SEARCH
Regulate Carbon—and Trade—to Attack Global Warming |
|
 |
|
Environmental protections in trade deals have been a key concern of working people the world over. But the issue of global warming makes the need for such protections more urgent, says United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard.
Speaking to the North American Labor Conference on Climate Crisis at Cornell University, Gerard said yesterday that more stringent regulation of carbon emissions and trade is essential for addressing the global climate crisis. Said Gerard:
Global warming has transformed the issue of pollution into the ultimate health and safety issue.
Labor, environmental and human rights standards are at the core of our vision for making the global economy work for workers. They should become the new gold standard for how nations trade with each other.
Gerard said the union movement’s vision of addressing global warming is fundamentally at odds with global policies that allow corporations to make huge profits by buying and trading the rights to emit carbon without ever addressing the basic inequalities in our global economy.
We need to use regulation of global warming and trade to lift 2 billion people out of poverty around the world. To do that, we’ll need to regulate a lot of economic activity, from power plants to fuel efficiency to energy efficiency, and we’ll need to use this regulation as a powerful tool to improve workers’ lives, both here in North America and across the globe.
Last year, the USW joined with the Sierra Club to form the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership committed to mobilizing public support for policies that create good jobs, a cleaner environment and a safer world.
The Blue Green Alliance currently is urging U.S. trade rule reforms to end the illegal trade in the forest products industry, where environmental degradation is rampant, especially in Asia.
Gerard says:
By fixing the misuse of resources like those in the Indonesian rainforests, we can create an economy that lifts all people out of poverty while stabilizing the downward pressure on workers in the industrialized economies.
Don’t think this won’t come about without a fight. It will be the defining struggle about the future direction of the global economy.
Click here to learn more about the Blue Green Alliance.
2 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
When are the Rich people and their over paid CEO’s going to stop killing our world for profit? I guess that money is there God and nothing else matters.
I am tired of hearing about this farce of a global warming coming from industrialized carbon or that alothough there is a warming trend it is any different than what has occured in the past 500 to 1000 years. We need a little deeper research than what we have been given in the newspapers explain that the little differnces in carbon going into the atmosphere from industrial carbon usage is unlikely the cause of the increase in the temperature change. A well researched but still inconclusive is that sun spots may be the cause of the increase in global temperature. Let’s quit taking this to the extreme that this will continue to increase without any more research facts than we currently have is very foolish. The sky isn’t falling and that industry is to blame for the global temperature raising. We know that only a few hundred years ago Greenland was generally green not frozen island? We know at this same time people could walk across the ice out to Coney Island. Did that mean we were in the middle of a global freezing? We have just about stopped the American manufacturing because of following the Green movement that industry is bad and mining, ranching, farming, logging and any other use of our natural resources is going to kill us. The workers of America need leaders that stop this importation of cheap labor goods and put American workers back to producing something besides hot air.