Green Economy

Chicago Teachers Win Greener Schools

April 17, 2025 Nick Limbeck and Lauren Bianchi, Labor Notes. Create! Chicago, Education, Green Economy, Public schools

The Chicago Teachers Union won a tentative agreement in December that, for the first time, addresses climate and environmental justice demands—making healthy green schools a priority in our city. We achieved this breakthrough even while broader contract negotiations stalled. Finally, in April, we ratified the full agreement, which also includes big raises and lower class sizes. Our environmental justice victory stems from a collaboration between teachers and environmental activists to expose urgent problems facing us and our students—and link those problems to larger struggles.

Organizing To ‘Green’ Your Job: What Works?

March 30, 2025 Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes. Strategize! Green Economy, health, Unions, Worker Rights

Stewards often build fights around small issues, and they need to. But stewards also have a special charge to stay ahead of the boss—to think big about shifting power on the job, including by driving the move to green production. The union can fight smarter when it’s not just reacting to the boss’s plans—when members have talked over their own goals for making work different. The first task is to open up talk beyond the usual suspects. No matter the good intentions, passing resolutions and creating isolated green committees doesn’t flex much worker power.

How To Build An Ecological Economy

October 30, 2024 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. Create! Communities, Community, De-growth, Food Security, Green Economy

This is the second part of a scenario for how a city comes together to address the multiple economic, social and environmental crises facing our world. The first part of the scenario is here. It covers how the city creates basic frameworks of life. How it gains control of its own finances and local economy through creating a public bank. How it ensures everyone has shelter through creation of social and community housing. How clean energy is supplied while energy use is reduced through creation of community energy cooperatives. In this part, the scenario will cover how the city develops the basics of an ecological economy not dependent on endless economic growth.

Your Mind Is A Battlefield: Decolonize It To Prevent Global Catastrophe!

October 2, 2024 K. J. Noh, Popular Resistance. Educate! Anniversary, China, climate crisis, Communism, Green Economy, Transformation

It's a great honor for me to join you in this extraordinary, historical moment of celebration and reflection on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. As has been said, we are seeing changes unseen in a century. Changes both great and terrible. We are currently seeing the unravelling of Empire--and its last desperate, violent, hideous death rattle. We are seeing the unmasking of 500 years of western "civilization", and the laying bare of its hypocrisy and unspeakable brutality. We are seeing the true face of capitalist imperialism, not its made up public relations face, but its resting bastard face. It's not pretty. One of the precipitating factors of the end of Empire--not the only one, but a very important one, because it allows countries to resist hegemony together--is the rise of China.

The Oil Crash Is Coming Sooner Than We Think

April 18, 2024 Rachel Donald, Resilience. Educate! Energy, Fossil Fuels, Green Economy, Oil and Gas

Oil in the North Sea is expected to be net-energy negative by 2031. This means that in 2031, it’ll cost more energy to extract the fossil fuels than we would gain by using them, rendering extraction unfeasibly expensive. Yet, rather than use our remaining years of access to these fuels to turbo-charge new energy infrastructure, fossil fuels are being extracted and burned for business as usual: quick cash. Around the world, the lights will go off in nations that don’t have back-up renewables. That’s most of them. I interviewed Alister Hamilton, Director of Zero Emissions Scotland.

Climate-Science Deniers Are Plotting Against The Clean Energy Transition

March 17, 2024 Rebecca Burns, DeSmog. Educate! Big Oil, Clean Energy, climate denial, Energy, Fossil Fuels, Green Economy, Oil and Gas

Last July, a small group of rabble-rousers boarded a trio of powerboats, banners and bullhorns in hand. They were headed for the massive floating construction site of an offshore wind farm 35 miles from the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. As the boats motored through the swells, the self-styled activists broke into a chorus of pleas for the wind farm construction to cease—chants likely intended less for the still-faraway workers than for the camera there to capture footage. “Hear this message: We’re here to save the whales!” called out a man in a black polo shirt.

This Emerging Green Technology Could Decarbonize Buildings

January 10, 2024 Sara Van Horn, In These Times. Create! Energy, Green Economy, Green Transition, Just transition

In early 2021, an award-winning design for a “thermal energy network” caught the eye of John Murphy. The design was part of a proposal to decarbonize Empire Plaza in Albany, N.Y., and it featured a series of underground water pipes that balanced the heating and cooling systems of adjacent buildings. As the International Representative of the New York State Pipe Trades Association, which represents around 25,000 workers across New York State, Murphy had been searching for an renewable energy solution for his members. In his seven years in the position, he has seen how some of the state’s current approaches to the clean energy transition — namely closing power plants without providing alternate jobs — have often left his members unemployed.

