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 movements.

Real strides were also made to bridge the divide between environmental groups and unions. While Republicans relentlessly attacked environmentalists as “job killers,” groups like 350.org, Sierra Club, and NRDC reached out to unions early and often, and as a result, six labor unions came out in support of President Obama’s decision to oppose the permit. Not since the “Battle in Seattle” have we seen such diverse and robust coalitions.

But the Keystone campaign also exposed the perennial Achilles’ heel of those who are fighting against climate change: We are often painted by our opponents and perceived by the public as caring more about the environment than about jobs. In a press release titled “U.S. Chamber Calls Politically-Charged Decision to Deny Keystone a Job Killer,” the Chamber of Commerce said President Obama’s denial of the KXL permit was “sacrificing tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs in the short term, and many more than that in the long term.” And its messaging worked, with the media repeating the jobs vs. environment frame again and again. NPR’s headline was typical of many: “Pipeline Decision Pits Jobs Against Environment.”

Where should those proposals come from? As the six labor unions that opposed the KXL pipeline permit pointed out, one source can be the jobs programs that Republican politicians are currently blocking in Congress, like the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, which would boost employment by almost 2.3 million jobs in 2012 and almost 3.1 million jobs in 2013; the extension of the Highway Trust Fund, which would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide for critical infrastructure repair; and initiatives to fund jobs for teachers, firefighters, and police. It’s time for the environmental movement to put the spotlight on the way climate-denying politicians are crying crocodile tears over a few hundred or thousand jobs while blocking millions of jobs unemployed American workers could be hired to do right now.

If we fail to become the voice for both the planet and workers, our movement risks losing the support of increasing numbers of workers, unions, and their political allies. The fossil-fuel industry and its allies know that working families are likely to prioritize bread-and-butter issues over environmental protection, especially in recessionary times. Right-wing forces are counting on the “job killing” message to drive ordinary Americans into the arms of the climate-denying Republican Party. Together, environmental and labor movements can defeat them by presenting a better jobs program to American workers — one that addresses the climate and economic crises at the same time.

Why in the world were protesters occupying the Wisconsin statehouse wearing “King Tut” headdresses?  And why were orders for pizza coming into Madison, Wisconsin from Cairo, Egypt?

The story begins around 1500 BC, when Egyptian workers at Deir El-Medina hadn’t been paid for three weeks by their notoriously corrupt supervisors.  They stopped work and walked out.  It may be history’s first recorded strike.

Fast-forward thirty-five hundred or so years to the very end of 2006 AD.  Another group of Egyptian workers, angered at the denial of their promised year-end bonus and the corruption of their managers, quit work and shut down their workplaces.  The strike by Mahala El-Kobra textile workers startled the Egyptian people, and apparently the government and the government-owned employer as well.

The strike started with night-shift workers who were enraged at the company’s decision not to pay a bonus that had been promised by Egypt’s Prime Minister Ahem Nazif.  The next day they were joined by the day shift, who occupied the plant and a nearby street.  Government security forces surrounded the area and cut off electricity to the plant.  Eventually 27,000 workers were involved, including 4,000 women, who said they were “standing up for their children.”

After five days, the government retreated and offered to restore the bonuses.  An employee reported that on return to work, “The cashiers were sitting to greet the workers” with their back pay “the minute they walked into work.”

In 2006 I was helping start a tiny NGO called Global Labor Strategies.  We called it a “bridge building” organization; our purpose was to help workers and their allies connect across the borders of an every more globalizing world.  While the strike was virtually unreported in the US media, I discovered information about it on the web and wrote it up for the GLS blog.

A couple of years later there was another strike in Mahalla.  This time a small organization of student and youth activists formed to support the strikers.  They set up a Facebook page and called a demonstration on April 6.  Thereafter they began referring to themselves as the April 6 movement.  After the strike was over they continued their social networking site with lively debates on freedom of speech, government nepotism, and economic stagnation.  By 2010 they had 70,000 Facebook friends.

On December 17, 2010, an impoverished Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, after repeated police harassment, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire in a city 190 miles south of Tunis to protest the economic and political conditions he and his country were subjected to.  Within a week, seven other Tunisians had done the same.  What seemed like futile acts of despair inspired massive protests.  With hundreds of thousands of protesters refusing to let business as usual go on, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s ruler for a quarter of a century, was forced to flee and a transitional government made preparations to hold elections under a new, democratic constitution.

Egyptians watched the unfolding events in Tunisia with fascination.  They too faced grinding poverty and a tyrannical government supported from abroad that used violence and torture to repress opposition while looting billions of dollars by means of corruption.  A few small groups, including the April 6 movement, began calling for Egypt to undergo a democratization like that in Tunisia.  They used Facebook and other new social media to get out the word.  They started holding street meetings in Cairo neighborhoods.  To their surprise, large numbers came out in the poor neighborhoods and supported the idea of an “Egyptian Tunisia.”  They began holding daily demonstrations in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square (Arabic for “Liberation Square”) calling for Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s autocratic president for thirty years, to go.

Over the course of two weeks the demonstrations swelled.  Men and women, Sunni, Shia, and Christian marched side by side.  Initially the established opposition parties and organizations stayed aloof from the protests, but gradually they began to join in.  Meanwhile the hated security police launched repeated attacks on the demonstrators.  The Army began to roll into Liberation Square with its troops and tanks and its airplanes flying overhead.  Then suddenly the police withdrew and the army high command issued a statement that it would not fire on the protesters.

The United States, which had provided Mubarak’s regime with more than sixty billion dollars over the previous thirty years and maintained a close relationship with Mubarak and the Egyptian military, expressed strong support for Mubarak. But as the number of demonstrators multiplied, the US began to distance itself from the regime.  Within a week, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was declaring, “Mubarak must go.”

Meanwhile, the protests continued to swell, not only in Cairo but throughout the country.  The army troops fraternized with the demonstrators; a young woman told reporters that demonstrators in Liberation Square were arranging a football match with the soldiers.  As the police disappeared from the streets, people in Cairo neighborhoods began organizing their own neighborhood watches.  Workers throughout the country began to conduct strikes, some seeking to establish unions and win wage increases, others calling for the removal of the regime.

On February 1, 2011 a “Million Man March” indeed produced something like a million protesters in Liberation Square calling on Mubarak to leave.  It was widely reported that he was about to do so.  Instead, he went on television and gave a speech making a few concessions but pledging that he would fill out his term and that he would “die on Egyptian soil.”  Commentators observed that he should be careful what he said.

The protestors felt betrayed; a wave of rage pervaded the entire country. Within six hours, the senior officers of the army announced that Mubarak had “resigned” and that an officer’s council had taken power.  They also announced that they would establish a transitional government that would establish a new democratic constitution and hold democratic elections.  Large demonstrations continued in Liberation Square and throughout the country insisting that they indeed do so.

Early on in the Egyptian demonstrations, I saw a young woman being pressured by a TV journalist to name those she considered leaders.  After repeatedly trying to explain that people were acting on their own, finally in exasperation she pointed around the crowd and said, “Right now it looks like we have half-a-million leaders.”  Her words reminded me of the group of “Wobblies” – members of the Industrial Workers of the World union — nearly a century before:  Asked who their leaders were, they replied, “We’ve got no leaders — we’re all leaders.”

