350 Wenatchee Climate Conversations NCW

While paying lip service to climate protection, Washington has signed off on huge expansions of fossil fuel extraction on Federal lands in the Gulf and Alaska. And it is providing huge subsidies for new, so-far-failing technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen that may actually expand the burning of fossil fuels.

The extent of the fossil fuel reductions we need has been laid out by climate scientists. Specific goals have been agreed to in the Paris Agreement. Targets and timetables for U.S. greenhouse gas reduction have been laid out by the Biden administration. How should we determine what means to use to reach those targets?

The Labor Network for Sustainability is dedicated to developing strategies for climate protection for workers and their communities. We believe that the use of alternative technologies should be determined by scientific evaluation of their full costs and benefits for workers and society. Those include health, safety, environmental, employment, waste disposal, and other social costs and benefits while effectively meeting the targets and timetables necessary to protect the climate. Any technology should be used if and only if it provides a means of protecting the climate that is more beneficial to society than other means, such as renewable energy and energy efficiency.

The following principles should guide the selection of strategies and technologies for climate protection:

• The climate emergency requires an emergency response that reduces GHG emissions at a rate of 6 percent annually starting immediately. Any climate protection plan must include immediate implementation of such reductions.
• Any strategy must be based on scientific evaluation of means and likely effects.
• All impacts, including health, safety, environmental, employment, waste disposal,  and other social costs and benefits, must be included in evaluation.
• Costs and benefits must be compared for different strategies and technologies.
•  Employment benefits should be evaluated for contribution to creating good jobs for all.

These principles should be applied to all climate protection technologies, including renewable energy, energy efficiency, nuclear energy, carbon capture – and allegedly “clean” fossil fuels.

For workers and communities being asked to back hazardous projects with unproven technologies, we offer this word of advice:

Don’t be afraid to ask whether the programs you are being asked to support actually meet the criteria you need.

The New York State legislature has just passed the Build Public Renewables Act with support of unions representing a million New York workers. The Act authorizes the New York Power Authority – the largest state-owned power company in the US –to start investing in renewable energy. It requires that all state-owned properties that ordinarily receive power from the New York Power Authority (NYPA) are run on renewable energy by 2030. It also requires municipally owned facilities like hospitals, schools, public housing, and public transit to convert completely to renewable energy by 2035.

Labor protections written by the state’s AFL-CIO preserve existing collective bargaining agreements for New York Power Authority workers and require collective bargaining agreements for all projects. Contractors and subcontractors are required to pay prevailing wages. Employers must sign a memorandum of understanding with labor unions to uphold and protect pay rates, training, and safety standards for workers supporting the operation and maintenance of such projects. Job applicants who have lost employment in the oil and gas sector will be prioritized for those positions. The Authority will allocate up to $25 million each year toward worker-training programs for the renewable energy sector through a newly created Office of Just Transition.

The Act establishes a program allowing low- and moderate-income electricity customers in disadvantaged communities to receive credits on their monthly utility bills for any renewable energy produced by the power authority.  It also accelerates the closing of six highly polluting “peaker plants” in Queens, the Bronx, and  Harlem, which have some of the highest asthma-related death rates in the country.

For more information:

• New Republic: “Green New Deal Advocates Just Won Big in New York. Here’s How They Did It.”
• Truthout: “4 Years of Organizing Paid Off: New York Says Yes to Publicly Owned Renewables”
• The Guardian: “New York takes big step toward renewable energy in ‘historic’ climate win”
• DSA: A short video capturing this historic win

Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the original sponsors of the Green New Deal, have reintroduced the Green New Deal legislation, whose goal is to eliminate fossil fuels in a decade while creating millions of well-paying jobs. According to the Washington Post, Markey and Ocasio-Cortez say they’re aiming to ensure that Democrats’ landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is implemented in a way that upholds the Green New Deal’s core principles.

According to Markey, “The Green New Deal jump-started the movement that won the IRA, a historic accomplishment that represents a major down payment on the Green New Deal goals.” He added, “We want to make sure it’s implemented so that front line environmental justice communities, who have for too long borne the brunt of the climate crisis, are getting the benefits which they were promised.”

