The climate crisis is a working class and trade union issue that cannot wait

HubMP2012

Today is World Environment Day. Clara Paillard looks at the impact on working people and surveys the key organisations campaigning on this.

On World Environment Day, is there much that the labour movement could be celebrating? As the Climate Justice agenda has fallen from the politics and trade unions radar since Covid, fossil fuels extraction continue to grow, wars are killing more people, generating a huge amount of emissions and destroying the environment and the far right and their climate denial agenda are growing at a disturbing pace.

But there is a strong case for trade unions and the labour movement to return to environmental politics as a working class issue:

• Shifting our energy systems to renewable and sustainable solutions could tackle the cost of energy and create tens of thousands of jobs with a workers-led Just Transition programme.
• Building thousands of new well-insulated  social housing and affordable homes could help tackle the housing crisis as well as cut the price of energy bills.
• Public spending on sustainable and affordable public transport systems would help tackle car pollution and congestion as well as create thousands of jobs.
• Investments in sustainable land and food production programmes could make good food affordable, improve people’s health, avoid food shortages and help restore natural habitats.
• Bringing back water systems into public ownership would help resolve water pollution issues, ensure water rates are affordable and plan for water conservation.
• The growth of AI is threatening jobs, increasing workplace surveillance and creating a new major source of emissions and need trade unions to organise resistance.

2026 was designated as the Year of Trade Union Climate Action by the TUC and a number of unions at their annual conferences. The TUC set up a dedicated page on their website with some information but doesn’t seem to be proactively organising activities. UNISON have launched their Year of Green Activity dedicated hub with resources and a calendar of events. Education unions and other partners organised the Climate and nature education festival in March to explore the role of educators in organising for a just transition.Other unions like the BFAWU are using this opportunity to renew members’ education, training of green reps or introducing the issue of climate into their bargaining and Health and Safety agenda.

But a lot of the focused efforts to shine a light on Climate Justice through the lens of Class and Cost of Living are led by other worker-climate organisations: 

• the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union group actively trying to get unions engaged in the Year of Trade Union Climate Action. 
• The Greener Jobs Alliance has been publishing a regular newsletter with worker-climate news for several years. 
• The Worker-Climate project has been engaging with young workers and Trades Councils to try and foster organising around Just Transition Plans.
•  Workers Planet organised a fringe day-event at the TUC last year and will again gather young workers and climate and community activists for an annual event on 12th September 2026 in Brighton. 
• The Working Class Climate Alliance has been trying to organise working class people for Climate Justice. 
• The Climate Justice Coalition is actively working with Migrant Solidarity groups to combat racism and climate denial via their Migrant & Climate Justice group, while our Health system and food production is heavily relying on Migrant workers, often poorly organised by the mainstream unions. 
• Safe Landing, a community of aviation workers concerned about climate change, have been trying to put in practice Workers Assemblies to discuss the future of Aviation workers.
• NEON has been developing a Worker-led Transition partnership with the TUC to build strategic collaboration between the climate movement and trade union movement, while changing the public narrative about a transition and who it is for. 
• Platform, Uplift and Friends of the Earth Scotland have continued their efforts to win an energy transition in Scotland and have launched the Our Power Scotland with no official backing of trade unions while the long established Just Transition Partnership there has concentrated on research and lobbying of the Scottish government. 
• Climate Cymru has been rolling out their Warm this Winter campaign since a couple of years ago, advocating price control on energy and rents via an impressive coalition of groups which include the Welsh TUC.

The reality is that nobody has yet cracked the issue of real engagement with workers in the pollutive sector, partly because the unions that represent them, GMB and Unite, have solely focused on the threat to  jobs and favoured ‘false solutions’ that come from the fossil fuel industry and are neither proven technologies nor yet viable, such as carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, so-called ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ etc… Their vision and policies very much stay with ‘business as usual’ and the ‘balanced energy mix’. Indeed thousands of jobs have been lost in the past couple of years with very little industrial resistance from trade unions:

• Over 400 jobs in Grangemouth refinery went when Ineos moved investment to the US and other parts of the globe.
• In Port Talbot, 2,000 jobs went when Tata decided to shut down pollutive blast furnaces to replace them with electric furnaces. Although Unite ran a strike ballot, false promises by the Labour Party just before the general election meant we delayed industrial action and failed to protect jobs or to secure local investment in alternative jobs.
• In Luton, Stellantis car plant shut down with over 1,000 job losses despite promises to move to electric vehicle production.