To many people the events in Egypt revealed a courage, a solidarity, an activism, and an intelligence that seemed to violate their very sense of what is possible.  Many commentators on the scene said things like, “These are not the Egyptians I know,” and “This is a new Egypt.”  At Graterford prison outside Philadelphia, where many of the inmates were glued to the television watching scenes of rebellion in Egypt, a life prisoner named Charles Coley came up to a friend of mine in the hall and summed up a response shared by many around the world: “I just didn’t know that people had it in them.”

The Egyptian upheaval electrified the entire Middle East.  Popular upheavals rocked Bahrain, Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.  Demonstrations in Jordan and Yemen led to the firing and replacement of the entire cabinet.  Demonstrations in Libya turned into civil war followed by NATO and Arab League military intervention.  Comparing them to the upheavals that brought the overthrow of Communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, commentators began referring to these events as the “Arab Spring.”

But the impact of events in the Middle East didn’t stop at the boundaries of the region.  Students planning anti-government actions in London called for turning Trafalgar Square into a British Tahrir Square; nearly half a million people turned out for the demonstration protesting public spending cuts.#  As faculty, staff, and fifteen thousand demonstrators backed Puerto Rican students protesting the military occupation of their campus and the repression of freedom of speech and assembly, newscasters compared them to the protestors in Tahrir Square; US Congressman Luis V. Gutierrez said it reflected “a lesson the people of Egypt taught the world last week: Brutal laws and secret meetings and armed enforcers don’t extinguish the flame of justice – they are the spark that makes it burn brighter.”#  At a demonstration in Mexico City, Martin Esparza, Secretary General of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union, called for a peaceful civilian insurgency, taking its example from the events in Egypt.#

The ripples even reached the United States.  At the same time as the Egyptian upheaval, a string of right-wing state governors were taking office with the backing of the “Tea Party” and wealthy energy company executives.  In Ohio, Indiana, and many other states they seized on budget crises to pass laws restricting or completely eliminating the right of public employees to be represented by unions.

The epicenter of the struggle was Wisconsin, where newly-elected governor Scott Walker introduced legislation to abolish collective bargaining for teachers, social workers, and most other government employees.  Students and workers began holding demonstrations in the state capitol rotunda in Madison to protest the new anti-labor laws.  First there were hundreds, then thousands.  Eventually more than 100,000 people were occupying the building.  It represented the largest demonstration in Wisconsin at least since the Vietnam war.

According to a news report, “Many protestors appeared to be taking inspiration from the recent democratic uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, with some even wearing King Tut hats.”#  Orders for pizza for the demonstrators poured in from around the world — including some from Cairo.  And, parodying a famous pop song titled Walk Like an Egyptian, bumper stickers appeared reading “March Like an Egyptian.”

The events in Wisconsin were as unanticipated as those in Egypt.  Yet from 1500 BC to today, history shows that nothing is as predictable as unpredictable popular upheavals.

By sending his police to beat, pepper-spray, and evict unarmed protestors, billionaire Mayor Bloomberg is placing himself in the great tradition that runs from King George III of England to Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

History will not judge him gently — nor will those around the world who believe in democracy.

The Labor Network for Sustainability expresses its solidarity with the Occupy movements everywhere and calls on everyone who cares about a sustainable future to undertake the following Key Action Items recommended by OWS and its allies:

KEY ACTION ITEMS

1.     MAKE NOVEMBER 17 HUGE  (November17.org, We-r-1.org, OccupyWallSt.org)
2.     Send people and Principals to NY
3.     Get out people in NYC today to new Occupation at 6th Avenue & Canal St. (Zuccotti is Closed)
4.     Send statements of solidarity and cc. Lizbutlerdc@gmail.com
5.     Folks should call: 212-New-York to complain.
6.     Send out statements, tweets, throughout day. (NY Groups are drafting a model letter)
7.     Push OWS statements to reporter networks: Keep checking OccupyWallSt.org
8.     Next Allies Call 4pm ET Wednesday. We will send reminder with info.
The following message from Occupy Wall Street was issued in the midst of the attempted eviction:

Statement from OWS:  1:36am Tuesday, November 15:

A massive police force is presently evicting Liberty Square, home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country and around the world.

The raid started just after 1:00am. Supporters and allies are mobilizing throughout the city, presently converging at Foley Square. Supporters are also planning public actions for the coming days, including occupation actions.

You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.
Two months ago a few hundred New Yorkers set up an encampment at the doorstep of Wall Street. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol — with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative about our economy, our democracy, and our future.

Americans are talking about the consolidation of wealth and power in our society, and the stranglehold that the top 1% have over our political system. More and more Americans are seeing the crises of our economy and our democracy as systemic problems, that require collective action to remedy. More and more Americans are identifying as part of the 99%, and saying “enough!”

This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The “us” in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.

This moment is nothing short of America rediscovering the strength we hold when we come together as citizens to take action to address crises that impact us all.

Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces — our spaces — and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people — all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement.

You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.

We firmly believe that climate change is a real, dangerous, and rapidly worsening problem with deep moral implications. But the U.S. has done little to reduce its contribution to the crises. Concern about the costs of reducing emissions is one of the primary reasons we have failed to act. Given the stakes, we must acknowledge and act on the core moral principles our nation has long stood for, enacting effective climate goals that will at the same time protect vulnerable workers and communities.

The statement argues that our most fundamental principle is to prevent unjustifiable suffering and death among current and future generations in the U.S. and abroad. The statement calls on us to honor the principles of justice and equity. This requires that we do our part to ensure that the people and nations that are most impacted by climate change have the financial and technological capacity to prepare for and adapt to climate change. Finally, it asks that we honor the moral principle that we protect the Earth’s natural systems and species that support all life. These principles require that we significantly and rapidly reducing our carbon pollution.

We hope LNS members will sign to show that the labor movement is committed to addressing the climate crisis and building a more sustainable future for all.

Statement of Our Nation’s Moral Obligation to Address Climate Change

We, the undersigned current and former elected officials and representatives from the business, labor, youth, financial, academic, mental health, physical health, conservation, racial justice, civil rights, development organizations, and faith communities of the United States, recognize that climate change is a real, dangerous, and rapidly worsening problem with deep moral implications.

Although reducing carbon pollution will have costs, it will also produce incalculable benefits. Our response must therefore be driven not solely by near-term economic or national self-interest. We must also acknowledge and act on our long-standing moral obligation to protect current and future generations from suffering and death, to honor principles of justice and equity, and to protect the great Earth systems on which the wellbeing of all life, including ours, depends.

We call on every citizen to act on these moral principles without delay. Individually, and collectively as a nation, we must rapidly reduce carbon pollution by significant levels, prepare for the consequences of an already warming planet, and insist on public policies that support these goals and create a just transition to a low-carbon economy. The risks of inaction are exceedingly high. The benefits of acting on these moral principles are even greater.

The Moral Obligation to Prevent Suffering and Protect Human Life
The most fundamental of our guiding moral principles is that it is wrong to unjustifiably cause human suffering or death. Climate change-related impacts are already harming and killing people here and abroad. Unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, the resulting natural disasters, floods, diseases, illnesses, water and food shortages, and environmental degradation, along with associated rising violence and social breakdown, will injure or kill millions more every year.

