From Scorched Political Earth to Scorched Actual Earth

Jim Barrett, executive director of Redefining Progress, lays awake at night worrying about global warming's "nightmare scenario." He's concerned that poorly designed measures to cut greenhouse emissions might lead to an anti-environmental political revolt.

As Barrett recently explained to a group of trade unionists and environmentalists who came together for the "Good Jobs, Green Jobs" conference in Pittsburgh last month, the scenario goes something like this:

Lawmakers pass legislation in response to increasingly dire predictions of climate catastrophe from the scientific community and mounting political pressure from the public and abroad. Energy costs skyrocket because almost any action taken to curtail emissions will pressure prices upward. This, in turn, squeezes the pocketbooks of working and middle class families just as they are struggling under the twin burdens of recession and globalization. Meanwhile, the job losses from global competition are blamed on environmental legislation that imposes a cost on production that other countries are not--triggering yet another round of pollution-driven "race to the bottom".

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According to Barrett: "Five to ten to years down the road if we have climate policy that is laying off workers and squeezing the middle class," politicians with strong environmentalist stands and a working class constituency (think Ted Kennedy) cannot go back to their constituents and say "we did the right thing."

Barrett's nightmare is a "scorched political earth followed shortly by a scorched actual earth," whereby poorly crafted climate policy spurs an ugly backlash amongst working and middle class voters in the Democratic Party -- voters who often do not self-identify themselves as environmentalists. The result is a "Battle Royale" between Democratic allies, while their political enemies sit on the sidelines and both workers and the planet suffer the consequences.

All of us concerned about the perilous plight of the planet need to start laying the groundwork to avoid this battle to the death. Some far-sighted groups like the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club have created the Blue Green Alliance to push for a "green jobs" -- the jobs that will be needed to rebuild our economy and drastically reduced greenhouse gasses -- as a way to transition workers into a new green economy. And organized labor worldwide has called for a "just transition" to a low-carbon economy that will not place the burden of change on those who have the misfortune of working in industries that must undergo "green downsizing."

But so far little has been done, or even planned, by legislators and others to take care of those like coal miners and power plant workers, who may lose their jobs as a direct effect of efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. While there is promising talk about the millions of new green jobs soon to be created, few seem to be taking seriously the relationship between climate change legislation and potential job loss. Joel Yudken of High Road Strategies, a consulting group that regularly advises trade unions, recently went searching for studies predicting the potential employment impacts of climate protection and turned up nothing. Now he's been hired by the Bipartisan Policy Center to begin investigating these and other key questions. According to Yudken: "We know where the opportunities are; we don't know the risks."

Not surprisingly, some of these constituencies and their unions have been among the most outspoken opponents of policies to address global warming. At the same time, today's labor movement debate around green jobs and global warming is occurring after decades of job losses from globalization. Some workers and unions wonder whether climate change policy might accelerate corporate-led globalization.

Stunning progress has been made bringing the crisis of global warming into the viewfinder of American and global politics. And we are now all but guaranteed that climate change legislation is coming down the pike.

But now, in many ways, the hard work begins, since the risk is no longer the failure to respond to the global warming crisis; the danger is if we respond poorly and transform Jim Barrett's simulated political nightmare into a reality.

Comments

[SolarPowerGuy]

Sadly, this is old news to anyone who has been active with the Green Party. It would be a challenge to get people like my grandfather and people like myself to work together -- even though they might both describe themselves as liberals. Nevertheless, our futures depend on exactly that cooperation.

May I suggest the book _Island_, by Aldous Huxley? It's quite a prescient book, for one that was written in 1962. Huxley foresaw the modern Western dystopia, filled with people addicted to sitting on their tushes and thirsting for petroleum. He describes a counterculture which, among other things, considers the merits of good old-fashioned human muscle power before reaching for a gasoline-fueled power tool.

The "green jobs" movement makes good sense to me.

[mgloraine]

We already have shills and sock puppets for the carbon fuels industries actively posting around the blogosphere - some right here at HuffPo - attempting to blame current economic problems on environmental protection activities, real or imagined.

Just today I've seen claims (which I am paraphrasing) that "people are starving all around the world today because of Al Gore and his support for ethanol" and "we had to invade Iraq for their oil, because environmentalists won't let us drill into US oil fields which are actually the largest on Earth" and so on. Most of these assertions are utter nonsense, but in recent years we've seen other examples of utter nonsense getting echoed so many times that it becomes national policy, despite the premises being false and the results of the policy being disastrous.

Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to be overcome is the Reagan-era notion that we will not undertake any environmental regulations which might "hurt American business" (meaning primarily the megalithic corporations which fund election campaigns). There WILL be impacts to American businesses, some quite major. But it is illogical to allow our planet to become uninhabitable so that a handful of uber-wealthy gluttons can be spared the discomfort of a slightly less obscene unearned profit.

If global warming goes unchecked, a lot of people, possibly all of humankind, will die. If we all die, nobody will be buying anyone's products and nobody will be making any money anywhere! Not even Wal-Mart or Halliburton!!

[ShawnMichel]

Global warming deniers, like Peak Oil deniers, are living in a cave. As it turns out, the same cave. And because of their ignorance, they are going to push the rest of us back into caves as human civilization crashes due to our continued inaction and ignorance, as well as our willingness to let the deniers have a voice and power. It's quite simple.

Wake up.