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One of its theorists, Adam Tooze, defines a polycrisis as “not just a situation where you face multiple crises” but one where “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.” As a character in Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock once put it, "the whole world is in a terrible state o' chassis." 

The Ukraine war and the escalating conflict between NATO and Russia, for example, not only threatens nuclear holocaust, it is causing a global food crisis, a financial crisis, trade wars, and also an expansion of climate-destroying fossil fuel burning. The climate crisis, in turn, is generating mass migration, destruction of local environments, beggar-your-neighbor competition between the US and Europe over trade in climate-protecting production, and local environmental destruction that is making major parts of the earth uninhabitable. The touted “World Order” has become a global disorder – indeed a war of all against all that threatens not only humanity but the entire biosphere.

The answer to the polycrisis is human solidarity. People of all kinds around the world have a common interest in warding off climate change, preventing World War III, and countering ruinous injustice. Our responsibility is to force our own governments and corporations to submit to that common interest. We must declare our allegiance to each other, not to those who would divide and destroy us.

By: Bakari Height, LNS Transit Equity Organizer

The Labor Network for Sustainability’s seventh Transit Equity Day will be on Saturday, February 4, 2023 at Noon EST. You can tune into the Livestream on the Transit Equity Network YouTube page. We would love for you to join us.

Our message for Transit Equity Day hasn’t changed. We believe that EVERYONE has a right to a public mass transit system that is:

1. Safe
2. Reliable
3. Environmentally Sustainable
4. Affordable
5. Fair and just for those who don’t own or cannot access a private vehicle
6. Union Strong and Supported
7. Properly Funded by Local, State, and the Federal Government

The Transit Equity Network is made up of many different transit advocates, transit labor unions, and environmental justice groups that want to help public transit become a standard in America and beyond. 

We cannot continue to go year after year through the most heinous natural disasters caused by climate change knowing that changing the way we travel can be a start of a solution to reducing carbon emissions.  Transit Equity Day and the Transit Equity Network aim to do just that. Your action on Transit Equity Day doesn’t have to be huge, it just has to make an impact. 

If you’d like to join this space, please follow our linktree to all of the links for Transit Equity Day 2023 including:

•  Registration page for your Transit Equity Day 2023 Action
• The Transit Equity Network YouTube Page
• The Transit Equity Day Organizing Toolkit
• Social Media Amplification Tools
• Transit Equity Day Presentation PDF

For more information, visit www.labor4sustainability.org/transit-equity-2023

By Maria Brescia-Weiler, LNS Young Workers Project

The Young Worker Listening Project interviewed 70 young workers in all parts of the country about the ways climate change impacts how they do and think about work, and how their work informs their understanding of the climate crisis and potential solutions. They ranged from 16-year-olds who were just starting to think about what kind of work they might do to 35-year-olds with 20 years experience as construction workers, government employees, teachers, and nonprofit workers.

Many young workers shared common trajectories in developing their consciousness around climate change. While most interviewees never received formal education about workers and unions, almost everyone shared memories of learning about climate change as children. Folks talked about recycling and measuring their carbon footprints; watching An Inconvenient Truth; and seeing the news about Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Many of them perceived that the scale of the solutions they were being offered didn’t match the scale of the crises they were witnessing. Learning about climate change through the lens of individual responsibility often led to an understanding that urgent action must be taken – combined with feelings of anxiety and depression and a general sense of paralysis.

Generational consciousness-shaping events came up over and over again: 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; the Great Recession and the Occupy movement; direct action at Standing Rock in 2016, at the Trump Inauguration on J20, in the Youth Climate Strikes, and during the George Floyd uprisings.

Economic and environmental uncertainty have been the backdrop of young workers' entire lives, and they have an intuitive understanding of how deeply linked these issues are to each other, as well as to issues of racial inequality, militarism and imperialism, and gender equity.

This has led many young workers to seek out education about and participation in collective action. They are seeking economic stability, a sense of community, and the opportunity to effect political change, and have realized worker activism and union participation can provide avenues for achieving all of these at once. This is the foundation of a shared and unrelentingly intersectional analysis that has brought many young workers to the Young Worker Project and on which we hope to build deeper coordination for a powerful labor-climate movement.

Image: Photo of Judy Sheridan-Gonzales addressing the LNS regional Convergence in 2018

On January 13, 7,000 nurses at two New York City hospitals returned to work after winning their main priority -- improving working conditions by adding nurses to short-staffed hospital floors where they said crowded conditions had put patients at risk and led to stress and burnout among staff.

The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), which represents more than 42,000 members, said that for nurses at Montefiore, the tentative agreement would include a 19.1 percent wage increase over three years and the creation of more than 170 new nursing positions. Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, a nurse on the negotiating committee at Montefiore and president of NYSNA, said the agreement marked the first time the hospital had agreed to nurse-patient ratios in the emergency department.