Climate change-induced suffering from food shortages and the dramatic spread of disease and illness will be especially significant. Millions of people worldwide will be affected. Suffering will also result from the job losses and disruptions to families and communities caused by the billions of dollars in direct and indirect annual costs of climate impacts, as well as from the escalating market volatility, supply chain disruptions, and other impacts businesses will experience.

Over the past century, the U.S. has been the world’s largest overall contributor to climate change, generating about 30 percent of the total energy-related CO2 emissions that are destabilizing the climate. Today, we continue to produce far more emissions on an annual basis than any other nation except China. Even if the costs are high, we must avert one of the worst violations of human rights the world has ever seen by acknowledging our contribution to the climate crisis and significantly reducing our emissions.

The shift to a low carbon economy can create millions of good jobs that support healthy families and communities. This requires a ‘just transition’ that spreads the investments in solutions and the benefits of new approaches equitably, enables whole industries to make the changes needed, provides adequate resources for workers and communities adversely affected by the shift and ensures that all Americans have a democratic voice in their workplaces and their communities in how those decisions are made.

The Moral Responsibility to Honor Principles of Justice and Equity
Those who suffer the most from climate change are not the same people who now benefit greatly from the overuse of fossil fuels and other natural resources. As a matter of justice and equity, we have a moral obligation to reduce our carbon pollution in order to prevent suffering and death among people who have contributed little to climate change but who are, at least initially, most impacted: those living in the Arctic; people in less developed, hotter regions of the world; low-income and working-class communities; communities of color; women as well as children in the U.S.; and future generations everywhere.

In addition, even as we reduce our emissions we must do our part to ensure that vulnerable populations and nations have the financial and technological capacity to prepare for and adapt to the consequences of a warming planet and grow clean energy economies.

The Moral Obligation to Honor and Protect the Processes that Make Life Possible
Because we have a moral obligation to protect human life and prevent suffering and injustice, and because Earth’s gifts have intrinsic value, we have a responsibility to protect the ecosystems and organisms that provide the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the materials we use to sustain life and prosperity, and the natural beauty that lifts our spirits.

Whether we believe that the Earth and its great abundance is a product of natural processes or, as millions of people nationwide believe, that the Earth is the gift of the Creator, or both, our obligations are fundamentally the same–we must be good stewards of what we have inherited. Humanity is not in command of creation, but merely part of it. To disrupt the climate that is the cornerstone of all life on Earth and to squander the extraordinary abundance of life, richness, and beauty of the planet is morally wrong.

We Have the Know-how and Tools
The people of our great nation have the spirit, knowledge, and tools required to reduce climate change. The greatest obstacle is lack of human will. History is watching us. Our legacy will be determined by what we do now and in the next few years.

We call on everyone in the U.S. to act on their moral principles now by rapidly and significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in their homes, places of work and government.

We call on every citizen to actively prepare for the consequences of climate change.

Moreover, we urge every citizen to insist that their government adopt policies to foster emission reductions and prepare for climate change, and to provide sufficient resources to build the capacity of the most impacted people worldwide to do the same.

This is not just about avoiding harm. Acting on our moral principles will foster the growth of a sustainable economy that creates millions of good jobs in clean energy fields, supports healthy families, and builds vibrant communities. That, itself, makes this imperative.

The need for action is urgent, the possibilities enormous.  Please join us in heeding this call. Click here to sign on.

How did we get here?

At the end of World War II, the generation that had lived through the Great Depression established the so-called “Bretton Woods” institutions they hoped would prevent a return to the mass unemployment and misery of the 1930s.  They established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to prevent the trade discrimination and trade wars that had so aggravated the Depression.  They established the World Bank for Reconstruction and Development to finance the rebuilding of the war-torn world.  And they established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help countries maintain full employment by growing domestic demand through fiscal and monetary policy rather than by capturing the markets of other countries.  As Robert Kuttner puts it in Exiting from the Crisis, their goal was “to create a global financial system biased toward full employment policies domestically.”

The next quarter century saw the longest period of sustained growth in modern economic history.  With low unemployment, relatively mild recessions, and rising wages and profits, it has often been called “the Golden Age of Capitalism.”

In the late 1960s, however, the global economy stumbled, with a sharp drop in profits, soaring unemployment, devastating recessions, stagnant real wages, and stagflation worldwide.  Despite a variety of policy responses, these conditions persisted through the 1970s.

The era of neoliberal globalization

In response to the crisis of the global economy, many economists, corporations, and political leaders abandoned the economic strategy designed to maintain full employment through domestic demand and turned to a radically different approach variously known as neo-liberalism, Reaganomics, free-market globalization, and the Washington Consensus.

The guiding idea of this approach was to eliminate anything that interfered with capitalists trying to maximize their profits by competing in markets.  The GATT was replaced by a World Trade Organization (WTO) dedicated to reducing labor, environmental, consumer, and other regulations as “barriers to trade.”   The IMF abandoned its role as supporter of domestic-led economic growth and became the promoter of export-led growth based on cutting wages and public programs.  The World Bank became a vehicle for imposing such policies on poor countries under the guise of “structural adjustment.”  Most of the world’s governments adopted such neoliberal policies voluntarily or as a result of international pressure.  Corporations took advantage of such conditions to go global, producing and selling their goods directly and through dependent suppliers and vendors around the world.

The consequences of neoliberal globalization

For most of the world’s people the thirty-year reign of neoliberalism has been disastrous.

In the developed countries, deregulation of labor led to falling wage share in national production and increased inequality. Europe largely abandoned the “European social model” of redistributive tax systems, welfare states, codified industrial relations, and social dialogue.  Its Stability and Growth Pact and the freedom of movement of capital largely nullified measures promoting domestic employment.  Precarious work proliferated and threatened the standards of those who continued in regular employment.

While “Washington Consensus” policies were supposed to help poor countries develop, in fact “GDP growth rates in developing regions that applied the policies most diligently, such as Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, were actually lower in the 1980s and 1990s than in the previous two decades.”  Inequality and the number of poor increased in most developing countries.  The great exception was East Asia, which “had not followed the Washington Consensus policies and had grown faster than any other region of the world.”

The debt problems of less developed countries deepened.  International capital flows became much more volatile.  The era has been marked by a string of global financial crises.  While given labels like the “Mexican,” “Asian,” and “Argentinean” crises, they actually were world crises in which catastrophe ricocheted from one country to another.

Meanwhile, there was a huge shift of resources from the real economy to the financial economy — what came to be known as “financialization.”  In the US, “The financial sector’s share of total corporate profit reached 42 percent before the crisis, up from about 25 percent in the early 1980s.” During the 2000s, “less than 40 percent of the profits of non-financial firms in developed countries were used to invest in physical capacity,” 8% below the early1980s.

Who gained from neoliberalism?  From 1976 to 2007, the share of US national income of the top one percent of Americans grew from nine percent to more than twenty-three percent.

The Great Recession

Inadequate incomes for ordinary people around the world inevitably led to inadequate purchasing power, aka economic demand.  But this was hidden for years by the growth of debt  — the other side of “financialization.”  Every possible way to make money without making something of value was pursued.  Banks lent recklessly; mortgages were sold to impoverished purchasers and bundled for sale to investors; exotic derivatives were invented and sold; credit default swaps purported to insure against financial losses.  Rating agencies endorsed the value of these “products” — while being paid by the very companies that produced them.

Inevitably the bubble burst.  Credit crunched.  Banks refused to lend even to each other.  Capital became unavailable.

For a brief period, governments abandoned neoliberalism and “resorted to the supposedly discredited old-fashioned Keynesian recipes” to control the crisis.  Policies “that had been off the agenda for the previous thirty years — such as deficit spending and public ownership — were suddenly back in vogue.”  Governments “substituted private debt-led demand with public debt-led stimulus.”  Fiscal stimulus in 2009 represented 1.7% of world GDP.  With the support of the IMF, demand-promoting measures like  “coordinated global fiscal stimulus,” “quantitative easing” to inject liquidity into the system, and improved unemployment benefits to increase purchasing power became the order of the day. The IMF estimates that such stimulus policies saved 7-11 million jobs worldwide.

That was only one side of the response, however.  Governments in one way or another took on much of the colossal debts that were crushing the financial companies.  And they did so with little change in the practices that had led to the financial collapse in the first place.  The trillions of dollars they spent under various schemes to bail out and support the finance industry dwarfed the economic stimulus that went to support the wellbeing of ordinary people.

Further, within a year, economists, investors, politicians, and pundits began warning of excessive government debt.  (Public debt had indeed grown, less as a result of profligate spending than because of falling tax revenues and the public assumption of private debt.)  They called for “consolidation,” aka fiscal austerity.  Financial crisis in Greece and elsewhere began to reveal that there was a “sovereign debt crisis.”

The austerity drive included a demand for “wage flexibility.”  As Joseph Stiglitz put it mockingly, “If workers were only ‘flexible’ in their wage demands, we could get the world back to work.” Wage flexibility represented “a hidden call” for “reducing the wages of the most vulnerable.”

Such “neoliberalism on steroids” further weakened aggregate demand, thus threatening to prevent economic recovery and bring about a “double-dip” recession.  Exiting from the Crisis warns that “policymakers are now, through fear of the bond markets, about to plunge the global economy into a prolonged slump.”

The crisis continues

Despite claims of recovery, the devastating effects of the Great Recession on poor and working people continue unabated.  In developed countries unemployment rates are 50 percent higher than in 2008.  The youth unemployment rate is now nearly 2.5 times that of adults. Worldwide, there are one hundred million more people in extreme poverty than before the Great Recession began.

The revival of neoliberal policies is aggravating this situation in multiple ways.  “Consolidation” is creating cutbacks in public services and weakening the “automatic stabilizers” like unemployment compensation that normally boost demand when employment falls.  These austerity policies put downward pressure on wages, further reducing effective demand.

While for many companies profits have returned to pre-crisis levels, many profitable companies are still reducing investment.  “The companies are sitting on piles of cash, and using low and even negative interest rates to boost dividends.”

In the US, manufacturing investment remains weak because of “global excess capacity.”  Construction remains weak as a “hangover from the property bubble.”  Consumer spending remains weak because “households are deleveraging and increasing savings.”  Such is the touted recovery from the Great Recession.

Pillars of a global labor alternative

It is clear that a further continuation of neoliberal globalization will only aggravate the Great Recession.  But Exiting from the Crisis does not propose a simple reversal of neoliberal policies and a return to those of an earlier era.  Indeed it notes, “Simply to call for a return to the policies of the post-war boom period would be a catastrophic mistake.”  New realities like globalization and climate change require new solutions that may incorporate elements of past programs but also must go far beyond them.

The approach laid out in Exiting from the Crisis can be summarized in the following “pillars”:

Redefining growth:  The apparent economic growth of the past thirty years, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has left the rich richer, the poor poorer, the global economy in ruins, and the world threatened by devastating climate change and other forms of environmental destruction.  We need a new gage to measure our economic success, one based on real human needs and environmental impacts.

Equalization:  The benefits of neoliberal globalization have gone to a tiny minority; the costs have been paid by the overwhelming majority.  Not only is that unjust, it has led to the very lack of purchasing power — aka economic demand — that is producing recession and unemployment.  Raising the incomes of workers and the poor is central both to economic justice and to the kind of economic growth that benefits people and the planet.  Worker organization and collective bargaining locally, nationally, and internationally are critical aspects of that process.

Public investment for a green and sustainable future: Hundreds of millions of people are unemployed and underemployed while billions suffer from poverty, climate catastrophe, and other preventable problems.  We need to develop forms of global public investment to use our human and natural resources to meet our needs.

Countering the downsides of globalization:  While globalization was supposed to “lift all the boats,” for most it has led instead to a race to the bottom in which workforces and countries compete to attract footloose capital by lowering their labor, environmental, tax, and social standards.  Countering the race to the bottom requires global labor rights, limits on financial speculation, and a focus on producing for home markets rather than for export.

Definancialization: As financial institutions have taken over more and more of the economy, ordinary people have become so much the poorer.  Instead of dictating to society, finance should be a tool that society uses.  Downsizing, regulation, taxation, public accountability, and the creation of public purpose financial institutions can all help make that so.

Making corporations accountable to people: The original justification for laws allowing incorporation was to encourage people to join together for socially beneficial purposes.  In neoliberal doctrine, however, corporations instead should aim exclusively to “maximize stockholder value.”  A worldwide movement is developing to make corporations accountable to a wide range of “stakeholders,” including workers, communities, and citizens, and to pressure them to adopt sustainable practices.

Shifting power: Neoliberal globalization has not prevailed because its proponents had better ideas, but because they were able to amass more power.  The policies that can make it possible to “exit from the crisis” will only be implemented if labor, popular movements, and their allies grow strong enough to impose them.

Exiting from the Crisis makes one thing clear:  “Markets, if left to themselves, will never develop effective institutions for global economic governance.”  Markets alone “cannot solve global imbalances, deal with exchange rate questions, establish a fair trading regime, tackle climate change, or reduce income inequality.”  That will take people, acting through their unions, social movements, and governments.

[The next piece in this series, “Growth for What? Growth for Whom?,” argues that current definitions of economic growth, based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), are counterproductive for both our livelihoods and our environments, and how they can be replaced by a new gage that actually measure our wellbeing.]

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

In 2007, President Bush signed into law Section 526 of the Energy Independence and National Security Act of 2007. It prohibits the US government, which is the largest single fuel purchaser in the U.S., from using taxpayer dollars to purchase fuels that have a higher carbon footprint than conventional oil.

This little-known law is significant because Congress crafted it, in part, with the explicit intent to block the US from buying Canadian tar sands oil — considered the dirtiest oil on the planet. With President Obama currently debating whether to authorize the construction of the Keystone Pipeline — which will funnel tar sands oil from Alberta into the the US — and more than 1000 activists arrested in front of the White House last month in protest the pipeline, the issue has moved to the front and center of the climate debate in recent weeks.