Working For Climate Justice: Report Urges Unions To Lead Transition

December 5, 2023 Queen Mary University of London. Create! Green Economy, Just transition, Report, Trade Unions, United Kingdom (UK), Worker Rights

Ahead of COP28 the UN warns that the world is facing ‘hellish’3C of climate heating, and with European lawmakers urging COP28 climate summit to take aim at fossil fuels, a new report published today from the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice and Institute of Employment Rights, reveals why trade unions need to put climate bargaining at the centre of everything they do and maps out the steps that must be taken to achieve this. The report, ‘Working for Climate Justice: Trade unions in the front line against climate change’ asserts that until now, the trade union movement has failed to make climate change a core concern of their bargaining agendas.

Revealed: Meetings Blitz Between Big Ag And Anti-Green Lawmakers

October 5, 2023 Clare Carlile, DeSmog. Educate! Big Ag, Corporate lobbying, Europe, Food and Agriculture, Green Economy, Transparency

Agriculture lobby groups have been in constant contact with a small group of influential European politicians, holding an average of over two meetings a week while the bloc negotiated flagship reforms to protect nature and climate, DeSmog can reveal. Between January 2020 and July 2023, over 400 meetings took place between industry and key members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who have been at the forefront of efforts to stall reforms since the Farm to Fork strategy launched in 2020. DeSmog documented meetings held by six MEPs from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the largest group in parliament.

Laid-Off Sierra Club Staffers: ‘We Can’t Give Up On United Fronts’

September 3, 2023 Brooke Anderson, Hop Hopkins, and Michelle Mascarenhas, Portside. Organize! Climate Justice, Frontline Community, Green Economy, Liberal class, Sierra Club

For the last decade, climate justice organizers have seen the Sierra Club as a critical lever for moving a climate agenda that centers equity and just transition. It has the largest grassroots base outside of labor, the most substantial infrastructure of any national green group in the US, and roots in a movement that at times was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with large corporations or development-oriented pro-business government entities. But beginning in May, the organization accelerated a restructuring process that included layoffs of the entire equity and environmental justice teams and of senior staffers, several Black women and other women of color among them.

In A Summer Of Record Heat, Striking Workers Are Making Climate Demands

August 9, 2023 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. Resist! climate crisis, Green Economy, Strikes, Wabtec, Worker Rights and Jobs

July was the hottest month on record—possibly the hottest in the history of human civilization — and August is bringing more scorching temperatures and supercharged storms. On July 16, the heat index at the Persian Gulf International Airport weather station in Iran climbed to 152 degrees Fahrenheit, a level that tests humanity’s ability to survive. Meanwhile, in vast swaths of the United States, people watched smoke from Canadian wildfires turn their skies noxious hues of orange and gray, only to then be hit with storms and heat waves. The scientific consensus has long held that climate change is human-made and real.

A Just Transition To A New, Greener Life

August 1, 2023 Cristina Carro, Portside. Create! Coal Mining, Green Economy, Just transition, Mining, Spain

My blood is as black as coal. We’re all miners in my family: niece, daughter, granddaughter, sister, cousin, wife, mother... It’s not like I was born with a piece of coal in my hand, but almost, like everybody else in these parts. When the coal mine shut down, it was a total disaster. There was no work. Young people started to leave, the villages became desolate, businesses closed. You carry those roots deep inside you. We are a different kind of people. We see things from a different perspective. You get used to living with fear. You make it your ally. When I was little I saw how nervous my mother was for my father. Later I was the same when my husband and my son also went down the mines.

Climate Groups Announce Global Days Of Action

August 1, 2023 Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams. Resist! climate crisis, Green Economy, National Day of Action, Renewable Energy

The climate justice group 350.org on Monday announced upcoming global days of action—November 3 and 4—aimed at accelerating the worldwide transition to clean energy. "On every continent, in big cities and on small islands, we'll take action to show that a global renewable energy revolution is within our reach," says a new website where people can sign up to participate in what 350.org and its partners are calling Power Up. "We'll spotlight the oil industry's greed and reclaim the money and power to fund a just future powered by the sun and the wind." "We are taking to the streets because we are outraged," the website states.

Protest At BIW Destroyer ‘Christening’ – Arsenal Of Hypocrisy

July 30, 2023 Bruce K. Gagnon, Space for Peace. Resist! Green Economy, Maine, Transformation, US military, Wars and Militarism

On Saturday, 23 activists from around the state gathered on very short notice to protest at another Aegis destroyer 'christening' at Bath Iron Works (owned by General Dynamics) here in Maine. In the past the event was open to the public with weeks advance notification. But after a series of large protests and several high profile civil resistance actions things have changed. In current times there are only a few days notice and attendance is by invitation only. The past long lines of the general public wishing to enter are over. These destroyers are outfitted with nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles as well as so-called 'missiles defense' systems.

Whose Green Transition? Ours!

April 29, 2023 Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes. Organize! Green Economy, Just transition, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Huge changes are coming for our workplaces, quick as a heat wave. This month Joe Biden inked new rules to make all-electrics the majority of new cars sold in America within a decade. To charge all those batteries, many of the largest states are pushing to power their grids with two-thirds clean energy by the same deadline. These green shifts have put billion-dollar signs in the eyes of bosses. Public cash is pouring out to subsidize cleaner manufacturing and energy. Corporations aim to cash in double by cutting unions out.

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