The New York State Nurses Association is well known in the LNS network as a powerful advocate for climate protection. Its president Judy Sheridan-Gonzales addressed the Labor Network for Sustainability New York Region Convergence on Labor and Climate. Their 2021 Annual Report stated:

The climate emergency is an existential crisis threatening all of humanity. As healthcare workers, NYSNA members understand the unique challenge facing the nation. They are at the bedside when patients present with respiratory challenges due to pollution or birth defects and infertility linked to fracking. Nurses and other healthcare workers appreciate that there is an ecosystem that supports quality care, and the climate crisis disrupts that system. As such, NYSNA members have been on the frontlines pushing for more aggressive action to save the environment.

A new “Commentary on Solidarity and Survival” by LNS co-founder and senior strategic  advisor Jeremy Brecher lays out the way that states have begun implementing the principles of the Green New Deal.

“The Green New Deal in the States – Part 1” describes how in the last two years there has been a wave of state legislation and executive action that sets and implements new standards for greenhouse gas emissions. States like Hawaii and Illinois have greatly expanded their plans for wind and solar energy and energy efficiency. In most cases these are combined with policies specifically designed to create good quality jobs and to counter inequality.

Read the full commentary here.

You can subscribe to Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! Commentaries on Solidarity and Survival by signing up here.

The Georgia State Conference of the NAACP issued a call for a “safe, vibrant, interconnected, and affordable city and state for all.” Its priorities for the 2023 Georgia legislative session, along with anti-racism, healthcare, education, protection of the rights of women, immigrants, the LGBTQ population, and people of color, emphasized climate change.  

The statement supports “policies to fight climate change and support climate adaptation at a scale and timeline commensurate with the crisis and as justice demands.” It advocates a state goal to be “climate-pollution free by 2030” through policies that “limit and reduce climate pollution”; “increase investments in clean energy, public transit, vehicle, vessel and building electrification”; and “promote energy efficiency.”

Specifics policies include:

•   incentivizing electrification in the transportation and building sectors.
•  reducing the preference for natural gas in the built environment.
• water supply reliability and resiliency post- natural disasters, and in response to climate change
•  solar production incentives
• policies that will reflect the true cost of carbon pollution, rapidly reduce climate polluting emissions, and ensure equity for lower-income communities and communities of color to share in the economic opportunities presented by solutions to climate change.
•  reducing toxic chemicals and other harmful substances in the environment, including regulating lead paint, toxins in children's toys, neonicotinoid pesticides that threaten our food supply by harming bees, building materials, and other and toxic materials in recyclable and compostable products and packaging. 
•  initiatives to reduce waste and increase composting
  

You can review the full legislative agenda here.

Image Source: dusanpetkovic1- stock.adobe.com

Washington, DC plans to eliminate its $2 bus fares in July. It is also considering a monthly subsidy for subway riders.

Kansas City, Missouri is the first major U.S. city to approve a fare-free public transit system. Boston, San Francisco, and Denver are now experimenting with zero fare systems. Zero-fare transit is widely advocated by environmental groups that want to get cars off the road and transit unions that want to allow bus drivers to be socially distanced from riders to protect their health.

The D.C. legislation also provides free bus service for Maryland and Virginia. And it will add a dozen 24-hour bus service lines. The program is affordable in part because Washington fares provide less than 10% of the transit budget.

For more: Zero-fare public transit movement gains momentum

Image Source: madlyinlove- stock.adobe.com

Six hundred fifty thousand young climate activists have said they will continue “protesting in the streets in huge numbers” against fossil fuels.

In a cease-and-desist letter to the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, youth campaigners accuse them of a “direct violation of our human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, your duties of care, as well as the rights of Indigenous people.” This cease-and-desist notice is “to demand that you immediately stop opening any new oil, gas or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need,” the letter says.

The letter came one day after protestors, including youth climate activist Greta Thunberg, were physically removed by German police from a village about to be razed to access a massive coal deposit.

For more:  Climate activists vow to take to streets to stop fossil fuel extraction | Environmental activism | The Guardian

Jessica’s ultimate goal is to do her part to build a strong labor movement capable of taking on the climate crises. She is a founder and chair of her union’s Eco Justice Working Group which is part of a number of local, state wide, and national coalitions committed to ecological action. Jessica helped bring together a group of union educators concerned about climate which today has grown into the LNS-sponsored Educators Climate Action Network coordinating action by hundreds of teachers around the country. 

To learn about Earth Day actions that teachers are planning, sign up here: bit.ly/LNSECAN

Follow Jessica on twitter @Deeplyjessica

Our Mission

To be a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action by building a powerful labor-climate movement to secure an ecologically sustainable and economically just future where everyone can make a living on a living planet.

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