According to Congressman Henry Waxman, Chair of the House Energy Committee, the US purchase of tar sands oil would clearly violate Section 526. As he wrote in a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee in 2008, the law “applies to fuels derived from unconventional petroleum sources such as tar sands which produce significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions then are produced by comparable fuel from conventional sources.”

Meanwhile the Canadian government has been working behind the scenes to strike Section 526 from the books to clear the way for tar sands extraction. Using Freedom of Information requests, the Pembina Institute and Climate Action Network Canadian, uncovered a 2008 strategy memo by Canadian Embassy official Hélène Viau, which urged US oil lobbyists to send letters to the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of State to show “concerns with regard to section 526 and argue that oil sands products should not be targeted by this provision,” and to develop “a comprehensive oil sands advocacy strategy to focus on outreach to allies, influencers, legislators, etc.”

And Big Oil lobby have taken Viau’s suggestions to heart. Matt Fox, senior vice-president of oil sands for ConocoPhillips warned US legislators that Section 526 “could bring [tar sands] development to a screeching halt. You’d have to think twice about oil sands development if your intention was to deliver oil to the lower ‘48.”

If President Obama elects to unilaterally disregard Section 526, the planet may be doomed. According to Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and one of the leaders of the Keystone pipeline protests, the burning the recoverable oil in the Alberta tar sands by itself would raise the carbon in the atmosphere by 200 parts per million (ppm). It wasn’t hard to figure out that this would increase the 390 ppm carbon in the atmosphere today by more than half. Indeed, it would increase the gap between the current level and the safe level of 350 ppm five-fold.

The leading NASA climate change specialist Jim Hansen summed up what’s at stake saying: “If the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over” for a viable planet.

While protecting the climate will ultimately require legislation and treaties, in the meantime it is essential to prevent the use of “extreme energy” fuels like the Alberta tar sands oil that will rapidly make climate change far worse.

Congress and President Bush showed wisdom in saying that the US should not and would not buy such oil. President Obama would be wise to find the Keystone XL pipeline — whose only purpose is to bring the world’s dirtiest oil to the US — is not in our national interest.

“Labor, Sustainability, and Justice” presents a labor alternative for national and global economies.  It reflects a common analysis and program worked out by labor movements and labor-allied economists from around the world.  It draws on a collection of essays titled Exiting from the Crisis: A Model for More Equitable and Sustainable Growth released this April by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

The Labor Network for Sustainability hopes this review essay will kick off a wide-ranging discussion of how to create a more just and sustainable economy.

Labor, Sustainability, and Justice

Executive Summary

1. The Great Recession, which represented the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, was not an isolated episode, but rather the predictable result of the policies and dynamics of the last thirty years — the era of deregulation and global capital mobility known as “neoliberal globalization.” Even as some declare the crisis over, the basic problems that resulted from those policies and processes remain, as do their devastating impacts on working people around the world.

2. While the solution to the problems of the global economy is often described as “growth,” and growth is generally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in fact GDP does not measure the well-being of people and society but rather the quantity of commercial transactions. It measures some things that should grow and other things — like pollution-producing processes — that we would be better off with less of. In order to evaluate whether the economy is growing in the things that we want and shrinking in the things we don’t want we need a new economic guage. Fortunately, there are models being developed around the world that we can build on to create them.

3. The era of neoliberal globalization has been an era of growing inequality and injustice. A key cause of the Great Recession and our continuing economic difficulties is that underpaid and underemployed workers don’t have the purchasing power to provide strong and steady global demand. Policies to increase the purchasing power of poor and working people are working successfully in some places; applying them worldwide will be a critical part of exiting from the economic crisis.

4. The global economic crisis has hit at the time of a still greater crisis — the climate crisis. But saving the planet by transforming it to a low- carbon basis can be the motor that revives the kind of economic growth we need. A “global green new deal” can move the world toward full employment while saving it from climate destruction.

5. In the era of globalization, corporations have put workers, communities, and countries in competition with each other to see who will pro- vide the lowest wages, biggest subsidies, and weakest environmental regulations. The result is a “race to the bottom” in which the conditions of all are driven down and global demand is reduced. In response to the Great Recession, countries are desperately pursuing austerity and “beggar your neighbor” trade and monetary policies that aggravate the race to the bottom and produce a downward spiral of inadequate global demand. A global economy requires a high degree of global coordination to provide an alternative to such mutually destructive polices. Globally coordinated full employment policies and global protection of labor rights are essential for reversing the race to the bottom and the downward spiral.

6. The era of neoliberal globalization saw an enormous growth in the financial economy that stunted and continues to stunt development in the real economy. A series of policies ranging from regulation of banks and the “shadow” finance industry to taking some of the profit out of financial speculation with a “financial transaction tax” can help reduce the impact of this leech on the global economy.

7. Preoccupation with immediate short-term profits and stock prices has turned corporations into engines of unsustainabilty. New systems of corporate governance, accountability, and reporting are necessary to represent the interests of a wider range of stakeholders and to make them act in line with environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Expanding these systems is to the advantage of working people and the labor movement, especially if sustainability is defined broadly to include labor rights and the reduction of poverty.

8. Most current economic policies are continuing or even augmenting neoliberal globalization. They are not only failing to solve the problems that led to the Great Recession, they continue to make the climate crisis more and more catastrophic. The labor movement around the world is in a unique position to propose alternatives that are in the interest of the great majority everywhere. We need a lively discussion of an alter- native to the current economic and climate crises that can offer people real solutions as those crises affect them more and more profoundly.

Sometimes a decision forces you to think deeply about what you believe in and how you act on those beliefs.  It was like that when the climate protection leader Bill McKibben asked me to sign a letter calling for civil disobedience to block the building of a pipeline designed to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.  Opposing the pipeline might strain ties with unions that I’ve worked with and been part of for my whole adult life.  And yet the pipeline might be a tipping point that could hurtle us into ever more desperate acceleration of climate change.  Amid these conflicting pulls, what should I do?  Having lived at the confluence of trade unionism and environmentalism, what’s the right course of action – what has my life’s work meant?

I was born into a union family.  My dad worked in the steel mills in Lorain, Ohio and was a founder of the Steelworkers Union. My mom had been an organizer in the Clothing Workers Union in Cincinnati. I grew up near Cleveland and I walked the picket line with my dad during the 1959 steel strike.

My own trade union life began the day I walked through the factory doors at Capital Products Aluminum Corporation in Mechanicsburg, PA.  I was 17 years old, and I joined the United Steelworkers of America.  That summer I engaged in my first strike.  The following year Hurricane Agnes pounded the mid-Atlantic states; Central Pennsylvania was devastated, and the mill was flooded out.  So I joined the Laborer’s Union and went to work on construction.

That’s where I first learned something about working on pipelines.  I worked building the Texas-Eastern pipeline as it wound its way through the rolling hills of Central Pennsylvania.  Small teams of operating engineers, pipefitters, and laborers traveled across the state doing work we enjoyed and that we understood to be useful and important.  (We didn’t know then what we know now.)  It was a great job and I was a member of a great union, Laborer’s Local 158.  We formed friendships and shared a solidarity that touched us all deeply.

