When will Richard Trumka pressure Obama for the 20,000 Keystone XL jobs?
The Hill reports,
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Thursday that climate change deniers call the shots in Congress.
“[I]t is clear that as long as Congress is effectively controlled by climate change deniers, all of us — investors, companies, workers and the broader public — must take action ourselves,” Trumka said.
In a wide-ranging speech in New York at the Investor Summit on Climate Risk & Energy Solutions, Trumka made the case for creating jobs with the build-out of low-carbon infrastructure…
But Trumka also urges renewed efforts to pass climate legislation, arguing capital markets aren’t currently addressing climate risks because it remains an “externality.”
He states:
That’s why investors need, for our own economic reasons, government policies to make sure that critical investments get made — investments in building retrofits, in high-speed rail and the smart grid, in carbon capture and sequestration. That’s what comprehensive climate legislation is about — and that’s why we as nation must return to the work of passing a climate bill.Trumka also notes concerns that tackling climate change and Environmental Protection Agency rules to curb other pollution from coal-fired power plants will be economically harmful to regions like West Virginia and the Ohio Valley.
“The truth is that in many places — and not just places where coal is mined — there is fear that the ‘green economy’ will turn into another version of the radical inequality that now haunts our society — another economy that works for the 1 percent and not for the 99 percent,” he states.
Trumka says the AFL-CIO wants new dialogue between workers, environmentalists, companies and investors to “forge pathways to fair and politically sustainable change.”
He said labor will help lead talks to discuss strategies for boosting technologies like “smart” power grids, building high-speed rail, retrofitting coal plants and expanding renewable power.
Trumka argues such talks must consider how to help communities thrive when coal plants and mines close, and how to create jobs for unemployed construction workers.
“In particular, we need dialogue between environmentalists and workers and communities about the future of coal. About what the global labor movement calls a Just Transition to a low-carbon-emissions economy. And the AFL-CIO is ready to host that dialogue,” he states.
IMO, Trumka is retarded and a Commu-fascist( Globalist), the last proving the first. IMO, Trumka is a Globalist- TRAITOR to those rank & file he proports to support. He is also, IMO, a TRAITOR to ANY union he proports to support, because Union “success” should be measured in job-retention, AS LONG AS an industry is NOT made inefficient-enough to fail. Germany’s unions should be the “model” here, because the Germans always are truly concerned with the economic viability of the firm the workers work for, re-training excess labor. Trumka’s agenda of the Environment FIRST, predicates the worker IS disposible, which was done in Spain, and is why Spain is now,”broke.” Therein, lies Trumka’s “Labor-TREASON”, imo. Trumkas’s “nest” is feathered, but what of those of the rank & file? In those instances, when IN-efficiency is pursued, labor jobs in the short-term, increase. But the industry involved with too many workers due to production/efficiency DECREASE, will eventually fall-over, like a 4-legged mammal without two legs on the same side. Imo, too bad Trumka is not smart-enough to be “German!” (This is NOT an endorsement of the Commu-fascist Super-state, the EU, now in un-fortunate Gestation.)