Brendan Smith

These are tough times to be a construction worker in America. While other sectors of the economy are showing signs of life, the unemployment rate in the construction industry is getting worse, not better -- rising from 16 percent to 17 percent in January.

It is against this...

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline are taking a well-deserved victory lap. The Obama administration's decision to reject TransCanada's pipeline proposal -- at least for now -- represents an historic win for the environmental movement, and reveals the potency of the emerging alignment between the environmental, anti-corporate, Occupy and other...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

Climate change has arrived in America. What will it mean for your job?

Climate change affecting my job? Many people have never even considered the possibility. They have been misled by false assurances like the testimony of Douglas W. Elmendorf, the director of the supposedly objective...

Drafted with Jeremy Brecher.

The Keystone XL pipeline, recently approved by the U.S. State Department and awaiting President Obama's declaration that it is in the "national interest," will carry oil that is too dirty for the U.S. government to buy -- under legislation signed by George W. Bush!

Stroll by any Whole Foods seafood counter and you will see color-coded fish: Green for fully sustainable, yellow for partially sustainable, and red for fish threatened by overfishing or grown on polluting fish farms. Buy a "green" fish and you eat guilt free, confident that you are doing your part...

More than two million American construction workers -- nearly one in five -- are currently unemployed. Factories that produce building materials are operating at only half their capacity. So when a private company proposes a project that it claims will spur the creation of 118,000 new...

[Drafted with Joe Uehlein]

Throughout history artists have joined forces with political movements to battle injustice and demand a better and more beautiful world. Picasso's "Guernica" captured the horrors of the German bombing of civilians in 1937. "Solidarity Forever," "We Shall Overcome," and "Give Peace a Chance" expressed the optimism...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

If you listen to right wing commentators, you might think American progressives are leading the charge to protect our planet from climate change. Would that it were so!

All around the country, progressives are fighting to make our world a better place to live. In...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

At the start of 2011, as the energy corporations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Tea Party launched their assault on environmental protection and the EPA, it looked like public opinion and organized labor might just be swept along. Instead, much of the public and...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

To talk of climate change or not to talk of climate change -- that is the question.

For the last several years many of the biggest players in the climate movement have argued that to save the planet we need to purge the words "global warming"...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

President Barack Obama recently established a Presidential Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.  He stated at the first meeting, "The biggest challenge we're seeing right now is that unemployment is way too high."  He asked them to come up with "some concrete deliverables" to lower the 9%...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

You can hear the echo chamber reverberate the talking points:

• The Independent Petroleum Association of America complains that drilling permits and pollution are curbing job growth.

• The head of the National Association of Manufacturers and the governor of Virginia write a joint article called...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

With the collapse of climate protection legislation in Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, acting under a mandate from the US Supreme Court, is stepping in to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. At the end of 2009, it issued an "endangerment finding"...

I am not an environmentalist. But all I think about these days is the climate crisis.

I admit I have arrived late to the party. Only recently have I begun to realize what others have known for decades: The climate crisis is not, at its core, an environmental issue. In...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher and Lisa Hoyos]

What will be the impact of climate change on California workers if the US and other countries around the world fail to significantly reduce green house gas emissions? In other words, what happens in a "do nothing" scenario?

Climate scientists have established...

[Co-authored with Jeremy Brecher]

An October 4 New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell, "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted" poses an important question: What if anything is the potential contribution of web-based "social networking" to social movements and social change? The article's answer, drawing primarily...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

The climate denial lobby behind Proposition 23 in California argues they're fighting to protect jobs by overturning what they like to call California's "Job Killing Global Warming Law." But don't be fooled: if passed, Proposition 23 will remove all hope of protecting California's economy -- and...

[Drafted with Jeremy Brecher]

Breakdown at Copenhagen. Climate legislation stalled. EPA regulation of greenhouse gasses threatened. Is climate protection dead?

Maybe not. Climate protection has gone local. Political leaders may fiddle while the world burns, but grassroots groups around the country are organizing to cut greenhouse gas emissions and build...

Rising greenhouse gases. Climate change. Rising energy costs. Declining fossil fuel reserves. Now the BP disaster. With the arguments against fossil fuels continuing to pile up it's no wonder people have latched onto nuclear power as an attractive solution.

Here are eight questions that we should answer before, not after,...

With gallows humor, my fellow oystermen around the country have been passing around a Youtube clip of a 1960 educational film produced by the oil industry entitled "Lifeline to an Oyster."

This reel explains how in the late 1950's Louisiana oystermen began sounding the...