On another job building a railroad bridge across the Susquehanna river, a buddy of mine got fired by a hubris-filled college kid.  (The kid’s dad owned the construction company so the kid had been made chief foreman over all laborers.)  We struck and shut the job down.  The operating engineers, carpenters and ironworkers supported us.  Without that support we would have lost, but we won and my brother laborer was hired back.

These jobs helped me pay my way through college.  They also taught me a lot about solidarity and trade unionism, and helped launch me on a life-long pursuit of workers rights and jobs with justice, first as a local leader and eventually as an official with the AFL-CIO.

I grew up along the banks of Lake Erie and I learned at a tender age about the possibility of human threats to the environment.  I was there when they posted the signs telling us to stop swimming in the lake and stop eating the fish.  I’d already eaten hundreds of Lake Erie Yellow Perch and swallowed more of that lake water than I care to think about.

I also learned early about the potential conflict between protecting labor and protecting the environment.  In the 1970s I worked on the concrete crew during the construction of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and my local union put out a bumper sticker that read “Hungry and Out of Work?  Eat an Environmentalist.”

Since then I’ve devoted much of my life trying to bridge the gap between labor and environmental movements.  I’ve argued that both share a common interest in combining economic and social sustainability with environmental sustainability.  I’ve argued that “jobs vs. the environment” is a false choice.

Climate catastrophe

During my years with the AFL-CIO, I served on the UN commission on global warming from its inception in the mid-1980s thru the ‘90’s. I worked for many years to persuade the American labor movement to recognize the threat of global warming and to become a leader in addressing it.  I witnessed how the labor movement — and our country — ignored the science and opposed efforts to reverse global warming.  I’m glad that’s been changing  (Since that time much of the country, including much of the labor movement, has recognized the reality of global warming and supported green jobs that help reduce it.)

We’ve wasted more than two decades that could have been spent dealing with the problem.  We’ve already warmed the Earth by nearly one degree Celcius (C), causing floods, heat waves, forest fires, loss of food production and spike in food prices, stronger storms, the loss of glaciers, arctic ice, permafrost, and snow-pack, and much more.

The best science tell us that the carbon we’ve already put in the atmosphere will raise global temperatures by two degrees C (almost four degrees F) from pre-industrial levels even if we stop putting carbon in the atmosphere today.  And this is very, very bad news for the planet and its people.  We can, however, stop the increase from going to four degrees C, or seven degrees Fahrenheit (F), which would mean massive eco-system collapse – if we radically cut the carbon we are putting in the atmosphere.

The Keystone XL dilemma

Bill McKibben’s letter pointed out that burning the recoverable oil in the Alberta tar sands by itself would raise the carbon in the atmosphere by 200 parts per million (ppm).  It wasn’t hard to figure out that this would increase the 390 ppm carbon in the atmosphere today by more than half.  Indeed, it would increase the gap between the current level and the safe level of 350 ppm five-fold.

The letter called the pipeline “a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.”  It quoted the leading NASA climate change specialist Jim Hansen saying that tar sands “must be left in the ground.”  Indeed, “If the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over” for a viable planet.

It sounded like a pretty compelling case.  But there was another letter that made the question harder for me. It was a letter from the General Presidents of the Teamsters, Plumbers, Operating Engineers, and Laborers unions, the last of which helped give me my start as a kid.  Their letter enthusiastically supported the Keystone XL project, saying it will “pave a path to better days and raise the standard of living for working men and women in the construction, manufacturing, and transportation industries.” It will allow “the American worker” to “get back to the task of strengthening their families and the communities they live in.”  I’ve dedicated 35 years of my life to those goals.

Their position reflects the absolutely critical need for jobs. The Keystone Pipeline will provide a lot of good jobs.  (A company financed study claims it will create 118,000 jobs, though a government environmental impact statement says it will only create 5,000-6,000  and only for the three-year construction period. [http://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/pipeline-climate-disaster-the-keystone-xl-pipeline-and-labor/]  Many would be good paying union, middle class jobs – the kind with health care and other benefits.  And that at a time when the official unemployment rate is close to 10 percent and two million construction workers – one in five – are out of work.

A just transition to sustainability

In the long run, “jobs vs. the environment” is a false choice.  But the Keystone Pipeline reminds us of the painful reality that often, in our real day-to-day lives, there are jobs vs. environment choices with real immediate impacts.

I’ve often pleaded with my environmental and sustainability friends to understand that for me and my family for generations, indeed for all working people, sustainability starts at the kitchen table.  Every day we seek decent work so we can provide food, housing, and healthcare for our families and an education for our children.  Any job that does that helps provide for our sustainability.  But what are we to do if those jobs are also building an unsustainable future for ourselves and our children?

There is a solution to this dilemma.  Many of the jobs I had during the years I worked construction involved the kind of work that we need to make the transition to a low carbon economy, from railroad repair to bridge construction.  Today such work can be a central part of building a new energy system, saving our water infrastructure, building a new transportation system, and constructing sustainable cities — everything that’s necessary to halt our destruction of the climate.  We need to ensure that the transition to an economy that protects the climate is also a just transition that protects the livelihoods of those who through no fault of their own may have to pay the price of change.

The labor movement has become an enthusiastic supporter of “green jobs.”  But by and large it continues to support jobs that will lead to climate catastrophe.  There are many things that we should be building – but the Keystone XL Pipeline is not one of them.  Every dollar we invest in fossil fuels is not only a dollar that goes to intensify the climate crisis; it is also a dollar that we should instead be spending for the transition to renewable energy.

Labor has been critical of corporate short-term thinking, maximizing profits on a quarterly basis and not looking to the future.  Yet labor is guilty of similar short-term thinking when it comes to decisions related to climate and sustainability.  To be fair here, the job of today’s labor leader is beyond difficult – he or she has to balance the needs of workers who pay dues today with those of the future, and people pay dues to unions to protect their jobs.  But the truth is that this short-term thinking is bad for the planet and its people, and equally bad for the future of the labor movement.  As we build a labor movement for the 21^st Century our self-interest is best served by building a labor movement that is a part of the sustainability movement.

Recently West Virginians held a March on Blair Mountain to “abolish mountaintop removal,” but also to “strengthen labor rights” and invest in “sustainable job creation for all Appalachian communities.”  I hope those who march to halt the Keystone XL pipeline will also march for labor rights and sustainable – and sustaining — jobs.

My decision

My mom and dad were proud of their contribution to building the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), one of the two predecessors to today’s AFL-CIO.  They oftenreferred to the CIO not by its cumbersome real title but as “Community in Operation.”  That broad vision of trade unionism as a force for social good – a force for the betterment of all people — was a strong vision in labor’s past, and is what continues to motivate me today.

I believe in worker solidarity.  I believe that today we must expand that solidarity to human solidarity.  We must help each other protect and preserve this jewel floating in space – none other like it that we know of.

The famous labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” comes from the coal mining organizing battles of “bloody Harlan” County, KY.  The question then was, are you on the side of the bosses and the Sherriff, or the side of the workers?  That’s still crucial.  But I believe today we have to expand our worker solidarity to human solidarity; today that means acting together to halt climate catastrophe for all of us.

