Industries such as solar, wind, and battery storage must expand rapidly, and fossil fuels must remain underground to keep the world temperature below 1.5°C.
There have been many articles on the need to retrain workers in current carbon-intensive industries in order to transition to decent green jobs in a planned way.
This is especially important in the Covid-19 era, when thousands of people lost their jobs, and the need for long-term job creation, resilience and sustainability against health, climate and economic shocks became clearer.
recover
Transition requires time, resources, and vision-but workers in fossil fuel-intensive industries can be protected through pensions (older workers) and financial retraining to provide young workers with guaranteed green work programs.
Education providers must start offering courses to make a new generation of engineers, construction workers, plumbers, metal workers, architects, and others part of a low-carbon future.
Work must always provide a living wage, safe working conditions—for example, workers who produce solar panels to deal with toxic substances and electrical hazards—and give workers a meaningful voice in decision-making, including by ensuring freedom of association. Workers’ cooperatives can create a deeper level of workers’ democracy.
Public ownership and green stimulus investment can create millions of jobs in specific sectors.
These include passive housing construction, through energy efficiency transformation and embedded SMART renewable energy power generation infrastructure, so that the infrastructure generates more energy than the energy used; public transportation upgrades and innovative electric car sharing programs; ecological restoration and land, forestry and Agriculture improvement and community energy, waste and manufacturing infrastructure.
Minerals
In view of the fact that on a global scale, governments plan to produce about 50% more fossil fuels in 2030 than limiting the temperature rise to 2°C, and 120% more than limiting the temperature rise to 1.5°C.
The output of the fossil fuel industry continues to grow, thanks to government assistance-approximately US$500 billion in 2019) and unprecedented support from private banks-since the Paris Climate Agreement, global banks have injected US$2.7 trillion into fossil fuels , And they are confident that business as usual is expected, and there will be no political shift to a gradual Green New Deal.
For example, when the temperature in India and Pakistan rises above 51°C, workers need to be protected from heat stress. This is also well documented. It is also necessary to create jobs for those on the front lines of climate change impacts.
In addition, although the transition to renewable infrastructure (such as electric vehicles) is often the headline of discussions about the Green New Deal in the North, few people acknowledge the developmental assembly lines of these so-called green products and the mining of the minerals and metals they require. .
