring jobs from the U.S. and make large investments in manufacturing renewable and green energy infrastructure to address the climate crisis.

The group, called the “The Bring It Home GE Campaign,” is led by the IUE-CWA, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and Common Defense. According to Chris Shelton, president of the Communications Workers of America, which represents thousands of GE workers in the US through its IUE-CWA industrial division, 

GE is an iconic American company. Everybody still thinks that it is an American company, but gradually it left America behind by offshoring thousands of good, family-supporting, union manufacturing jobs, and left behind empty factories and hollowed out towns all over the country. Our campaign is about telling the stories of the towns that got hollowed out, and the workers that no longer work in GE plants.

Photo: Sunrise Movement Ohio emphasizing the importance of expanding transit with renewable energy as a means to shift to a Green New Deal. Credit: Paul Becker, CC BY 2.0.

Two veteran labor leaders recently penned an Op-Ed declaring that “Climate Justice Must Be a Top Priority for Labor.” John Braxton, past co-president of American Federation of Teachers Local 2026 in Philadelphia, and Peter Knowlton, retired General President of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), write in Labor Notes:

Today’s existential crisis for humanity is the immediate need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. All of us have to. Everywhere. For workers and for our communities there is no more pressing matter than this.

We need to begin a discussion among co-workers, creating demands and acting on them at the workplace and bargaining table. We need to show up at local union meetings, central labor councils, and town halls supporting demands that move us toward a fossil fuel-free future.

At the same time, we need to protect the incomes and benefits of workers affected by the transition off of fossil fuels and to make sure they have real training opportunities. And we need to restore and elevate those communities that have been sacrificed for fossil fuel extraction, production, and distribution. We should promote candidates for elected office who support legislation which puts those aspirations into practice, such as the Green New Deal.

If the labor movement does not take the lead in pushing for a fair and just transition, one of these futures awaits us: (1) the world will either fail to make the transition to renewable energy and scorch us all, or (2) the working class will once again be forced to make all of the sacrifices in the transition. 

Read the full Op-Ed.

Photo Credit: "Divest From Fossil Fuel," Overpass Light Brigade, CC BY-NC 2.0.

With an open letter expressing "the utmost alarm about the state of our climate system," over 330 scientists on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and swiftly put an end to a fossil fuel-based energy system.

According to a summary, the letter presents a three-step action plan. It begins with a full ban on any new fossil-fuel leasing and extraction on public lands and waters; no future permits for related infrastructure; and ending fossil-fuel exports and subsidies. It calls for declaration of a climate emergency with a substantial redirection of military spending to renewable energy projects and reinstatement of the ban on crude oil exports. And it urges rejection of carbon capture and storage and other schemes that the scientists frame as "delay tactics" that ultimately "impede the rapid transition to renewable energy." 

Photo Credit: Shadia Fayne Wood, Survival Media Agency, Oct. 11, 2021, Washington, D.C.

October’s People vs. Fossil Fuels week of action in Washington, D.C. saw six hundred and fifty-five people arrested in acts of civil disobedience demanding that President Biden uphold his commitments to climate action and environmental justice. The actions were led by Indigenous and community leaders from the front lines of fossil fuel pollution and climate chaos.

• People vs. Fossil Fuels video recap
• See incredible photos from Survival Media Agency
• "Indigenous activists come to D.C. with a message for Biden: Declare a national climate emergency," The Washington Post, Oct. 11, 2021

Above: This graphic has been floating around the Internet in preparation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) taking place this week in Glasgow, Scotland. "Net Zero" is expected to a buzz term that will be challenged by climate and just transition advocates.

More than 354 organizations released a statement recently calling “net-zero” emission pledges by corporations and governments a dangerous distraction from real climate action. Commenting on the statement evaluating the deceptive language of “net zero” carbon emissions, Joe Uehlein, President of Labor Network for Sustainability, said:

“Net-zero is the language of the fossil fuel industry and provides for the continuing extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Net-zero supplements equally dangerous carbon capture technologies that have the same goal. Over 300 scientists just wrote to President Biden urging that we get off fossil fuels right now. Net-zero is not the way to accomplish that task."

For more, check out "What Corporations and Governments Mean by “Net-Zero.”

It’s a largely untold story: During the COVID-19 pandemic millions of people struck, helped each other survive through mutual aid, held rent strikes, walked off the job for black lives, and fought to keep their schools and workplaces COVID-safe.

Now their story is told in the new mini-book by Labor Network for Sustainability: Don’t Starve – Fight: People Power in the Coronavirus Pandemic. 

COVID-19 and its economic effect brought hardship, but it also brought resistance to hardship.

• Unemployed organizing
• Mutual aid
• Rent strikes
• Health strikes
• Strikes for black lives matter
• Strikes for safe schools

And other forms of “people power.” 

Now, as the pandemic grinds on and emergency relief support runs out, we need to know this history to prepare us for the next phase of the struggle against devastating hardship.

Pandemic hardship is still here. A survey published Oct. 12 found that nearly forty percent of U.S. households have faced serious financial problems, including struggling to afford medical care and food in the last few months. Sixty percent of households with incomes under $50,000 reported serious financial problems and nearly a third had lost all their savings.

Don’t Starve–Fight not only tells the story of people power action in the COVID-19 Depression, it puts this story in a wide historical context–the struggles of working people during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And it draws lessons for the hardships working people are facing ahead.

COSHCON2021 is a one-of-a-kind event that brings together workers, unions, occupational health and safety experts, worker centers and other activists to learn about and organize critical labor and environmental health and safety issues. 

Workers who attend COSHCON gain crucial skills and contacts for organizing to build power on the job. Participants are inspired by speakers such as Sara Nelson and Dr. Linda Rae Murray and can hear directly from essential workers about topics such as successful COVID protection campaigns or how the fight for climate justice is a labor-justice issue.

National COSH brings together experts in workplace safety AND long-time organizers so that participants learn the crucial facts about workplace illnesses and injuries but also what workers’ specific rights are in the workplace and how to exert those rights to create the change needed to make workplaces healthier while protecting the planet. We hope to see you there.

Labor Network for Sustainability stalwarts Dimitris Stevis and Todd Vachon have just helped edit and write the just-published Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. LNS Founder and President Joe Uehlein writes,

“In order to win the fight to address our manifold sustainability challenges we need the labor and environmental movements to come up out of their silos and work together. The editors have offered a pathway for a greater confluence of these movements in this first Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. They have assembled a great group of authors who explore the pitfalls and possibilities and show us how we can expand the boundaries of our movements and begin to take down the forces that keep us apart. So long as humanity views the planet as something for us to dominate, we will continue to destroy it. When we realize that living in harmony with nature is first and foremost, then we can begin to repair the damage we’ve done.”

Sydney started a national climate-focused working group within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and worked successfully toward establishing climate as a national priority for the organization. As a steering member of DSA’s national Green New Deal campaign committee, Sydney co-led DSA’s campaign to pass the PRO Act. This campaign–born from an analysis of the centrality of worker power in winning a Green New Deal and a truly just transition–is credited with winning support from two holdout Senators through the million+ calls DSA made through phone banks, nationwide actions, and coalition building with unions.

Sydney currently serves as a member of DSA’s National Political Committee and is the DSA representative on the board of the Worker Power Coalition, a coalition of union and progressive organizations dedicated to passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and winning power for working people everywhere. Additionally, Sydney serves on the board of The Trouble magazine.

Making a Living on a Living Planet is published by the Labor Network for Sustainability: