Austerity vs. the Planet: The Future of Labour Environmentalism
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- Published on Monday, 25 April 2016 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1251 .... April 26, 2016
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Austerity vs. the Planet: The Future of Labour Environmentalism
Trish Kahle
Last December members of the International Trade Union Confederation joined other civil society activists in a mass sit-in at the COP21 talks in Paris. Unionists and their allies, some 400 strong, filled the social space adjacent to the negotiating rooms for several hours, in defiance of a French ban on protests that remained in effect in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks. The ITUC delegation demanded the negotiators go back to the table and make a serious effort to incorporate labour's demands for a just transition -- which, at its heart, is concerned with making sure workers in environmentally unsustainable industries are retrained and put to work building a new, sustainable economy.
The action, even as it generated energy and media buzz, failed to convince the negotiators. The "just transition" clause of the Paris agreement remained stuck in the preamble (not in the body of the agreement itself, as the ITUC members had demanded), more of a hat tip than grounds for international action. But at least it got a mention -- unlike the fossil fuels largely responsible for the climate crisis in the first place. Nowhere in the Paris agreement or its preamble do the words fossil fuel, coal, oil, gas, or pollution appear.
As the talks wrapped up and world leaders hailed a "historic turning point" in the world's relationship to ongoing climate disruption, environmental activist Chris Williams pointed out that "twenty-one years of treaties and negotiations have all been stepping around the main problem, which is the production of fossil fuels." For all the pomp and circumstance, this agreement was no different. Meanwhile, the consequences of two decades of inaction become clearer each day. A few weeks after the Paris agreement was signed, scientists confirmed that 2015 was the warmest year on record, with global temperatures approaching 1°C above the twentieth-century average. And those already feeling the worst effects of this climate disruption, predominantly poor people of color, continued to have the least say in how to combat it.
