Sean Sweeney

Earth to Labor: Economic Growth Is No Salvation

exception). The overuse of insipid terms like “green jobs” cannot hide the fact that the ecological crisis is not on the agenda of the U.S. labor movement. And those who raise ecological issues are likely to be reminded that labor is too embroiled in a struggle for its own survival to have much time and energy to commit to planetary survival. However, labor has much to gain by addressing, rather than avoiding, the ecological crisis and its causes—many of the solutions would help, rather than harm, unions and workers.

Puerto Rico’s Energy Future: Keeping Power With the People

Puerto Rico is now at the center of the global debate about climate resiliency, the potential of renewable energy technologies, and the best way to transition away from fossil fuels. To some extent, it has compressed the struggle for the world’s energy future both geographically and temporally. The whole system was shut down by an “extreme weather event” in the form of hurricane Maria that hit the island on September 16, 2017. This scale of disruption has never happened before—not in Puerto Rico, not in the United States, and not anywhere in the modern world. What was once a discussion about the future of energy has now been transplanted firmly into the precarious present. Hurricane Maria completely knocked out Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, leaving the island without any power. As of this writing, four months have passed, and still 45 percent of the island’s population is without electricity. This is the longest power outage in U.S. history. By mid-January 2018, only 20 percent of the island’s traffic lights were functioning. Of nearly 31,000 new utility poles ordered from the United States, almost 19,000 had still not arrived. Hundreds of schools, while holding classes, were operating without electricity. Puerto Rico’s Public Electric Power Authority (known as PREPA), which since the mid-1970s has provided virtually all of the island’s electrical power quickly became the target of an avalanche of criticism regarding how it responded to the disaster. These criticisms inflicted fresh damage on PREPA’s already sullied reputation for poor management, neglect of infrastructure, and deep indebtedness. PREPA was also criticized for dragging its feet on the development of wind and solar power. Puerto Rico has significant wind and considerable solar potential, but only 3.3 percent of its preMaria power was generated by renewables. Oil generates 47.4 percent of Puerto Rico’s power; about 33 percent was generated by gas and roughly 16 percent from coal—all of it imported. In 2010, the island’s legislature introduced a renewable energy target that essentially instructed PREPA to source 12 percent of energy from renewables by 2015—a target that it failed to meet.

The Energy Revolution Will Not Be Subsidized

If asked the question, “Do you think governments should support renewable energy with subsidies?” most progressive trade unionists would probably respond affirmatively. Renewable energy is crucial in the fight against climate change, generates no pollution, and creates jobs. Subsidies also provide a way for individuals and local groups to produce solar power, thus undermining the market dominance of large energy companies. There is also a clear sense that subsidies will help eliminate fossil fuels. These fuels (themselves subsidized) cook the climate, poison the air and water, enrich the already super rich, undermine democracy, and lead to land grabs and wars. Furthermore, most opponents of government support for renewables do not like government subsidies, in principle. In the United States, many are climate-change deniers, CEOs of large utilities that are content to carry on using coal or gas, or employers concerned about the cost of energy and U.S. competitiveness, a noble cause currently being served by cheap shale gas from fracking. For these and other reasons, progressives have generally closed ranks behind the idea that renewables should be subsidized. This kind of thinking is widespread, which means the number of people on the political left willing to question the wisdom of subsidizing renewables could probably sit on the tip of a small wind turbine.

Standing Rock Solid with the Frackers: Are the Trades Putting Labor’s Head in the Gas Oven?

If anyone were looking for further evidence that the AFL-CIO remains unprepared to accept the science of climate change, and unwilling to join with the effort being made by all of the major labor federations of the world to address the crisis, the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) provides only the most recent case in point. Taking direction from the newly minted North American Building Trades Unions (NABTU) and the American Petroleum Institute (API), the federation stood against the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribal nations. In a recent video interview, NABTU President Sean McGarvey dismissed those who oppose the expansion of fossil-fuels infrastructure.

