The document discusses the concept of a "Just Transition" to a low-carbon economy. It emerged in the 1970s from environmental, indigenous, and labor activists who saw the need for support strategies for workers who could lose their jobs due to environmental policies. A Just Transition aims to decarbonize the economy without costing workers jobs or harming their livelihoods. It requires a Green New Deal to create millions of green jobs, sectoral transition plans, job training and unions to bargain for workers' rights. Financing comes from a national investment bank and transition funds while nationalizing energy ensures affordable, renewable power for all.

1. Ballintoy, County Antrim
11-13 September 2021
The Just Transition

2. 1. What are the features of the Just
Transition
2. Where did the concept emerge ?

3. Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is already likely beyond us.
Achieving the slightly more realistic target of 2 degrees warming will
require a rapid and comprehensive decarbonisation of the global
economy
It was in the 1970s, during the second wave of modern environmentalism,
that environmental, indigenous and labour activists first joined forces to
spell out the need for Just Transition strategies in North America.
Initially understood as a programme of support for workers who stood to
lose their jobs in industries made redundant due to environmental
pressures, the Just Transition gradually broadened to focus on the need
for radical and transformative change.

4. What is the
‘Just
Transition’?

5. The guiding principle of a Just Transition is that climate ambition
cannot be divorced from social and economic justice.
The process for decarbonising the economy should not cost
workers or communities their jobs, environment, economic
security, health or wellbeing.
Delivering these structural changes at the scale and speed required
will necessitate state-led planning, regulation and control of key
policy and investment decisions.
This democratic planning of a national economy is not only
feasible in light of technological and logistical advances, but
essential due the market failures which are deepening the climate
emergency.

6. A Green New Deal that maximises the potential for
creating hundreds of thousands if not millions of
decent, well-paid and unionised green jobs.
That involves sectoral strategies for transport, energy,
manufacturing and transition agreements, a Job
Guarantee, training and apprenticeships, good
pensions.
This agenda can only be maintained by strong trade
unions whose members enjoy the right to access,
enhanced bargaining power and the right to strike.

7. Meeting the goals of climate action demands a radical
transformation in land use and the transition to
ecologically regenerative and sustainable land use. It
will also require a radically new approach to stewardship
of the commons.
Community Wealth Building - Create public affluence
through the redistribution of wealth and an expansion of
social goods such as green public housing, access to
clean public transport, universal health and social care,
free education, the right to clean air, water and the
commons

8. A Just Transition will only be possible with a
democratised financial sector that is placed at the
service of a green transformation.
Repurposing of central banks, directs monetary and
fiscal policy towards a Green Industrial revolution New
Deal and promotes democratic investment and lending
vehicles such as credit unions and community banks.

9. A Just Transition is nothing if not internationalist and anti-
imperialist. The OECD nations which have spent the last century
driving carbon emissions through extractivism, expropriation and
exploitation, are obligated to cut their emissions deepest and
fastest.
Facilitating a Just Transition must extend to significant economic
transfers from the richest countries to the global South to prepare
for the inevitable and disproportionate effects of climate change.
Justice also means that any domestic climate movement worth its
salt has to stand opposed to new imperialist adventures in search
of scarce resources.

10. ‘Tinkering at the margins of an economic
model driving environmental breakdown is
guaranteed to deepen the climate emergency.
To thrive, only a systemic response to a
systems crisis will do.’
www .commonwealth.com
Any fight against climate breakdown requires
serious limits on the free market.

11. 1. Decarbonisation of the economy
2. The democratisation of finance and
state-led investment
3. Building public affluence in place of
private wealth
4. Land reform & ownership
5. A Just Transition and green industrial
revolution

14. $16 trillion plan for a Green New Deal
100% renewable energy in 10 years an energy-efficient
"smart" grid.
Upgrade all buildings to become energy efficient.
Decarbonize & upgrade infrastructure especially
transportation.
Fund massive investment in the drawdown &
capture of greenhouse gases
The creation of thousands of green jobs to enable low
carbon infrastructure reconstruction

17. ENERGY

18. Nationalisation
77% of us believe energy should be in public ownership, Customer
satisfaction with the Big Six companies is extremely low.
The National Grid is a private company.
The Big Six energy companies (British Gas, E.ON, EDF
Energy, nPower, Scottish Energy and SSE) supply 95% of all UK
10.2% of the UK's energy comes from renewable sources
Prices have increased by 13% and 67% respectively since the year
2000. Electricity prices are 10-20% higher than if in public
ownership.
Each UK household could save £158 a year if energy was publicly
owned. Meanwhile, 11% of English households live in fuel poverty.