Green New Dealers unveiled Delivering a Green New Deal, an implementation guide that tells states, localities, tribes, and others how to use funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. It tells how communities can use federal funding to meet the principles of the Green New Deal — “creating good-paying jobs, promoting justice and equity, and acting on climate with the urgency and scope demanded by the science.” According to the Delivering a Green New Deal, every program in the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act “must be explicitly designed and implemented with these principles in mind — otherwise, these investments could worsen inequality and climate change.”

For more on this story:

The Washington Post: “AOC, Markey try to influence new climate law with a new Green New Deal”

By Veronica Wilson, LNS California Organizer

California Teachers, education, and health advocates took a major step toward winning on climate in May when the California Senate unanimously passed (39-0) SB 394, a mandate to create a master plan for healthy, sustainable, and climate-resilient schools.

The vote moves the state closer to committing to the Climate Ready Schools Coalition’s vision – green grass under playground structures, children arranging seedlings in burlap wall planters, a teacher in hiking boots facing eager young learners surrounded by redwood trees. Making this vision a reality requires securing funding in the state budget and making sure schools in low-income areas are first in line.

Who will install the solar panels and upgrade the HVAC systems to heat pumps in the 730 million square feet of school buildings? Are there school staff who know how to maintain school learning gardens on the 125,000 acres of the K-12 school footprint in the state, or repair the zero emission buses? These questions were of keen interest to the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and other members of California Labor for Climate Jobs, a statewide coalition organizing a worker-led transition to a just and climate-safe economy, which supports the Master Plan in part because of opportunities to ensure equity and quality union jobs.

The potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making climate-resilient spaces is particularly urgent. Teachers and students in California have been forced to sit and lay on the floor of classrooms when wildfire smoke blankets the region; last Labor Day temperatures reached 116 degrees; and recent winter storms flooded schools in the Central Valley.

The Master Plan for Sustainable and Climate-Resilient Schools will show how K-12 infrastructure investments can meet the state’s carbon-neutrality targets while promoting educational equity, strong labor standards, and the health and safety of children and workers. The bill is now moving on for consideration by the California Assembly policy committees.

After a three-year organizing struggle, workers who manufacture school buses for Blue Bird in Fort Valley GA voted last month to be represented by the Steelworkers. Blue Bird is the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country. Steelworkers organizing director Maria Somma said, “It’s been a long time since a manufacturing site with 1,400 people has been organized, let alone organized in the South, let alone organized with predominantly African American workers, and let alone in the auto industry.” Only 4.4 percent of workers in Georgia are represented by a union.

The federal Clean School Buses program, which subsidizes Blue Bird’s bus production, prohibits recipients from using funds to campaign against unions. Enforcement is weak, but the federal policy nonetheless had a deterrent effect. According to Somma, “This is an employer that would have fired workers. And so while they broke the law, this policy allowed us to calm the employer’s union-busting down.”

To learn more:

Labor Notes: “Union Win at Bus Factory Electrifies Georgia”

Jeremy Brecher’s review of Dimitris Stevis’ new book Just Transitions: Promise and Contestation 

The late president of the AFL-CIO once quipped that the reason he didn’t believe in a just transition is because he had never seen one. It’s too bad that he didn’t live long enough to read Dimitris Stevis’ new book Just Transitions: Promise and Contestation. He would have been able to learn something about the just transitions that are occurring in countries around the world.

Stevis traces the idea of a “just transition” back to Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, now part of the Steelworkers. He shows that just transition is “now on the agenda” of “intergovernmental organizations and negotiations, governments, environmentalists, business, churches and labor unions around the world.” And he teases out the often contested ways the term has been used – and the varied strategies that are being advocated and used to implement it.

Dimitris Stevis is the co-director of the Center for Environmental Justice at Colorado State University and a co-author of the LNS report Workers and Communities in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project.

On October 30, 2020, the Marathon oil refinery in Contra Costa County, California, was permanently shut down and 345 unionized workers laid off. A new study from the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that 74% of former Marathon workers (excluding retirees) had found new jobs. Nearly one in five (19%) were not employed but actively searching for work. Their unemployment rate was 22.5% Their jobs paid $12 per hour less than their Marathon jobs, a 24% cut in pay.

