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Working Class & Climate Change
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  1. Anticapitalism and Climate Justice
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2010
    The current crisis raises the urgent need to change the world from below and do so from an anticapitalist and radical eco-socialist perspective. Anticapitalism and climate justice are two struggles which must be closely linked.
  2. As Temperatures Climb Across the Country, Workers Will Suffer
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    The summer of 2016 is barely two weeks old, but this year is already on track to break high temperature records in the United States. On June 20, cities across the Southwest and into Nevada reached all-time triple-digit highs. Meanwhile, every single state experienced spring temperatures above average, with some in the Northwest reaching record highs. These temperatures have already proved deadly, killing five hikers in Arizona earlier this month. Triple-digit heat earlier that same week is also being blamed for the deaths of two construction workers, 49-year old Dale Heitman in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 15 and 55-year old Thomas F. “Tommy” Barnes on June 14 at the Monsanto campus in nearby Chesterfield, Missouri.
  3. Austerity vs. the Planet:The Future of Labour Environmentalism
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Last December members of the International Trade Union Confederation joined other civil society activists in a mass sit-in at the COP21 talks in Paris. Unionists and their allies, some 400 strong, filled the social space adjacent to the negotiating rooms for several hours, in defiance of a French ban on protests that remained in effect in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks. The ITUC delegation demanded the negotiators go back to the table and make a serious effort to incorporate labour's demands for a just transition – which, at its heart, is concerned with making sure workers in environmentally unsustainable industries are retrained and put to work building a new, sustainable economy.
  4. Climate change: It's going to take a revolution
    Resource Type: Film
    Published: 2015
    A new video by Suhail Ilyas: The growing strength of the climate movement around the world gives us great hope, but it's going to take a revolution to make the world inhabitable for future generations.
  5. Climate Insurgency
    A Strategy for Survival

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2015
    Twenty-five years of human effort have failed even to slow climate change, let alone reverse it. Climate Insurgency lays out a strategy for protecting the earth s climate: a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency. This short book starts with a brief history of official climate protection efforts from above and non-governmental ones from below that explains why climate protection has failed so far. Then, it proposes a global nonviolent insurgency for climate protection to overcome that failure.
  6. "Climate Justice" and the Left: The Necessity of a Mass Movement
    Against The Current vol. 141

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2009
    The climate crisis -- a crisis not of civilization, as some commentators would have it, but of capitalist production -- requires a political response that is long overdue, and is finally stirring. Now that the movement against global warming is brewing, socialists must get involved.
  7. Climate Justice Transitions
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    The devastating fires in Fort McMurray show the urgent need to transition to an economy that supports people and the planet, and this is part of a transition in climate justice politics.
  8. The Climate Movement Doesn’t Know How to Talk With Union Members About Green Jobs
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2020
    Throughout the Democratic primary, the potential loss of good construction and fossil fuel industry jobs has helped prevent moderate Democratic candidates, including frontrunner Joe Biden, from taking policy positions that would aggressively confront the fossil fuel industry and the climate crisis. Whoever opposes Donald Trump in the general election will face a politics of climate denial built on an empty but alluring promise of job security in the oil, gas, and coal industries.
  9. Connexions Library: Environment Focus
    Resource Type: Website
    Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on environment, ecology, climate change, pollution, and land use.
  10. EnvironmentSources.com
    Resource Type: Website
    Published: 2017
    Web portal with information about environmental issues and resources, with articles, documents, books, websites, and experts and spokespersons. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
  11. Five Challenges for Ecosocialists in 2008
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2007
    Ecosocialism is not separate from the existing left and green movements, and it is not a structured movement on its own. Rather, it is a current of thought within existing socialist and green-left movements, seeking to win ecology activists to socialism and to convince socialists of the vital importance of ecological issues and struggles.
  12. For Workers' Climate Action
    Climate Change and Working-Class Struggle

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    A new collection of articles and reviews on the fight against dangerous climate change, capitalism and workers' organisation and struggle. Urges the left to reach out to climate activists to make the case that being "anti-capitalist" is important but not enough.
  13. Getting Serious About Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Ground Means Getting Serious About a Just Transition
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    If the climate movement is going to get serious about keeping fossil fuels in the ground, the movement needs to get serious about cultivating a real vision for a just transition. If we’re going to see coal-fired power plants and oil refineries and chemical plants shut down we need to have a real vision about what the future looks like for those workers, their families and their communities.
  14. How to Promote a Just Transition and Break out of the jobs vs. environment trap
    A Superfund for Workers

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    A strategy has been emerging to protect workers and communities whose livelihoods may be threatened by climate protection policies. Protecting those who lose their jobs due to necessary environmental policies has often been referred to as a "just transition."
  15. Labor in the Age of Climate Change
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Climate change must be stopped. But who will do the stopping? Who, in other words, could be the political subject of an anticapitalist climate revolution? Stefania Barca argues that this social agent could be, and indeed must be, the global working class. Yet to play this role, the working class must develop an emancipatory ecological class consciousness.
  16. Making Green Jobs Good Jobs
    Unions organize the clean energy sector

