Has Climate Made Up With Labor? (and Other Messy Conversations)

Source: Has Climate Made Up With Labor? (and Other Messy Conversations)

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Labor and climate policy

…Historically, telling labor that environmental policy is bad for workers has been a pretty effective strategy. Back in the early 1900s, environmentalists and labor unions often shared common enemies: Don’t forget it was coal companies on the receiving end of many of the first major labor strikes in a lot of countries. Fossil fuel companies spotted this as a problem early on and made big moves to ally themselves with labor, paying higher-than-average wages for unskilled jobs, committing to long-term job security, providing great benefits; and the unions in turn would show up for the industry when it needed to fight a green building code, environmental regulation or climate policy.

This time it didn’t work. When auto execs and politicians like Josh Hawley (R-MO) tried to say that electrification or “climate policy” was to blame for low salaries or the loss of jobs, United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain simply wasn’t here for it. Quickly and clearly he corrected it every time: That’s not why this is happening, it’s happening because of x, y, and z and also if any of that were true executive pay wouldn’t have increased so much over the same period of time. Boom. Simple. And the message consistency was awe-inspiring. But also for the first time since I started covering climate 20 years ago, I saw the climate movement show up for labor in real and productive ways. I heard from organizers that were working tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure that climate folks understood what was at stake here and that they didn’t fuck it up.

And it WORKED. The whole “it’s climate policy’s fault” talking point never stuck, the union won, and the climate movement learned another important lesson about intersectionality. It’s the first glimmer of hope I’ve seen that climate and labor could really be friends, and hell I think we could all use some optimism at the moment.

Encouraging Journalists To Be Lazy Is Not A Climate Solution!

Been ranting a lot about something lately and thought it might make sense to share that rant with this community: there is an increasing desire in the climate NGO space to want to effectively do journalists’ jobs for them, to provide all the investigative work, research, source vetting, and documents to tee up an investigation. I understand the drive. Climate coverage is better now than it’s ever been but it’s still not great and I can count the number of investigative climate journos with the time, bandwidth and skills to do their own enterprise reporting on one hand…okay maybe two. BUT, training journalists to be lazy is a dangerous game. Training newsrooms to leave investigative work to someone else is an even more dangerous one. Today you’ve got that NYT reporter checking sources with you; do you really think they’ll be impervious to the influence of your enemy tomorrow? In an interview years ago the great Melissa Aronczyk got me really focusing on the entire PR apparatus as being a problem – the warping of information, the hijacking of the media, is a net negative for democracy, whether it’s being done by someone you agree with or not. I wish climate NGOs would invest instead in actual newsrooms, or in the organizations training folks in the newsrooms (like Covering Climate Now for example). A lot of NGO investigators were formerly journalists, pushed out either because it’s damn near impossible to make a living as an investigative journalist or because they were consistently being muzzled by the higher ups. It’d be great to see literally ANY of the orgs focused on climate, particularly climate and disinfo, turn their attention to fixing the structural issues in #media rather than exploiting them.