The report made eight recommendations to support displaced workers, including:

• Extended cash payments to maintain pre-layoff income levels
  Financial support to cover the 24% average gap in workers’ pre-layoff wages and their post-layoff wages
• Bridge-to-retirement funding that provides full retirement benefits to workers eligible for early retirement within one year following layoff

In an op-ed about the report, Tracy Scott, President of Steelworkers Local 5, which represents Marathon workers, wrote:

 In California and across the country, working people support addressing climate change and transitioning to renewable energy. But when refineries like the former Marathon facility shut down without a clear plan in place that involves unions from the outset, workers and the community inevitably get left behind.

In order to guarantee that California has an economy that works for everybody, impacted workers must be at the center of planning for the ongoing transition to clean energy, and they must have access to union jobs that guarantee financial security, strong protections, and good benefits.

Read the Report Summary: UC Berkeley Report – Refinery Closures

The Labor Network for Sustainability’s Young Worker Network is holding network calls on the first Tuesday of every month. We hope you or young workers from your union or organization can join us for our first Young Worker Network call on Tuesday, June 6th at 4 pm PT/5 pm MT/6 pm CT/7 pm ET. We intend for this to be a space for young workers to share & learn insights with and from each other at the intersection of labor and climate organizing, and strategize around how we can better support each other to meet our material, emotional, and social needs through collective action. Register with this link!

The day of action is hosted by the Zinn Education Project, the African American Policy Forum, and Black Lives Matter at School. More than 40 co-sponsors have signed on to help with outreach and local media. Groups that sign up receive a media toolkit, Teach Banned Books buttons, graphics, an optional pop-up Teach Banned Books display, and the chance to meet other event organizers from around the country. Sign up to host a #TeachTruth event on June 10! It is easy — pick a site (historic, a library, or any public space), invite people to join you, and speak out. You can read banned books, host a history walking tour, do a book swap, take photos with a Teach Banned Books frame, etc. Read more and sign up here!

The event drew roughly 500 panelists and participants. LNS California Organizer Veronica Wilson presented in the breakout session “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall: Climate Resiliency *Is* Economic Resiliency” along with fellow panelists Joe LaCava (San Diego Community Power, San Diego City Council), Cristina Marquez (IBEW 569), Norman Rogers (USW 675), and moderator Jim Miller (AFT 1931). Miller’s thoughtful questions focused on labor’s role in addressing the climate crisis, to which panelists responded that it will take workers in many sectors and industries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and close gaps of racial, environmental and economic inequities.

Underscoring in the discussion that workers and communities experience climate hazards today, there was wide agreement on urgency, requiring all-hands-on-deck. At the same time, the exchange added a precautionary note, warning against relying on corporations that have profited from polluting industries on the backs of workers and poor communities to remedy the crisis. In sum, the conversation was an opportunity to begin talking through the nuts and bolts of specific proposals that leaders in San Diego and beyond can turn into action.

Excerpts from an interview with Friedrich Graeber of the Magdeberg grouping of the Youth Climate Strike group Fridays for Future:

 All this goes back to three years ago when we approached the trade unions in Germany and we asked them if they were interested in working together, because we have to connect climate and social justice fights. We got an answer from public transport workers, who were interested in working together with us, and since then we started to build an alliance in more and more cities in Germany.

Last year we had a meeting together again in Berlin where people from all over the country came together and decided to support public workers in their next big strike waves. In March we from Fridays for Future struck together with workers in public transportation in several places. We also went to the streets, demonstrated together, and joined the picket lines.

At the start of next year we will strike together all over Germany and shut down public transport in order to get better working conditions and higher wages for the workers and also more money for transition. We want a transition of transport in Germany, a transition away from individual car-based mobility towards a more public transport sector affordable for all people. Our demand is to double the capacity of public transportation by 2030.

For full interview: www.transnational-strike.info/2023/05/04/we-drive-together-an-interview-with-friedrich-graeber-on-german-climates-and-workers-strike/

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.