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Jobs versus the environment -- it's an old dilemma that pits unions seeking work for their members against activists rallying against projects like the Keystone XL. An expanding renewable energy sector might provide a way out of this quandary. Solar and wind energy projects can put people to work without imperiling the planet. But will these jobs be friendly to workers, as well as the environment?
  17. Marxism.ca
    Resource Type: Website
    Published: 2016
    A gateway to resources about Marxism compiled by Connexions.
  18. On the Front Lines of the Climate Change Movement: Mike Roselle Draws a Line
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2019
    An excerpt from the book The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. An account of environmental activists fighting massive industries to save the environment.
  19. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 5, 2015
    Ecosocialism, environment, and urban gardening

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2015
    This issue of Other Voices covers a wide range of issues, from the climate crisis and the ecosocialist response, to terrorism and the struggle against religious fundamentalism, as well as items on urban gardening, the destruction of olive trees, and how the police are able to use Google's timeline feature to track you every move, now and years into the past.
  20. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - January 16, 2016
    Working class organizing

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2016
    Working to change things for the better, fighting to prevent things from getting worse, remembering the past to illuminate possibilities for the future: as always, that is the focus of Other Voices. In this issue, we pay special attention to working class organizing. There can be no meaningful change without the active participation of the majority of the population: working people. Yet much activism ignores this obvious reality, while the organized labour union movement has put much of its reliance on 'professionals' who see organizing as a top-down technique rather than a grassroots movement. Several articles in this issue look at aspects of these issues. We also delve into the relationship between feminism and socialism, and look at the so-called 'sharing economy,' which produces increasingly exploited and precarious work, and immense profits for super-rich corporate owners.
  21. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2016
    Science and its enemies

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2016
    Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
  22. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 23, 2016
    Workers and Climate Change

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2016
    Working people -- and most of us are workers -- are affected by climate change in every aspect of our lives. As climate change worsens, our lives will worsen. If we are successful in bringing about the needed rapid change away from a fossil fuel based economy, working people are the ones who stand to bear most of the costs, including the cost, for millions of workers and their families, of losing their jobs.
    Many elements of the environmental movement have been guilty of ignoring working people, while others actually blame ordinary working people for climate change and the injustices associated with it. Yet it is working people who are dying, in many places, even now, from excessive heat in factories, fields, construction sites, and homes. And million of working people stand to lose their jobs, homes, and communities in the transition to a low-carbon or no-carbon economy.
  23. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 18, 2017
    Public Transit

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2017
    Public transit - good affordable public transit - is key to a liveable city. Around the world, there are movements of transit riders fighting for better public transit. A key perspective guiding many of these struggles is the idea that transit should be free, that is, paid for not by fares, but out of general revenues. This is how roads are normally funded: their construction and maintenance are paid for by taxes, rarely by user fees. Free public transit by itself would not be enough, however. We also need good transit, transit that runs frequently and goes where people want to go.
  24. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - August 27, 2017
    Official Enemies

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2017
    Why and how do some countries become 'enemies'? How and why do governments and media work in tandem to demonize official enemies? Who are the people who live in those countries, what are their lives like, and why should we consider them our enemies?
  25. This is What Insurgency Looks Like
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    The call to Break Free from Fossil Fuels envisioned "tens of thousands of people around the world rising up" to take back control of their own destiny; "sitting down" to "block the business of government and industry that threaten our future"; conducting "peaceful defense of our right to clean energy." That's just what happened.
  26. Tony Mazzocchi Lives: Blue-Green Organizer Takes Up 'Just Transition' Mantle
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    Union and environmental activist Alex Lotorto believes environmentalists should be working more closely with organized labour and following the advice of some of labour's more enlightened leaders.
  27. Towards Workers' Climate Action
    Book review

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    A review of a book and a pamphlet by Paul Hampton, both on the urgent need for workers' action on climate change.
  28. Without a Popular Movement We Don't Stand a Chance: Andreas Malm on Climate Change
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2018
    An interview with the author of "Fossil Capital and The Progress of This Storm", who says there are reasons to be hopeful but significant progress will require a global movement of unprecedented scale.
  29. Workers and Climate Change
    Introduction to the July 23, 2016 issue of Other Voices

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Many elements of the environmental movement have been guilty of ignoring working people, while others actually blame ordinary working people for climate change and the injustices associated with it. Yet it is working people who are dying, in many places, even now, from excessive heat in factories, fields, construction sites, and homes. And million of working people stand to lose their jobs, homes, and communities in the transition to a low-carbon or no-carbon economy.
  30. The Workers' Climate Plan & The Federal Climate Consultations
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    The Government of Canada is leading a process to create a National Climate Strategy, a result of signing the Paris Agreement to limit increasing global temperatures. Over the next 3 months, political leaders will be consulting the public and key stakeholders to propose a new federal climate strategy in October 2016.
  31. Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity
    Tackling climate change in a neoliberal world

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2015
    Paul Hampton, a Marxist trade union researcher in Britain, addresses the role of workers in the climate justice movement, as well as the tasks of revolutionaries.


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