Portside

We can, and must, create common ground between the labor and climate movements. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if God had intended some people to fight just for the environment and others to fight just for the economy, he would have made some people who could live without money and others who could live without water and air. There are not two groups of people, environmentalists and workers. We all need a livelihood and we all need a livable planet to live on.

I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do . . . I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns.

So often there's an apparent conflict between jobs and the environment. There's a way to resolve our differences. Every environmental campaign should have a jobs program and every jobs program should be designed to address our climate catastrophe.