Excerpt from Al Gore in Australia, thinking about labor and the transition…
Gore said it would be a mistake not to acknowledge the “great debt” we all owe coal industry workers for building the economy throughout the past century.
But he said Australia, like the US, owed those workers and their communities “realistic and practical programs for job training and job placements in better jobs than the ones that used to exist in the coal industry”.
“Almost no one who really spends time with the economic data believes that those jobs will be practical in this new century,” he said.
“We [the US] are closing coal plants right and left. We are now beginning to close gas plants, to replace them with solar and wind. In the state of Texas there is so much wind electricity the new rate plans make electricity totally free from 9pm to 6am the next morning. How are fossil fuels going to compete with free? How are they going to compete with clean? The answer is – I don’t think they can.
“But where these employees are concerned, we owe them better jobs. We owe them a realistic set of options and plans, to move on into the future, with safe, clean good paying jobs that they deserve.”
- One Of America’s Most Racially Unequal Cities Has A Plan To Close The Wealth Gap
- Right now there are two public banks in the United States – North Dakota and American Samoa. It looks like that may not be true for long.The Public Banking Act, also known as “AB 857,” has taken public banking a historic step forward after it passed the California Assembly with 41 Aye’s to 26 No’s. Next, it goes to the Senate. Read about the critical progress for publicly accountable banking cultivated by NEC member organization, the Public Banking Institute.
- Sanders Backs 2 Policies to Dramatically Shift Corporate Power to U.S. Workers
- Can We Establish Forms of Home Ownership that Promote Empathy and Solidarity?
- Can ESOPs Make a Difference for Equity? New Research Findings Say Yes
- The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less
- Alternative Economic Work Is Thriving in the U.S. but Faces Unnatural, Unnecessary Hurdles
- Economic Democracy, If We Can Keep It
- The Green New Deal is Fracturing a Critical Base for Democrats: Unions
- A Generation Is Learning How To Strike
- These Indigenous Women Are Reclaiming Stolen Land in the Bay Area
- Will Worker Ownership Seize Center Stage in US Politics in 2020?
- Do You Have To Buy More Stuff To Go Zero Waste?
- Millennials Approach Middle Age in Crisis
- Budget Could Boost City’s Nascent Community Land Trust Movement
- Billionaire Kat Taylor’s Radical Call to Take On Big Banks
- The Struggle in Rural Kentucky, Being a Black Producer, Is Real
- 2019 Western Worker Cooperative Convening Olympia Recap
- Meet The New Startup: It’s a Co-op, Keen to Spread That Model
- We Have the Means to Fund Reparations. Where Is the Political Will?
- The internet was supposed to mean we never had to leave our homes again. But other forces — a globally expanding middle class, increased transportation options, and even social media — have conspired to make this an era of when an unprecedented number of humans are exerting their travel agency. The trend has left some increasingly popular places stuck in a tourist trap. The Atlantic: Too Many People Want to Travel. “If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon, overtourism is its demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera. There are just too many people thronging popular destinations.”
