Standing in Solidarity for Our Future

By Jason Walsh, Executive Director, Blue Green Alliance

Last year, the BlueGreen Alliance put forward a blueprint to create good-paying, union jobs while tackling the climate crisis. We called this platform Solidarity for Climate Action and it is backed by the power of the millions of members and supporters of our labor and environmental partners. 

We are at a moment now when climate change is at the forefront of public consciousness and back on the agenda of leaders in Washington D.C. and around the country. This is thanks, in large part, to the tremendous call to action we’ve seen over the last year from people across the country—particularly young people—calling for bold action. These rallying points—from the Green New Deal to the many states moving strong clean energy and climate change commitments forward—are giving us a national opportunity that we must work together to seize. 

Leaders in Congress recognize this and are putting forward solutions. This week, Senator Tom Carper of Delaware along with over thirty Democratic cosponsors including minority leader Chuck Schumer, released the Clean Economy Act. This bill is aligned with the blueprint we set forth in Solidarity for Climate Action. It creates a national goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and includes measures to increase investments in infrastructure and manufacturing with strong job quality and domestic content standards, ensures equitable access to worker training programs, and prioritizes investments in frontline and low-income communities and communities on the hurting end of changes in our energy and industrial economic sectors.  It also suggests removing policy barriers to union organizing.

It is a pathway forward that we can all support to build the future we need—one where there is real action to address the climate crisis and where we seize this opportunity to build a stronger, fairer economy that works for every American.

Two Problems, One Solution

The world is warming. Wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and sea-level rise driven by climate change are hurting communities across the country and will only worsen if we don’t take decisive action. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its Special Report on Global Warming, “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, which could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society.” 

We need climate action to happen at the speed and scale demanded by scientific reality and the urgent needs of our communities. 

At the same time, American workers are being left behind. As union density has dropped since the 1970s, we have seen wages stagnate, while CEO pay has skyrocketed. The data is clear, when unions were at their strongest, more Americans shared in prosperity. 

The actions we take today on climate change must be bold, and strategic. The BlueGreen Alliance and our labor and environmental partners believe the best—and only—way to solve both these crises is to solve them at the same time—by ensuring the jobs created and retained by addressing climate change are good-paying, union jobs and that we do not leave behind workers and communities as we transition to a cleaner, safer, and healthier economy. 

We Don’t Have to Choose Between Good Jobs and a Clean Environment—We Can and Must Have Both

Too often, Americans are given a false choice: that protecting the environment and building a strong economy are mutually exclusive. We have seen, time and again, that this is simply not the case. From clean cars standards that support hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country to the jobs potential of capturing wasteful and preventable methane emissions in the oil and gas industry, actions that reduce climate emissions have been shown again and again to create and sustain good jobs. 

Those on the wrong side of history—who are pitting their greed and gain against workers, science, and the health and safety of every American—are well-organized and extremely well-funded. They excel at setting worker against worker and worker against environmentalist. However, we have something on our side they do not—and will not ever—have: the truth. 

The truth is that our climate is changing and action is needed now to stave off the worst impacts of this climate crisis. The truth is that American workers are being left behind—their jobs outsourced, their wages stagnant, their costs rising, and their patience running out. The truth is that it is not too late to fix these crises. 

Senator Carper’s Clean Economy Act sends a strong message that we reject the false choice of jobs or the environment and instead embrace the truth that economic prosperity and basic fairness go hand-in-hand with fighting the climate crisis.