Workers and Sustainability

American Labor: A Sustainable Path by Joe Uehlein

This Labor Day, as union membership falls to a mere seven percent of private sector workers and bargaining and political clout shrink to match, two roads diverge for American labor. One is to attempt to find a niche within an economic-political system that is ever more shaped by short-term greed and is therefore ever more unsustainable economically, socially, and environmentally. The other is to align with the long-term interest of workers in transforming that system to provide for a sustainable future for the planet and its people. Organized labor will have a better future if it chooses the second road.
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To have a future itself, organized labor needs to reorient itself around the objective of providing a sustainable future for all working people and the world we inhabit. That means putting millions of people to work creating a sustainable economy, society, and environment.

Nothing is more threatening to our long-term sustainability than climate change. It is affecting American workers here and now through forest fires, dust storms, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events like floods, droughts, tornados, blizzards and hurricanes. So far this year there have been an unprecedented eight weather-related disasters that have each done more than a billion dollars worth of damage to states from Texas to Maine.

The Great Recession represented the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Even during the so-called recovery, American workers continued to face unemployment rates unprecedented since the Great Depression. Now as that recovery falters, the private sector appears to have little to offer besides more unemployment, more insecurity, more wage cuts, and more misery.

It will take the labor of millions of people to reconstruct our economy on a climate safe basis. The solution for labor, as for America and indeed for the world, lies in a Green New Deal to mobilize our unused human resources to meet our increasingly desperate needs.

....read rest of article at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/01-13

Joe Uehlein is the former secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department and former director of the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Campaigns. Joe is the Executive Director of Voices for a Sustainable Future. He spent over 30 years doing organizing, bargaining, and strategic campaign work in the labor movement. He also performs regularly with his roots-rock revival band The U-Liners.
[He is also on the Advisory Board of the National Jobs for All Coalition.--jz]

Posted by National Jobs for All at 5:16 PM    

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Sustainable Bonds Hope to Help Fix the Planet

Sustainable Bonds Hope to Help Fix the Planet - NYTimes.com:

By SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP

Published: November 3, 2010

SINGAPORE — Financial experts may debate how much it would cost to shift the world to a low carbon economy, but they agree on one thing: the amount would be phenomenal. The International Energy Agency in Paris, for example, has estimated that it would take $46 trillion in additional clean-technology investments over the next 40 years to halve carbon emissions by 2050.

...Today, funds mobilized to address climate change are primarily coming from the private sector. While there is also some public investment, there remains a clear gap between what is needed to deal with climate change and what is available. How to close that gap has become a subject of intense debate.

For Ben Caldecott, head of the British and European Union policy department at Climate Change Capital, a London-based environmental investment manager, the answer is clear. “The only pool of capital deep enough to finance our low carbon transition is that held by institutional investors and players in the debt capital markets,” Mr. Caldecott said. “New green bonds are a way of accessing this pool of money.”

But, he cautioned: “Investors want to see a liquid market in long-dated asset-backed bonds that are investment grade and those criteria have yet to be met for green bonds. The market will buy these new debt products, but for this to happen at scale we need to create a liquid market first. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg story.”

Sean Kidney, chairman and co-founder of the Climate Bonds Initiative — an international network that advocates raising money through the bond market for climate protection projects — argues that “themed” bonds have long been a way to raise large sums of money for specific purposes.

For example, “the U.S. civil war was financed with war bonds,” Mr. Kidney told delegates at a carbon conference in Singapore last week. “Although these war bonds were targeted at retail investors, most of the money raised came from institutional investors.”

The retail investors’ campaign served to engage the population, creating political pressures that drew in the institutions, Mr. Kidney said, suggesting that themed climate change bonds could be used in a similar way to mobilize retail and institutional investors on the issue.

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Posted by Chuck Bell at 5:09 AM    

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