19. Private energy distribution companies are making it too slow and
costly for communities to start up new renewable energy projects.
National Grid should be publicly owned so that we can create the
clean, green, decentralised energy future we need.
Buying back energy distribution would pay for itself in around 10
years.
New publicly owned alternatives are springing up, like Bristol
Energy, Robin Hood Energy, The People's
Energy Company and White Rose Energy.
In Germany, public, council owned energy companies supply
around half of the market.
https://youtu.be/LBAKkCOkBJ8

20. Just transition and Organised Labour
The Green New Deal can act as a template to transform the wider
economy and bring about a fundamental rebalancing of power
Trade Unions for Energy Democracy Initiative, advocate bringing
the entire energy supply into public ownership including the Big
Six energy companies
Both energy transmission & distribution in public control.
Any excess profits generated could be reinvested into the
company to ensure further reductions of emissions, alongside
cheaper and more efficient energy for the public.
Alongside a national, retrofitting, green energy conversion and
insulation programme. All of these measures would, in turn, lead
to a reduction of fuel poverty and winter deaths.

26. Renewable energy creates more jobs than an equivalent amount
of fossil energy.
Fossil fuel jobs have shrunk mainly because of mechanisation,
not regulation.
For example, in 1980, producing a ton of coal per hour required
52 miners; by 2015 that number dropped to 16.
Even though more coal was being mined, coal mining lost 58
percent of its jobs between 1980 and 2015.
In 2016, there were over 3 million jobs in non-fossil energy &
energy efficiency, compared to 1 million in fossil energy.
Even without a price on carbon, installers and service jobs for
solar & wind are in such demand that those jobs are growing 13
to 15 times faster than the U.S. average.

27. We will need energy, whether it comes from low- or zero-carbon
sources or from the old polluting sources of the past.
Today, the energy technologies of the future create more jobs than
those of the past, and will likely continue to do so even as the new
technologies mature.
Not only is wind power already cost-competitive with electricity
from fossil fuels, it creates 50 percent more jobs for the same
amount of energy.
With a Just Transition job losses in mining and drilling would be
outweighed by job gains in almost every other category, including
manufacturing, education, construction, finance, retail trades, and
even health care.
UNLOCKING THE JOB POTENTIAL OF ZERO CARBON: A summary of the case studies for the United
Kingdom, Hungary and the Republic of Ireland.
https://gef.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GEF-Climate_Jobs-leaflet.pdf

28. Financing an environmentally sustainable
economy – how are we going to afford it?
Delivering greater investment in low-carbon infrastructure and
innovation, & curtailment of investment in high-carbon
infrastructure
Rebalance the economy towards more productive economic activity
and ensuring that money and investment is spread across the country
Establishment of a National Investment Bank (NIB)
Just Transition Funds to mitigate against the negative impacts of
decarbonisation.
Repurposing of existing carbon-intensive industries, re-skilling
programmes, and wage subsidies for workers made unemployed.

29. ONS 2014 - total unpaid work valued at £1.01tn,
equivalent to approximately 56% of GDP, & 60% done by
women

30. 50% of the United States' $640bn pharmaceutical market
is based on the genetic diversity of wild species
Bees pollinating work underpins about one trillion
dollars-worth of agricultural sales
The GDP value derived from marine fish stocks and the
industries associated with them are about $274bn per
year.
These huge numbers are dwarfed by the wider value of
the marine and coastal systems, in protecting coasts from
storms, in taking in carbon dioxide and replenishing
oxygen levels.

31. The value of these and other ocean-based services have
been estimated as worth $21 trillion annually
The degradation of nature is costing the global
economy $6.6tn per year (11% of world GDP) and on
present trends will reach $28tn by 2050.
In contrast, to meet global goals that would avert a mass
extinction of species would cost around $76bn per year –
or 0.12% of annual world GDP
Out current economic system sees nature as supplier of
resources and dump for waste

33. Korean War
Space Race
Vietnam War
Iraq War
WW2
Bail out
The IMF has stated that the bail out
cost 50.4% of global GDP

34. Green growth is an illusion.

35. The creation of new raft of ‘green’ public-private partnerships
Public subsidies for transition to green energy for Google,
ExxonMobil, Shell and BP.
The aim is to socialize risk while privatizing profits.
Carbon trading - Stat oil’s purchase of forest in East Africa led to
forced evictions and food scarcity.
The Noor Ouarzazate, world largest solar power pant; population
least connected to the grid.
Green resource exploitation bolstering European energy security
with climate friendly sources of power whilst millions of Africans
have none.

37. 2010 US Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) asked for 3x increase in
spending on green technology to 16 billion annually.
Yet 7 companies that form the AEIC have together spent 237 billion
on stock repurchases between 2001 – 2010.
The US spends more on crisps than energy research and
development.
“The important thing for governments is not to do things which
individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a
little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done
at all”
JM Keynes The End of Laissez faire 1926

38. Trade unions and a Just Transition
1) A trade union idea whose time has come
2) Repositions trade unions back at the
heart of the struggle for societal
transformation
3) Offers a positive narrative for workers
and communities