All those situations were very much dealt with in crisis mode rather than with a strategic approach. Surely, trade unions should be mapping out potential closures in industries and designing their own alternative plans to have something concrete to campaign for positively.

Will UK workers get inspiration with the italian ex-GKN workers who have occupied their car-parts factory for the past four years? They produced an alternative plan in collaboration with the Italian climate justice movement to create a workers’ co-op and launch an alternative production of cargo bikes and solar panels, reusing their skills for a socially useful production. It’s very much a reminder of what Aerospace workers attempted to do with the Lucas Plan in 1976 and some are trying to keep that legacy alive via the New Lucas Plan for the 50th anniversary.

Unite did launch their No Ban Without Plan campaign to defend their North Sea oil and gas workers but haven’t developed alternative plans and have continue to call for the opening of new fields, in total contradiction with any UK carbon targets. As a decision on the Rosebank oil field is looming, an open letter signed by ten General Secretaries and almost 2,000 union members is demanding that the government acts for the public interest and rejects Rosebank.

Traditionally, the TUC had confined their climate strategy to an industrial strategy where the industrial unions’ voices are the only ones heard because of the threat to their members’ jobs. In reality, the climate and environmental crisis is a threat to all workers and their communities, their health, their food, energy and housing security, and the poorest people in the UK and in the Global South are the ones paying for this crisis. 

There is still a gigantic task to provide more education about the impacts of the climate and environmental crisis because many workers and trade unionists still don’t realise the bigger picture about climate shocks and tipping points. As grassroot groups are organising across the country to hold screenings of the National Emergency Briefing on climate and nature, how many trade unions are showing it to their members?

But it seems that a recognition of the wider impact these crises have on workers is growing as extreme weather events are starting to materialise. The Heat Strike campaign successfully brought together Health and Safety reps and their unions to highlight how heatwaves affect workplaces, impacting a wide range of workers, from outdoor and factory to health and education workers and campaign for a statutory workplace temperature enshrined in law.

There is also a growing call for unions’ equalities networks to have a voice as the Climate Crisis disproportionately affects women, disabled workers, workers from Global Majority backgrounds, young workers and LGBT+ workers, but it is clear that so far, trade unions haven’t been paying enough attention to that dimension of the climate crisis.

In recent years, much energy of the labour movement has been rightly been concentrating on combating the cost of living crisis, the genocide of Palestinians and the growth of Reform and the far right. But all those issues can be related to the climate crisis as prices, racism and wars are only likely to grow with climate change.

Isn’t it time for workers, their trade unions and the labour movement to renew class efforts to revive the Climate Justice movement that gained so much momentum with the massive climate strikes young people carried out across the world in 2019? Working class people are and will be the most affected by climate shocks and their survival is at stake – surely that is a top trade union issue?

Clara Paillard is a Unite Branch Secretary, writing in a personal capacity. She is a cofounder of the Unite Grassroots Climate Justice Caucus and Workers Planet. She is also the former President of PCS union Culture Group and now works as a Trade Union Organiser for  Tipping Point UK.

For educational resources about worker-climate issues, click here. For more info about Reform, the far right and the Climate Crisis, click here.

Image: https://vectorportal.com/vector/environment-day/34419Creator: Vectorportal.com | Credit: Image by VectorPortal.com Copyright: Vectorportal.com Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed

Charles Manson: All-American

Ron Jacobs

 June 5, 2026

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Boyd Rice (right) and a man who only identified himself as “White” protesting for Charles Manson after he was denied parole – Public Domain

Charles Manson was an archetypal American in a manner similar to Donald Trump. Both men convince(d) others to do things against their better sense, moral training and counter to their own interests. The particular charisma Manson and Trump project is one that is based in the amplification of people’s fears while creating an illusion of their difference. Charles Manson was considered above conventional morality and something of a demigod by his followers and supporters; Donald Trump is placed above the law by his followers, with some genuinely believing he is a prophet and spiritual figure placed in the White House for godly purposes. More to the point, both men are sociopaths with minimal regard for the rest of humanity. Although Manson seemed to consider money only as a means to an end, Trump’s obsession with money borders on worship. Both enjoy(ed) and manipulate(d) power.

In a new book titled Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders, the author Claudia Verhoeven expands the above comparison to Trump to include much of the entire culture of the United States. Indeed, she makes a convincing argument that Manson is the USA, just like Nixon, Trump, rock and roll, and Hollywood are; not all of its culture, but as much a part of it as influenced by it. Ignorant and brash, insightful and confused, religious and blasphemous. It’s a bold statement that has more than a kernel of truth in it. After all, Manson was not the first or the last US resident to use the nation’s foundation in white supremacy to further his vision and Donald Trump will most likely not be the last.

The book itself is a critical exploration of the so-called Helter-Skelter history of the Manson family murders in Los Angeles in 1969, the formation of the family and the aftermath of those murders. For those who are either unfamiliar with the story or have forgotten it, here’s a quick review. In August 1969 a group of young people killed several people in the city of Los Angeles. The first people murdered were alleged to have somehow ripped off or offended Charles Manson, while the others were either members of the film community or extremely wealthy—some were both. Within days of the latter two sets of killings, the US national media had already begun to sensationalize the deaths and the victims. Like many crimes of this type—seemingly random and without motive—it took awhile before the police narrowed their investigation. Indeed, if the members of the Manson family had not been involved in car theft and other illegal activities, it may have taken the police considerably longer. If Manson follower Susan Atkins had not bragged about her involvement in the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends while in jail after being arrested for theft, the family could possibly have made a getaway to a hideout being prepared by them in the desert east of Los Angeles, making the investigators’ work even more difficult. In the meantime, the local and national media were having a field day speculating about the murders, especially those in the house rented by Sharon Tate.

Verhoeven goes over the murders, sparing the reader the particularly gruesome details while framing them in the zeitgeist of the time; the war in Vietnam, the Woodstock festival, Nixon’s intensification of the police state apparatus against the New Left, the counterculture, the antiwar movement and the Black liberation movement. In her telling of the history, which ranges from intimate details to general reminders of the state of the US nation, Verhoeven considers the nature of Manson’s beliefs, the process of gathering his followers, his social connections in the often-weird world of LA, and his personal history from Kentucky to Spahn Ranch and numerous prison facilities in between. Her discussion of what she calls the Helter-Skelter history takes on prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s presentation at the trial and in his book Helter-Skelter; not because it wasn’t relevant to Manson’s vision, but because her study found Bugliosi’s presentation to have left out some important interviews and other evidence in order to portray Manson’s concept of race war and a postwar ruled by him as more coherent and logical than it actually was.

I remember various writers in the underground and liberal press making the case that the massacre perpetrated by Manson’s followers was more similar than different than the US Army’s massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese in the village of My Lai. The comparison was probably made because the slaughter in MyLai became public knowledge in November 1969, three months after the Tate-LaBianca murders and the growing hysteria around those murders. A main point of the comparison was that if Manson and his followers had been soldiers in a US war, the murders would have probably gone unpunished, if not completely ignored. In addition, Manson—like most of the Army officers who covered up My Lai—would probably not have been charged. The My Lai atrocity was but one such incident in a war not only filled with similar atrocities, but an atrocity in and of itself. Somewhat ironically, the first verdicts in the Manson trials came down the same day as Lt. Calley was convicted for his role in the My Lai massacres.

Author Verhoeven notes that Manson is, as she says, a “slippery” subject. He seemed to pride himself on this characteristic, while this text proves the difficulty of pinning down exactly what his motives were and how they should be considered. With every attempt to answer a question regarding Manson, his followers and their motivations, more questions are raised. Love and Terror’s discussion of the Manson family, the murders, and the aftermath immediate and long term is both captivating and worthwhile; as a true crime piece, a study in US whiteness and an in-depth consideration of a society that creates phenomena like the Manson family.

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Reality, Resistance, Rock and Roll is a collection of book reviews written for Counterpunch over the years and is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com 

Vampire Planet: Data Centers, Far Bigger Disasters Than You Even Thought

Joshua Frank

 June 5, 2026

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Colby Groves, documenting Amazon’s Baldy Mesa solar project.

This week in the Anthropocene

The road is dusty and trash-strewn. My friend and collaborator Colby Groves is hanging out the car window as I drive, gazing at a patchwork of solar panels lined up behind a chain-link fence.

“This has to be it,” declares Colby, balancing a large camera on his lap, hoping it doesn’t bounce off as we traverse a series of bumps and divots.

We are in this land of scorching sun and heat, searching for a large Amazon solar installation in rural San Bernardino County, California. This is the home of the endangered desert tortoise and Joshua trees, but more recently, it’s become a plaything for greedy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

In 2024, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon connected its Baldy Mesa solar-and-storage project, which helps to power the company’s nearby data centers, to the electrical grid, earning accolades for its use of renewable energy. It’s the first of its kind in California. Despite its gargantuan size, the project faced very little opposition, as is often the case with such “green” projects.