What I will tell my friends

When Bill McKibben asked me to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, I was concerned what might happen if I did.  I might look like an enemy of every worker who might gain a much needed pipeline job – denying them the very opportunity that let me support myself and pay for my own education.  I also feared it would strain my ties with some of the unions supporting the pipeline.  But if I was silent, wouldn’t my silence equal consent to something I knew would be devastating to the planet, its people, and to the labor movement itself?  I was talking the talk, but would I walk the walk?

I’ve decided to walk the walk.  And here is what I will tell my friends about why I am doing it:

To my friends in the labor movement I say:  We can’t build our future by destroying our future.  If labor is to have a sustainable future, it must be as a central player in the sustainability movement.  We must fight for jobs for our members that will truly “pave the way for better days” rather than destroying their and their children’s futures.  Support deep reductions in the burning of fossil fuels, support the measures climate science says are necessary to protect people and the planet, and rebuild the labor movement around the jobs of the future.

To those who might get a job on the pipeline I say:  We’re blocking the pipeline to save your future too.  But I know I won’t be able to look you in the eyes if I and those I am marching with don’t fight to make sure there are decent jobs for you and your kids — building the kind of world we need.

To my friends in the climate protection, environmental, and sustainability movements I say:  We can’t let climate protection make victims of workers who happen through no fault of their own to be in the way of changes that are necessary to protect the climate.  Work with us in the labor movement to better understand that sustainability starts at the kitchen table.  Support full employment policies, support Blue-Green Alliance’s Jobs 21 campaign, support the AFL-CIO’s program for full employment, and fight for a just transition that protects the wellbeing of workers and communities who may be hurt by side effects of climate protection policies through no fault of their own.

And to myself I say: I am marching not against the labor movement but for the labor movement, for the labor movement to be what I have always in my heart believed it to be.  To be the “community in operation” my parents fought for; the labor movement I have spent my life building; the labor movement that makes it possible for working people to fight for what they really need.

The time to begin drastic reductions in carbon emissions is past – we haven’t a moment to waste.  So, If not now, when?  If not this issue, what issue?

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 to save the ocean and its inhabitants.

Put down your fork — Whole Foods is not telling you the whole story. The dirty little secret of their seafood rating system is that it ignores the largest and most imminent threat to our oceans: greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if every human on the planet miraculously decided to buy only seafood stamped with the Whole Foods seal of “sustainablity,” marine species will still be doomed.

This is not a secret threat: Just last month, the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) — a consortium of 27 of the top ocean experts in the world — declared that effects of climate change, ocean acidification, and oxygen depletion have already triggered a “phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.” According to Dr. Alex Rogers, director of the IPSO [PDF]:

The findings are shocking. As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the ocean the implications became far worse than we had individually realized … We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime.

Sadly, in the era of climate crisis, overfishing and other forms of unsustainable harvest are the least of our problems. Rising carbon emissions are radically changing the chemical composition of our seas, having already contributed to the destruction of more than 85 percent of the world’s oyster reefs. Rising air temperatures are changing wind patterns, which is a major cause of more than 400 ocean “dead zones” devoid of oxygen and sea life. Species ranging from gray whales to plankton are fleeing their native habitats for the first time in nearly 2 million years as water temperatures rise.

In other words, while some marine species are threatened by overfishing, our entire ocean ecosystem is in peril — and all of our “sustainable” eating will be ashes in our mouths unless we urgently address the climate crisis.

So if buying tilapia from sustainable farms in Peru will not save the oceans, what will?

One modest first step is incorporating seafood’s carbon footprint into sustainability rating standards. More than 80 percent of our seafood is imported and the fishing industry burns through millions of gallons of fuel chasing declining fish stocks in ever more remote regions of the globe. Whole Foods and organizations like Seafood Watch, which produce consumer sustainable seafood guides, need to incorporate the emissions produced by the harvesting and transport of seafood into their rating systems.

Inclusion of the carbon footprints into rating systems will encourage consumers to seek out local, as opposed to global, seafood. Groups like FishChoice have already developed online mapping tools to help retailers and restaurants connect with fishers in their region. And more than 60 community-supported fisheries programs have sprung up in the last two years, allowing residents to buy a share of their local shellfish farms and receive fresh, hyper-local seafood in return.

But rescuing our oceans from the grip of the climate crisis will require more that editing seafood pocket guides. Instead of saving whales we need to save entire ecosystems.

This will require dedicating portions of the ocean to farming — while reserving large swaths for marine conservation parks. These farms need to be small and decentralized. Industrial aquaculture farms have rightly been branded as large-scale polluters producing low-quality food. Simply replacing destructive fishing fleets with destructive global fish farms will only hasten the demise of our oceans. Guided by principles of sustainability, our shorelines of the future can be dotted with organic fish farms servicing local communities.

But our ocean farms can do more than grow food — they can also produce green energy. Wind and algae farms need to be integrated with oyster and salmon operations. With some careful planning, this is our opportunity to build a decentralized network of alternative energy and seafood farms growing food, generating power, and creating jobs for local communities.

Such transformation of the oceans will surely be controversial. Our oceans are revered as some of the last wild spaces on Earth — ungoverned and untouched by human development. But all those who love the blue sea need to confront the brutal reality that unless we reimagine our waters as agrarian eco-spaces designed to curb seafood’s carbon footprint, our wild oceans will be dead oceans.

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 jobs, it is hardly surprising that unions representing construction, transportation, and related workers pricked up their ears.

The project is the Keystone XL Pipeline. It will take oil produced from tar sands in Alberta, Canada 1,959 miles to Nederland, Texas.

The General Presidents of the Teamsters, Plumbers, Operating Engineers, and Laborers unions say the project will “pave a path to better days and raise the standard of living for working men and women in the construction, manufacturing, and transportation industries.” It will allow “the American worker” to “get back to the task of strengthening their families and the communities they live in.”

It sounds good. But before supporting the project, we need to take a deeper look at whether this project — and the energy practices it will make possible — will really lead to “better days” for working men and women, their families, and their communities. We need to know whether there are dangers that make the project more of a threat than a promise. And we need to know whether the claims made for its benefits are really true.

What is the Keystone XL Pipeline?

Under the forest in northern Alberta, Canada lie the world’s largest deposits of so-called “tar sands,” sand mixed with thick, tar-like oil. To produce one barrel of heavy crude oil from tar sands requires strip mining the forest, extracting four tons of earth, contaminating two to four barrels of fresh water, burning large amounts of natural gas, and creating vast holding ponds of toxic sludge. Production of this oil is increasing and a growing amount of it is already being shipped to the US.

The Keystone XL will be a 36-inch crude oil pipeline stretching nearly 2,000 miles from Hardisty, Alberta through Saskatchewan, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma to terminals at Nederland, Texas on the Gulf of Mexico. Tar sands oil will be heated to more than 150 degrees and pumped through it at high pressure. It is designed to carry more than eight hundred thousand barrels of crude oil extracted from oil sands to refineries in the US.

Does the Keystone XL hold a hidden threat?

The Keystone XL pipeline is a key link in an energy path that will lead to devastation for the American working families we are told it will provide “better days.” Here’s why.

