Who’s Up For Some “Green” Union Jobs?

It’s always interesting how the so-called science issue of ‘climate change’ ends up being mostly about left-wing politics, eh?

New York aims to fight climate change by creating green union jobs

As global warming has worsened in recent years, environmentalists and union members have often protested against each other, whether over fracking, oil pipelines, coal production or the Green New Deal.

But an innovative new labor-environmentalist effort in New York – to build offshore wind turbines to power up to 6m homes – is a sharp departure from all that feuding and shows that these two groups can work together to advance renewable energy and reduce dependence on carbon-based energy.

Giving this plan a vital boost, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has announced plans to have the state’s energy authority invest billions of dollars to build hundreds of offshore wind turbines. For Cuomo, this plan is key to New York state’s ambitious mandate to obtain 70% of its energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, by 2030.

As a sidebar, you can bet that there will be a lot of groups, mostly environmentalists and leftists, which will file lawsuits to stop the wind turbines and the transmission lines.

Pushed by a professor at Cornell University, more than a dozen unions came together to develop what they call Climate Jobs New York, a plan that they say will create more than 10,000 jobs; jobs that they agree should be middle-class, union jobs.

“We brought together more than a dozen unions, and said things are not good at the national level in terms of how unions are relating to environmental organizations and the climate movement,” said Lara Skinner, the labor relations professor at Cornell who spearheaded this effort. She noted that several unions were furious at environmentalists for opposing fracking and the Keystone and Dakota Access oil pipelines, which many unions viewed as a boon for job creation. (snip)

In an unusual move, more than a dozen unions and labor federations developed the climate plan, without inviting environmental groups to participate in the early discussions. One fear was that if the two sides were together from the start, there might be fights over fracking and pipelines that blew up and prevented progress on other fronts. One union leader involved in the effort said: “The labor movement and environmental community agree on probably 90% of things, so we shouldn’t focus on the things that are going to destroy goodwill.”

And the union will donate money to NY Democrats to make sure that the jobs only go to the unions, locking out individuals and small companies that are not part of the union. But, remember, this is science, not politics. Or something.