When Stopping Coal Plant Closures Makes Environmental Sense

After more than a decade of tenacious union lobbying of government negotiators, the words “a just transition of the workforce” was written into the preamble of the Paris Climate Agreement negotiated in late 2015 and ratified in 2016. Pioneered by the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers during the 1980s, the phrase “Just Transition” (JT) captured the idea that workers should not have to make a choice between making a living and harming the environment through their daily work, and living standards should be protected in the event that jobs are terminated as a result of environmental policies. But now what? Encouraged by the Paris Agreement, unions around the world have committed fresh energy toward giving Just Transition some practical significance; otherwise, it will remain little more than a moral appeal for fairness in a corporate-dominated world economy where both morality and fairness are increasingly scarce.

Corbyn’s Class Act Is a Climate Game Changer

On September 12, 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected the leader of the Labour Party in Britain. Supported by several key unions, the victory of the veteran socialist member of Parliament (MP) has shocked the political establishment and dealt a crippling blow to the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British politics for more than three decades. Corbyn won the support of thousands of younger activists who were not even born when the Labour Party began its rightward drift in the 1980s. For the perennially demoralized British left, Corbyn’s initials “J.C.” have invited enough “savior” quips to fill a stack of New Testament bibles.

Corporations Call for “Net Zero” Emissions: Do They Know How to Get There?

In the months leading to the December 2015 Paris Climate Conference, representatives of global institutional investors and multinational corporations made headlines after they demanded that world leaders adopt radical emissions reduction targets, among them “net zero” emissions by 2050. Examples include the Global Investor Statement on Climate Change, which was signed by 409 investors representing more than

Green Capitalism Won't Work

24 trillion in assets, and the Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group (which includes the likes of Shell Global and Heathrow Airport Holdings Limited). Following the Statement’s adoption in Paris, a cluster of corporate heads led by Virgin Group’s Richard Branson (calling itself the “B Team”) demanded that all governments turn the Paris net zero emissions target into national-level laws. What are we to make of this? The practical implications of the net zero target adopted in Paris—if it is seriously pursued—are nothing short of revolutionary, opening up a “system crunch” scenario when the forces of growth, profit, and accumulation that presently propel capitalism collide with the political imperatives required to reach virtually total “decarbonization” in little more than a generation. Paradoxically, the corporate push to adopt net zero by 2050—a target that is unprecedented in terms of its ambition—merely draws attention to the fact that the corporate elite has no clear or convincing idea about how it might be achieved. The capitalist spirit is progressively willing, but the flesh grows all the time steadily weaker. Thus, the Paris Agreement can be a clarifying moment for labor, the climate movement, and the broader left in that, more than ever before, it exposes the gulf between what needs to be done from a scientific standpoint and what the global corporate and political elite are actually able to deliver.

books and the arts

For the last twenty years, unions in the United States and internationally have generally accepted the dominant discourse on climate policy, one that is grounded in assumptions that private markets will lead the “green transition,” reduce emissions, and stabilize the climate over the longer term. Indeed, unions began attending the climate negotiations convened by the United Nations in the early 1990s, a time when the “triumph of the market” went unchallenged and the climate debate was awash with neoliberal ideas. Unions, therefore, focused on articulating the need for “Just Transition” policies to deal with the negative impacts on employment brought about by climate policies and to highlight the need for income protection, re-employment opportunities, education and re-training, and job creation. 1 In keeping with the policy discourse of the time, unions talked and acted as if the transition to a low carbon economy was inevitable—the science was, after all, definitive and a broad consensus was emerging among business, governments, and civil society that emissions reductions were urgently needed and made good economic sense. Few unions openly expressed the view that capitalism might be incapable of addressing climate change and that radical restructuring of political economy is necessary in order to stay within planetary boundaries.

The Case for Global Justice Unionism

NATURE | VOL 429 | 3 JUNE 2004 | www.nature.com/nature 505 treatments of it are something of an acquired taste, and the two fairly heavy-duty chapters here are no exception.Authors of subsequent chapters tend to focus on their specialism, and then say either how important it is for heterogeneity, or vice versa. A few chapters are on subjects sufficiently mature for the authors to really work the theme. For example, those on the ecology and population dynamics of the large herbivore community show how, over scales from biome down to local and from geological down to seasonal, habitat heterogeneity is a driving force in ungulate speciation and abundance, the size-scaling of ungulate assemblies, and the species richness of savannas. This and other examples show that understanding the effects of heterogeneity remains an important part of the research agenda for the future — a fitting tribute to the first century of research in Kruger. ■ Andrew Illius is at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Michael Swann Building, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JR, UK.