We’ve all heard about global warming caused by the emission of carbon and other “greenhouse gasses” into the atmosphere. Despite the claims of a political faction that it is a myth, there is a near-total consensus among climate scientists that it is real and that and that it will cause devastating climate change. That means rising sea levels, an ever-increasing number of extreme weather events like droughts, floods, and heat waves, and consequences like forest fires and species extinction.

We can see these effects emerging right now. 2010 was tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record. Rising sea levels, heat waves, forest fires, tornadoes, floods - their rising frequency and destructiveness are not in some distant future, but right now. As Scientific American recently noted,

In this year alone massive blizzards have struck the U.S. Northeast, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China and devastated Colombia. And this year’s natural disasters follow on the heels of a staggering litany of extreme weather in 2010, from record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan, to Russia’s crippling heat wave.

Scientists calculate that the safe level for carbon in the atmosphere is 350 parts per millions. But we are already significantly over that level — which is why we are already facing devastating climate change. Only by drastically limiting our carbon emissions can we limit still greater devastation.

Why is a single pipeline — the Keystone XL — so important to this story? Because it is the key link in an energy strategy that will radically escalate carbon emissions still further.

The energy strategy is to introduce large quantities of oil from Canadian tar sands. According to the US Department of Environmental Protection, the greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian oil sands crude oil will be more than 80% greater than oil refined in the US. Independent estimates run up to three times more global warming pollution than conventional oil.

Once the Keystone XL is in place, a wide area of the US will become dependent on oil from Canadian tar sands. With no available alternative, pressure will grow to import more and more of it. Even more dangerous, the pipeline will lock in dependence on fossil fuels for decades to come and remove the pressure to convert to renewable alternatives.

The Alberta tar sands are estimated to contain enough carbon to raise carbon emissions in the atmosphere by 200 parts per million. That would increase the current level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere by more than half. It would be more than enough to create more climate change than in the entire history of humanity on earth. It would also render pointless all other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As leading climate scientist James Hanson put it, “If the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over. There is no practical way to capture the co2 while burning oil.” We “cannot get back to a safe CO2 level” if “unconventional fossil fuels, like tar sands are exploited.”

There are also a multitude of other problems with the project. Tar sands extraction is already devastating native lands in Alberta. Other recently built pipelines are already leaking and spilling large quantities of oil into the US environment. The pipeline threatens the aquifer that is critical for Midwestern agriculture and drinking water. The tar sand oil carry some of the deadliest chemicals, including nickel, vanadium, lead, chromium, mercury, arsenic, selenium, and benzene

But isn’t the Keystone XL pipeline part of a balanced energy policy?

The trade union leaders’ letter to Secretary Clinton acknowledges the criticism that “further development of Canada’s oil sands puts in jeopardy U.S. efforts aimed at capping carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses.” It presents as an answer a position that has often been stated by spokespeople for US labor: “Comprehensive energy and environmental policy should strive to address climate concerns while simultaneously ensuring adequate supplies of reliable energy and promoting energy independence and national security.”

Such a “balanced policy” sounds reasonable. But the problem is that in practice it means putting off the necessary sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions for further decades, guaranteeing that the climate catastrophe will grow worse and worse.

Indeed, the letter goes on to say, “Alternative energy sources are generally still in developmental stages; therefore it is likely the U.S. Consumer will remain substantially dependent on carbon fuels for the next several decades.”

Any policy based on the assumption that the US will “remain substantially dependent on carbon fuels for the next several decades” is condemning American working people, all Americans, and indeed the entire world to a fate worse than humanity has ever known.

Are the job claims real or fraudulent?

The letter to Hilary Clinton states that the pipeline will “spur the creation of 118,000 jobs.” The headline of a statement by the American Petroleum Institute reads “API: Keystone XL Pipeline bill will create hundreds of thousands of new American jobs.” The It quotes an API official that “US jobs supported by Canadian oil sands development could grow from 21,000 jobs today to 465,000 jobs by 2035.”

How many jobs will the pipeline really produce? The US State Department examined that question in its draft environmental impact statement on the project. Here’s what it found, based on information supplied it by the Pipeline builder TransCanada:

Construction of the proposed Project, including the pipeline and pump stations, would result in hiring approximately 5,000 to 6,000 workers over the 3 year construction period. As indicated above, it is expected that roughly 10 to 15 percent of the construction workforce would be hired from local labor markets, thus 500 to 900 local workers throughout the entire region of influence would be hired.

After the State Department issued its report, TransCanada commissioned a consultant named the Perryman Group. The job estimates it came up were roughly 13 times greater than those from the environmental impact study. The following table compares the State Department figures with those of the TransCanada-funded Perryman Group:

The Perryman Group figures added in estimates for “indirect job creation.” How reliable are these figures? Take just one example: The State Department, based on figures supplied by TransCanada, said that the pipeline would create 938-1560 construction jobs in Nebraska. The Perryman Group study claimed that this would create 7,551 “indirect” jobs, including more than 800 retail jobs. So every every pipeline worker is expected to create from one-half to one full job for a retail worker! No wonder the Perryman Group study includes — in fine print — the following disclaimer: “This news release may contain certain information that is forward looking and is subject to important risks and uncertainties. . . . Readers are cautioned top not place undue reliance on this forward looking information.”

What should labor do?

In the midst of the Great Recession, workers and their unions are desperate for jobs. Knowing this, and faced with strong public opposition, TransCanada came and dangled what appeared to be a sweet deal before major unions: a “project labor agreement” which would provide the hiring of union workers under union conditions on much of the project. They also loudly trumpeted their study claiming that the project would create 118,000 jobs — when the company’s own figures showed that the project would actually hire only 5,000 to 6,000 workers over the 3 year construction period, a large proportion of them not high-paid, high-skill jobs but low-skilled, low-paid pick and shovel jobs.

For a long time, many American unions — including the Teamsters’ — similarly supported oil drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. But then the Teamsters’ went through a reappraisal and withdrew from the coalition that supported the drilling. Union president James Hoffa explained why:

Global warming is for real. Air pollution is killing people and making our children sick. And you know what? We share some of the blame. In the past, we were forced to make a false choice. The choice was: Good Jobs or a Clean Environment. We were told no pollution meant no jobs. If we wanted clean air, the economy would suffer and jobs would be sent overseas. Well guess what? We let the big corporations pollute and the jobs went overseas anyway. We didn’t enforce environmental regulations and the economy still went in the toilet. The middle class got decimated and the environment is on the brink of disaster. Well I say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! No more false divides. The future, if we are to prosper as a nation, will lie in a green economy.

Clean renewable energy and energy conservation are cheaper than new, unconventional fossil fuels. They are available right now. Many studies have shown that dollar for dollar they produce far more jobs — including jobs for the very workers who might find jobs on the Keystone XL pipeline. Labor should reconsider the pipeline the same way the Teamsters’ reconsidered oil drilling in the Arctic. If labor is to use its political clout to secure more jobs, the best way to do so is to fight for a new energy economy that rapidly phases out carbon-emitting fossil fuels and even more rapidly replaces them with renewable energy and conservation. That is the only real way to provide “better days” for American workers.

[For more on green jobs, see Blue-Green Alliance Jobs21 campaign and Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy.]