“The California Jobs Initiative.”  Sounds like a good idea.  After all, California’s unemployment rate is now over twelve percent.

But there’s something a little funny here.  Turns out that the main financial backers of the “California Jobs Initiative” are a bunch of oilmen from Texas.  Texas-based Valero Energy Corporation gave a cool half-million, and along with them Texas oil companies with names like Tesoro Oil, Tower Energy Group of Torrance, World Oil Corporation of Houston, Southern Counties Oil, and JACO have contributed 70 percent of the funding for the “California Jobs Initiative.”  All told 89 percent comes from oil companies.  Valero, Tesoro, and other contributors own refineries in California that would be forced to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the law.

Hmm, what’s that about?  The answer begins to come into focus when you look at what the “California Jobs Initiative” initiates.  The initiative would suspend the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, known as AB 32, which established a comprehensive program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.  The law would remain suspended until California’s unemployment drops to 5.5 percent for a full year. (In the last twenty years it has only dropped to 5.5 percent for a year two times, in 2000 and 2006, and it is now over 12 percent.) (more…)

by Joe Uehlein

“There are no jobs on a dead planet.” That’s how one union leader answered those who say that unions should be concerned only about jobs, and leave the planet to someone else to take care of.

Many unions and both labor federations hailed Barack Obama’s bold talk about solving America’s jobs crisis by putting millions of people to work in “green jobs” that would solve the climate crisis by transforming America to a low-carbon economy. Obama’s stimulus bill emphasized renewable energy and energy conservation; many unions and state labor departments have added “green” programs to their job training.

But many workers feared that the transition to a low-carbon economy would destroy existing jobs, and they wondered if anything would be done to protect the workers who held them. Some union leaders, meanwhile, worried that green jobs might be lousy jobs that would only accelerate the deterioration of wages and conditions. (more…)

By Joe Uehlein
 
The approach of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 provides us an opportunity to reflect on the “long, strange trip” shared by the environmental movement and the labor movement over four decades here on Spaceship Earth.
 
A billion people participate in Earth Day events, making it the largest secular civic event in the world.  But when it was founded in 1970, according to Earth Day’s first national coordinator Denis Hayes, “Without the UAW, the first Earth Day would have likely flopped!”
 
Less than a week after he first announced the idea for Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson presented his proposal to the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO.  Walter Ruther, President of the UAW, enthusiastically donated $2000 to help kick the effort off – to be followed by much more.  (more…)

By Brendan Smith

Thanks to greenhouse gas emissions, it’s looking like my days as a commercial fisherman are numbered.

I’ve been working the sea on-and-off my whole life. At 15 years old I quit high school to work the lobster boats out of Lynn, MA; later I fished cod and crab boats on the Bering Sea. As over-fishing decimated the cod stocks, I headed back home to Newfoundland to try my hand as a fish farmer growing halibut and salmon.

Now I’m an oyster man, growing 100,000 organic oysters a year on a 40 acre plot in the Long Island Sound. I see myself as a new breed of green fisherman, who have shifted from hunter-gatherers trolling the seas in search of declining fish stocks, to ocean-based farmers, sustainably growing shellfish on small plots of ocean acreage for local markets. (more…)