What I Do
IBEW helps build Busch Gardens' newest roller coaster.
IBEW helps build Busch Gardens' newest roller coaster.
Thank you, Dave [Foster], for your kind introduction. I’m glad to be here with all of you to talk about the importance of this alliance.
The twin crises of global climate change and joblessness demand that we do great things. Facing each alone is a staggering task, but together these challenges offer us a measure of hope. The climate situation can only be solved if we retool our world—our factories and power plants, our homes and offices, rail lines and vehicles, locomotives and planes, schools and hospitals. They all must be modernized, upgraded, renovated or replaced with something cleaner, more efficient, less wasteful.
We have to fix the leaks and seeps in America’s natural gas and oil pipelines, and we have to keep developing green technology and so much more.
That transformation means jobs. It means opportunities for economic growth. It means building a path to a healthier world and a healthier world economy—one less dependent on volatile energy prices, one where more of us have the things that modern energy makes possible.
That’s how America can retake our position as the world leader in innovation—by stepping forward to meet this challenge. To do it, we need a comprehensive energy and jobs bill that all of us can get behind. It cannot be done piecemeal. It has to be big.
On that point, allow me to commend my friends Leo Gerard, whose vision led to the founding of the BlueGreen Alliance, and President Billy Hite of the United Association, who in the last few months has seen the opportunity for the BlueGreen Alliance to stop dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and create good jobs by repairing and upgrading America’s pipeline network.
And I want to commend the Sierra Club for its role in founding the BlueGreen Alliance with the Steelworkers, and Michael Brune for continuing its steadfast commitment to supporting workers' right to organize. Now, we have not always seen eye to eye on how to address climate change, but what is important about the BlueGreen Alliance is the idea of the labor movement and the environmental movement working together to build on our common values and interests. At the heart of this is our shared belief that human beings and the planet we share with all creation must be treated as having a value and a dignity far beyond the profits that can be wrung out of them.
Yet despite all the good work by everyone in this room, the only way we can meet the enormous size of our challenges is with a comprehensive energy and jobs bill. A comprehensive energy and jobs bill needs to get to President Obama’s desk, and it needs to get there this year.
Now, I’ll be honest, I can just about hear the quote-unquote political realists who point to the quagmire in Congress and think: Comprehensive energy and jobs bill? Not a chance.
Well, let me just say that last year this time, not many political realists imagined that we would be standing on the brink of comprehensive immigration reform.
Skepticism is healthy, but I’ll tell you something: The naysayers are shortchanging the potential size and power of a movement that combines environmentalists and labor and business. We’ve operated for a long time with incremental change. But I believe that together it is possible for us to spark a sea-change, something to turn all that so-called conventional wisdom on its head. But to make that happen, we’ve got to get our work into high gear.
And let me say two things as directly as I can: First, for the record, I want to make it crystal clear that we firmly believe in and trust a science-based approach to regulating our environment, and we know climate change is real. We also know responding to climate change will give America a competitive economic advantage in the global marketplace.
Second, I reject the notion that we’re engaged in a zero-sum game, that for one of us to win means a loss to the other, that cleaning and greening our environment means destruction of jobs. Sometimes, that's the way it is. It can't be that way anymore, because it tears us apart. We need to be together. We’re stronger together—and we can’t let ourselves be divided. Working people—especially people in poor communities—cannot bear the cost of tackling climate change alone. It would be wrong to ask us to bear that burden. And politically it won’t work.
The reality is we need each other. We have to be able to rely on each other. And we have to be able to both know what it means to walk in each other's shoes and to tell each other the truth. I understand the desperation of the scientific community faced with the prospect of runaway global warming. But the only path to success lies in the scientific and environmental community having a similar understanding of the desperation of the unemployed construction worker, the laid-off manufacturing worker and the devastated coal community.
When we understand both the climate crisis and the jobs crisis, together we can set our sights on more projects like the Transportation and Jobs for America Project developed by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. This is a new kind of blue-green partnership, bringing together the Brookings Institution, a number of universities and a coalition of trade unions and community groups including the BlueGreen Alliance. This project levels the playing field for high road employers bidding on rail car and bus manufacturing procurements by incentivizing commitments to good jobs, domestic production and a long-term investment in disadvantaged communities.
Let me give you another example of the kind of support for one another that can build our relationship.
Just last month, I took part in a rally in West Virginia challenging a company called Patriot Coal, which is about the worst-named company I’ve ever heard of. This is a company that was formed by Peabody Coal and rigged to fail, so Peabody could shed pension obligations to the coal miners who made that company rich.
No company called “patriot” should ever do what Patriot Coal has done.
Patriot Coal stands for everything wrong in America today, and working people are sick of it.
So I went to a rally at a bankruptcy court in West Virginia. Thousands of miners were there, and thousands of other workers, and other supporters. It was beautiful and inspiring. It gave me a lot of hope. This is personal for me, because I was a coal miner, just like my father and my grandfather.
Well, I have to say, I was absolutely thrilled to see Van Jones from Green For All call out Patriot Coal on TV, and to see a Bloomberg opinion column by the environmentalist Bill McKibben, who made the argument that it isn’t good for anyone, not for anybody in America, for coal companies to treat working people and retirees like this.
Now I don’t agree with everything Bill McKibben writes, but it felt really good to see an environmentalist stand up for coal miners. That’s what real and productive relationships are built on.
Both labor and environmentalists are good friends to have in a pinch, truly. The investments we make in this relationship will pay huge dividends.
It’s time for us to take our commitment to each other to new heights. Right now, to be completely frank with you, our alliance is too often too fragile in too many places. Let’s change that.
We have a tremendous chance today -- and ironically, it’s because of our vulnerability.
If you look around at the fault lines in American politics, you’ll see that the institutions that safeguard America’s environment are under serious attack, and so are working people everywhere.
The anti-regulation crowd is out to destroy job safety and labor rights protections just as much as it wants to tear apart environmental protections.
We can all duck down into a defensive crouch, or we can get up, step up and stand together. We can look with clear eyes at the things that might divide us -- pipelines and coal mines and whatever else -- and then join forces to put our priorities together, because I know what we share is greater than one issue over here and another over there.
When it comes down to it, the blue-green coalition is joined at the hip, whether we like it or not, and the more we acknowledge that and build on it, the better off we both will be—and the better off working families will be, and the environment we all share.
So let’s change Washington. Let’s unite in a way that makes the pundits’ heads spin. I think we can do it. I want to do it. And I think you do, too.
Thank you.
