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You could not find a more striking physical contrast than that between AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and 2013 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Nohra Padilla. Trumka’s a big, strongly built son of the coal fields; Padilla a slight, waif-like women from Bogota, Colombia.

But both carry in their fiber the knowledge of what hard, dangerous physical labor feels like — and how fierce the struggle to get decent treatment and dignity for those who do it has been.

Padilla tells the audience that the world’s 15 million informal recyclers — rag pickers — “express in our bodies real green jobs… but the earnings we have are hunger earnings.” She led the effort to organize Bogota’s garbage recyclers into cooperatives that could demand decent treatment. She and her colleagues are preparing to negotiate new contracts with the City of Bogota, as are other members of her network of recyclers in far-flung cities in Brazil, Mexico and India.

Padilla’s organizing efforts were inspired, five years ago, by a visit with U.S. unions. She imagined a world in which informal recyclers received equal returns with those received by large multinational waste companies, and she has had to fight off efforts by the elite in Colombia to regain control of the value represented by recycled garbage.

Wages in Colombia are going up: “In the next few years we will keep moving forward, so that our children can not only go to schools but to universities, and to build their own companies to process the materials… If there are no borders for those who exploit, there cannot be borders for those who struggle for justice.”

Trumka, whose organization inspired Padilla, champions solidarity in another arena — domestically — calling on U.S. unions and environmentalists to embrace “the million things which unite us instead of the few things on which we differ” and recognize that what is required for continued environmental and social progress is a strong, long-term national strategy for jobs and climate protection.

Congress he says, must act, and must act boldly. He mocks the pundits who claim that action is impossible, saying, “A year ago they were equally convinced that a solution to our immigration problem was a political fantasy.”

Trumka lays down a searing challenge to the right-wing economic royalists who are funding climate change denial: “We must embrace science, and I am here to say that climate change is real and climate change is dangerous.” (more…)

On December 6, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a piece of legislation in the Senate that would allow the debt ceiling to be raised. Just a few short hours later, McConnell stood up on the Senate floor and actually filibustered his own legislation, effectively killing the bill that he himself authored.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

When Americans hear the word “filibuster,” they might picture impassioned, hours-long speeches like Jimmy Stewart’s in that classic scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But when McConnell killed his own bill last week, he only had to threaten to filibuster rather than actually take the floor. As Senator Jeff Merkley said, “It used to be that people wanted to take responsibility for their obstruction.”

Not anymore. Under current Senate rules, it’s staggeringly easy for important legislation to be derailed. Just the threat of a filibuster by a minority of senators can stop a bill in its tracks — and we’ve seen it happen over and over. In 2009, the American Clean Energy and Security Act — which would have represented substantial progress in addressing the climate crisis — died in the Senate under the threat of a filibuster. Over the past six years, almost 400 Senate bills have stalled this way.

Enough is enough. That’s why the Sierra Club has joined a coalition that’s calling for rule changes to help end this obstructionism. Organizations ranging from the Communications Workers of America to the NAACP to Common Cause are all onboard, because we know that if we want to see legislative progress on our nation’s problems — from the fiscal showdown to the climate crisis — we have to fix the Senate.

Mr. Smith fans don’t need to worry. The changes we’re asking for won’t end filibusters but will make sure they’re used as our founders intended. Senators will have just one chance to filibuster — not multiple opportunities to obstruct. Currently, many filibusters happen on motions to bring legislation up for debate — not in the context of actual deliberation on bills. The U.S. Senate is often described as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” — so let’s give the senators a chance to deliberate. (more…)

According to Google, use of the phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally” peaked in 1996, and has declined ever since. That may reflect how hard it is to practice this idea. During my years as Executive Director of the Sierra Club, the conflict between the club’s intellectual commitment — to think globally — and human instinct — to react powerfully and narrowly when threatened locally, was one I never really found a fix for.

So we may need to find proxies — values or ways of thinking that help us get the right answers even if they are asking different questions. And one such proxy, I would argue, is the idea of making it locally: one manifestation of which, in the case of the United States, is the increasing public fervor for the importance of making stuff in the U.S., of reviving our manufacturing base. “Made in America” it turns out is a pretty fair proxy for “Think globally.”

To understand why, I’m going to crib from a recent — and well worth absorbing — volume by Alex Steffen, Carbon Zero, which explains how badly off-course much of our thinking has drifted. Steffen asks us to imagine our ecological impact — in this case carbon emissions — as cakes, and our desire to live more sustainably, or reduce carbon emissions, as a diet.

He then describes three common ways of measuring these impacts, or counting the calories, we are using — he calls this “footprinting.”

Geographic footprinters say, “I will count only those cakes I both bake and eat at home.”

Most measurements of carbon emissions are geographic, like recent announcements of how U.S. carbon emissions are declining. They are, but the measurements being released are incomplete and don’t tell the whole story, because they are geographic.

Production footprinters say, “I will count all the cakes I bake, whether I eat them or not.”

In the case of carbon emissions, this makes countries like Angola look like major emitters, even though most of what they do is extract oil from their territory and ship it to rich countries like the U.S. to consume. And a very rich country like Singapore which imports almost all of its food and fuel and materials from other countries looks very virtuous on this scale.

Consumption footprinters say, “I will count all the cakes I eat, no matter who bakes them.”

Steffens argues that consumption footprinting is the correct way to measure out impact — because it requires us to think globally as we act locally. Stopping a locally damaging project is only globally helpful if as a result the total amount of damaging consumption goes down — and we only should get credit if it is our consumption that declines. If we block a mega-feed lot in California, and as a result people in China eat less beef, they really deserve the ecological credit. And if an even worse feed-lot gets built in Africa, we’ve actually done harm. (more…)

That variant on the NRA’s famous slogan came to mind last week with the phenomenal victory mountaintop mining removal opponents and community groups achieved in a court settlement: Patriot Mining, previously one of Appalachia’s biggest mountaintop removal mining companies, not only agreed to end the practice forever, but acknowledged its community and environmental costs.

Patriot Coal has concluded that the continuation or expansion of surface mining, particularly large scale surface mining of the type common in central Appalachia, is not in its long term interests … We believe the proposed settlement will result in a reduction of our environmental footprint.

This settlement is one of the biggest steps yet in the decade’s long struggle to end the devastation of Appalachia by poorly regulated and often illegal mining practices that destroy mountains, fill streambeds, and threaten schools and homes.

It’s wonderful. But it reminds us that problems afflicting the coal industry are the direct result of the historic attitudes of its operators — not actually the resource itself, or the men, women and communities who produce and rely upon it. And Patriot came to its senses only after entering bankruptcy. Not all coal operators are looking at their practices with a fresh eye.

Indeed, in the wake of the election two weeks ago another coal operator. Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, promptly laid off 156 of his workers, promised to lay more off later, and accompanied this decision with a stunning prayer, which equated the election results with the end of the American coal industry and indeed, the end of the idea of America itself:

Dear Lord,The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance.

We are a Country in favor of redistribution, national weakness and reduced standard of living and lower and lower levels of personal freedom.

My regret, Lord, is that our young people, including those in my own family, never will know what America was like or might have been. They will pay the price in their reduced standard of living and, most especially, reduced freedom.

The takers outvoted the producers.

Murray made a vague reference “allegations from radical Obama supporters that you know are blatantly false” — an apparent reference to charges that he was blackmailing his employees into supporting Mitt Romney by threatening their jobs in advance of the election — a threat, we should note, that was evidently not an idle one. But Murray made no reference whatsoever to an even bigger financial challenge he is facing; paying the $1.1 million fine he agreed to as the penalty for the death of nine of his workers in the 2007 Crandall Mine disaster in Utah. (more…)

It’s one week after the election, and I have some friendly advice for every Republican in Congress: Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and renew the production tax credit for wind energy before it expires at the end of the year. Here are five reasons why I’d tell them it’s time to finally get this done:

1. The American people strongly believe we should make clean, renewable energy a priority. And last week’s election results made it clear that it’s the American people you answer to — not the Koch brothers.

2. Speaking of the brothers K… Yes, they and other dirty-energy enthusiasts would love to set wind energy back. But apart from Mitt Romney, polluters were the biggest losers in this election. Ignore them and listen to your real constituents — the voters. (more…)

Hurricane Sandy has been widely treated as a wake-up call, even nudging New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to jump down from his presidential fence to endorse President Obama because of the need for action on climate change.

But it should be a particular kind of wake-up call for small government conservatives who, along with fossil fuel interests, remain the biggest barrier to an effective U.S. response to the climate threat. Sandy is unlike to change their view of the reality of climate change — serious conservative leaders already accept that the world is warming, that at least part of the warming is caused by human activity, and that continuing to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere by, say, doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, will further destabilize the climate.

And conservatives are probably the least likely to decide that the $50 billion price tag for Sandy is a good reason to change their longstanding resistance to climate stabilization investments. They are much less risk averse than the rest of us, and attach a much higher value to the ability of businesses to operate without worrying about constraints on how their activities impact common resources — like the atmosphere.

But the core of conservative resistance to climate action is their belief that trying to prevent or minimize climate change will “feed Leviathan”, and require bigger and more intrusive government, because combustion, burning carbon, is such a widespread core human economic activity. Regulating it thus evokes for conservatives the specter of a massive growth in state power.

But the aftermath of Sandy — not its damages, but society’s response to those damages — strongly suggests that it is the failure to stabilize the climate that creates the greater risk of an enormous growth in governmental power. Conservatism has obsessed with the wrong threat.

The New York Times captured the dominant meme in its first post-Sandy editorial : “A Big Storm Requires Big Government”: “Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government…”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo summed up the task facing government everywhere:

There has been a series of extreme weather incidents. That is not a political statement, that is a factual statement … Anyone who says there’s not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think is denying reality…. We have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns. We have an old infrastructure and we have old systems, and that is not a good combination.

The iconic political image of Sandy’s impact was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and President Obama in Atlantic City, sharing the burden of coping with the disaster. Christie’s embrace of the President, and rebuff of Governor Romney, made the point eloquently; when disaster strikes, even small government advocates want big government support.

But neither Obama nor Christie was the dominant figure in the response; the hour belonged to the man whom libertarians should fear above all — New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The fact that only three days after the ocean poured into New York’s subway system many of the trains were back and running, and Wall Street was up and functioning, is above all a tribute to the capacity and effectiveness of City Government in New York, honed by two and a half terms of Bloomberg cross-training, building on a base erected by Rudy Giuliani. Bond traders, in a crunch, turned out to need transit workers. Smaller towns in New Jersey — rich and poor — are getting back on their feet much more slowly, even when they were not as badly hit as Atlantic City or the Big Apple — they simply don’t have the muscle, the organization, the discipline to put things back where they were after a storm in a matter of hours. (more…)

Bob King, the President of the United Auto Workers, and Jim Tetreault, the Vice-President of Ford for North American Manufacturing, joined me at a Friday Forum at the Cleveland City Club to tell how a collaborative process involving Ford, the UAW, communities, and the government helped rescue the American auto industry. (Click to hear the podcast)

It’s a success story. If the auto industry had gone down, the number of jobs lost in the Great Recession would at least have doubled – making it worse than the Depression. And at one point the public opposed the federal intervention that was essential to save GM and Chrysler by a margin of 3-1- which unlike Ford had lacked the foresight to establish adequate lines of credit for the storm that was coming. So did many of our leaders – most notably Mitt Romney, with his famous New York Times op-ed, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” So even though the forum is non-political, the issues it raises unavoidably resonate in the broader context of this election year – and I think shed some light.

Romney’s op-ed looks even more revealing in the light of last week’s Boca Raton tapes revealing a harsh hostility to “the 47%” and suggesting that it is Mitt the Massachusetts moderate who may have been an act, and Mitt the bleak Social Darwinist the real thing. Because what Romney said about the bail-out, unequivocally and in precise detail, was that a collaborative solution to the auto industry crisis was impossible.

“Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.”

These words are eerily reminiscent of the infamous advice that Treasury Secretary Mellon gave President Hoover: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.”

Hoover – sort of – followed Mellon’s advice. Roosevelt’s New Deal followed. Obama didn’t – in the face of public opposition he kept GM and Chrysler going, maintaining the auto supply chain that Ford required as well. So Romney’s wisdom as a CEO seeking to be Job Creator in Chief has been tested – and found wanting.

With the bailout, the Big Three did precisely what Romney said they could not. They changed course – as Tetreault and King make clear here in Cleveland. They changed; they negotiated their way out of their retiree burdens, jumped into the technological lead, started regaining market share, embraced fuel efficiency and are rebuilding jobs, shifts and factories.

But they changed because there was trust and transparency – something Romney’s version of predatory capitalism values not at all – or we would have seen his tax returns. Romney’s version of private equity posits that only a hostile “turn-around” can rescue an industry in crisis – it values only fear, not trust. But that’s not what turned Detroit around. The auto industry changed because it faced a crisis, yes, but also because it discovered that it had a reliable, predictable partner in the American people, as expressed in the investment the Obama Administration made. And it changed because its leaders – people like Tetreault and Bob King – liked each other, trusted each other, and took risks with each other. (The three of us on stage are an unlikely trio. Tetreault , who started out as an environmental clean-up specialist keeping auto plant wastes out of rivers, graciously deflects efforts to draw him into politics - “I’m working with everyone.” -but he notes that Bob is not as apolitical. King, as I discovered on a trip to Tokyo trying to rescue the NUMI plant in California, is the rare industrial union president who is a vegetarian. And I’m here because we can’t outsource the creation of a sustainable America. Without the restoration of “America the Maker” our ecological future is grim.)

Roosevelt would have understood. Romney, it appears, does not. (more…)

What’s the purpose of our government? No matter who you ask, I doubt that stifling innovative solutions would be part of their answer. Yet that’s exactly what the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) seems determined to do. And we have only a couple of days left to help them see the light. This craziness started two years ago, when the FHFA cut the legs out from under a terrific idea for helping homeowners save on their energy bills — property assessed clean energy (PACE) programs. PACE programs make it possible for people to borrow money at low interest rates to fund projects like a home energy-efficiency retrofit or rooftop solar installation and then repay the loan via an annual assessment on their property tax bill, usually over a period of 20 years. The loan is attached to the property, not to the individual homeowner. If you sell your house, the loan stays behind with the new owner. That makes sense, because it’s also the new owner who inherits the lower energy bills that the PACE loan made possible.

For homeowners, a big advantage of a PACE loan is that you can invest in a home improvement that might take 10 or more years to pay for itself — without worrying that you might have to sell your house before you recoup that investment. It’s such a great idea that — even though PACE programs have existed only since 2008 — 27 states have already passed legislation to enable them. Two years ago, however, the FHFA, which oversees the federal mortgage underwriters Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, told them not to buy mortgages with PACE assessments. Their objection was that the PACE loan’s association with the property tax bill would prioritize it ahead of the regular mortgage in the event of a default. That decision was enough to cause the immediate suspension of most residential PACE programs (commercial PACE programs are largely unaffected by the FHFA). (more…)

Edward Abbey wrote that “the idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” Early this year, I called on President Obama to step up and start defending wilderness by using the powers of the executive branch to do what Congress has been unable or unwilling to accomplish. Although he’s been a great president for the environment in many ways, Obama was lagging when it came to protecting public lands that could otherwise be lost to development, drilling or mining.

Gradually, that has started to change. First came the welcome news that the president had designated his second national monument – Fort Ord, near Monterey Bay. Then, just last week, his administration proposed a management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska that keeps several important wildlife areas off-limits to oil and gas drilling, including critical habitat and breeding grounds for caribou and migratory birds.

In the coming months, I expect there will be more announcements from the White House of new protections for public lands. Congress, unfortunately, is unlikely to get anything done owing to a partisan dispute on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Even a simple matter like upgrading California’s Pinnacles National Monument to a national park, which has already passed the House and has strong bipartisan support, faces an uphill battle to reach the Senate floor before the current session ends and proponents have to start all over again. (more…)

Although he’s said and done some odd things in his day (“corporations are people”; dogs are luggage), I doubt anyone would argue that Mitt Romney’s completely off his rocker. So why did he just announce his opposition to one of the biggest American success stories of the past decade?

The U.S. wind energy industry not only supports 75,000 jobs across the country but also has emerged as an important energy source. By the end of this year, seven states will get more than 10 percent of their total electricity from wind. Two states, South Dakota and Iowa, currently generate more than 20 percent of their electricity from wind power. On its present track, the wind industry will produce at least 20 percent of the entire country’s electricity by 2030, probably more.

That won’t happen, though, if Romney gets his wish and Congress allows the American Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC, for short) for wind energy to expire at the end of this year. Without the PTC, the U.S. wind industry will contract — losing as many as 37,000 U.S. jobs in the process.

It does seem crazy to come out in favor of forcing thousands of Americans out of work at a time when jobs and the economy are the top two issues on voters’ minds. In Iowa, where the Republican governor joined the state’s entire congressional delegation in support of extending the PTC, the reaction ranged from stunned disbelief to anguished outrage.

Of course, after a summer of extreme heat, drought, and wildfires (in June, the lower 48 states were 2 degrees warmer than the 20th century average), it seems beyond crazy to put the brakes on wind power, which can help to replace carbon-polluting coal and natural gas power plants. Then again, that particular craziness is officially sanctioned by much of the current Republican leadership, so it’s not quite as surprising that Romney would subscribe as well.

The official rationale for Romney’s opposition to the tax credit is that he doesn’t believe in energy subsidies. Unless, of course, those subsidies are already going to Big Oil. (more…)