Who should control the climate transition?
Prepared by Harpreet Chima as a discussion document. This post does not represent an official position of Working Class Unity or the views of After Hours participants.
Lets think about the Mormon Slough restoration project that could reduce flood danger and create public space. If public investment raises nearby land values, tenants could face higher rents, homeless residents could face removal, and contractors or property owners would benefit from increased property values. Would the project be deliverying climate justice, green development, or both?[1]
This answer is about power. Who wrote the plan? Who owned the land? Who received public money? Who made the decisions.
The same questions apply to the closing of a refinery, building a battery plant, running a public utility, or enforcing a carbon tax. Climate science might tell us why emissions must fall. But they cannot decide who should pay, what should replace fossil production, or what authority rests where.
Matthew Huber argues a lot of climate politics treats knowledge as power. Experts identify the danger, design a policy, and then act like they don’t even have to try to persuade the public to accept it. Huber calls this professional-class climate politics. It is an approach adopted by people whose work is focused on research, credentials, and administration.[2] But it can end up interpreting worker resistance as ignorance when the conflict is really about jobs, prices, reliability, trust, or control. Workers often know practical facts about construction, industry, and energy systems that policy staff do not.[3]
A green investment might cut emissions and weaken worker power in the process. Public subsidies finance private investments, create temporary jobs, use subcontracting, and firms that fight unions. Green technology does not tell us who owns the workplace or who sets its terms or how workers tasked to build it will be treated.[4]
Still, worker power is not a moral blank check. A union may defend a polluting employer or place their ability to generate an income above nearby residents and the broader public.
A just transition could give guarantees before closure: continued income and pensions, jobs at equal or better pay, union rights, public investment, and worker bargaining over technology and conversion. Public ownership is one way to create room for democratic control, but just because something is a “public utility” it does not mean the public has full democratic control over it.
It is a complicated task: we must cut ecological harm, but if our politics does not leave ordinary people more able to govern the systems on which they depend, it is destined to fail.
Discussion Questions
- Climate experts establish an emergency, but workers reject the proposed solution. Who should get the final say?
- Would you accept faster emissions cuts under corporations that fight unions, rather than slower cuts under worker control?
- When a union protects a refinery or power plant, is it defending workers or the employer?
- Is degrowth facing reality, or the left wing of austerity when secure professionals ask people with less security to accept less?
- If restoration reduces flood danger but raises rents, is it climate justice or green capital accumulation?
- What could Working Class Unity do that would reduce climate harm and increase tenant or worker power?
Working Class Unity, “Mormon Slough — Area Research”, post 1380. ↩︎
Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War (Verso, 2022). ↩︎
Holly Jean Buck, “The Problem With Climate Disinformation”, Jacobin, August 2024. ↩︎
Matthew T. Huber, “Class Divides in the Politics of Building”, Damage, April 24, 2024; Lee Harris, “Industrial Policy Without Industrial Unions”, The American Prospect, September 28, 2022. ↩︎