As we step out of the car, we immediately hear the loud hum of a football-field’s worth of batteries, powered by solar panels that surround us in every direction. The entire setup is connected to the grid by towering transmission lines. Altogether, this sprawling array covers 1,500 acres of Mojave Desert habitat, almost twice the size of New York City’s Central Park.

Baldy Mesa’s impact on this delicate ecology is stark and tangible. Where Joshua trees once stood, Lego-like blocks of batteries the size of shipping containers now buzz and radiate heat. Where coyotes once scampered and desert tortoises burrowed, solar panels now blanket the landscape. Amazon avoided controversy by relocating 153 doomed Joshua trees, but the fact remains, there’s not a single Joshua tree where these photovoltaic panels now sit.

This particular Amazon Web Services (AWS) facility is an AI-driven machine-learning operation capable of analyzing 33 billion data points each year. That’s over 90 million data points a day. They claim it will allow their batteries to run more efficiently, while making you a better, wiser consumer of Amazon’s products and services.

As far as corporate marketing gimmicks go, this sure sounds nice. Yet, as I stand in the middle of Amazon’s solar farm, I can’t help but wonder what this desert must have been like before they decided it was better suited to powering AI programs. What was it like out here when the soil could still sequester carbon? Building on these lands has eliminated its ability to absorb fossil-fuel pollution. These solar panels are actually hurting the climate, not helping it out.

Even though this behemoth runs on renewable energy, nothing about it feels eco-friendly. Like so much of this AI-driven madness, there is a very post-apocalyptic aura to it all, made worse by the fact that Jeff Bezos is reaping the spoils.

“Wow, look at that.” Colby points to a fence set up to protect the battery installation. The gate is wide open.

Someone more inclined to commit sabotage would have no difficulty gaining access. But we aren’t here for data center mischief. Colby sets up his tripod to shoot footage to accompany Bad Energy, my forthcoming book exploring the downside of the so-called green energy transition.

Few people will ever make their way to this remote spot in the Mojave to witness firsthand what Amazon has wrought. Aerial photographs obscure the reality of what it’s like on the ground amid the AI upheaval being thrust upon us without our consent.

And, despite my many misgivings, this whole monstrosity is allegedly one of the better ones. Most new data centers aren’t powered by renewables but by fossil fuels.

Colby Groves in action.

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Unless you’ve been slithering under a rock for the last few years (I empathize!), you know data centers are bad news.

They suck up water. 17.4 billion gallons annually in the US.

They burn electricity. 176 terawatt-hours (4% of all US energy use) yearly. Globally, they use 415 terawatt-hours, which is more than that of only 10 countries.

They are creating heat islands. In some cases, warming the land around them by 16 degrees Fahrenheit.

They eat up land. The average data center is the equivalent of 450 football fields.

They aren’t long-term job producers. Even the Wall Street Journal calls data centers a “job-creation bust.”

And of course, they are the beating heart of the AI revolution, which is encroaching on every aspect of our lives.

But really, how bad are these damn things? After all, they aren’t a new invention; they’ve been around since the dawn of the computer age.

Yet, something is quantitatively different about what’s happening. At the current pace, data centers globally will require $1 trillion in annual infrastructure investment by the end of the decade.

It helps to put all of this in numbers.

In the United States, there are between 1,500 and 1,600 data centers in the planning or construction phase, with over 4,000 already operating. A Pew study estimates that 67% of these new plants are coming to rural America, where 87% of existing centers currently operate in urban zones.

There are 754 data centers planned in the South. 277 in the West. 419 in the Midwest and 106 in the Northeast. Right now, Pew has shown 38% of Americans live within 5 miles of a data center.

Globally, there are 11,000+ data centers, and economies of scale are expected to dominate. This means the footprint of future data centers will matter more than the number of data centers being built. The energy required for this growth, as the Southern Environmental Law Center predicts, will supercharge climate chaos.

This is because many of these new plants use natural gas to generate power. Natural gas, while not as dirty as coal, releases methane, which, in the short term, is even more harmful than carbon dioxide. Gas plants also emit carbon. Lots of it. A study released in April predicted that just three of Microsoft’s AI-powered, methane-gas-powered data center projects will double the company’s carbon footprint and spew large amounts of pollution.

Another paper from researchers at Cornell predicts that up to 44 million metric tons of CO2 will be emitted by decade’s end if operators continue to rely on natural gas to power their data centers. As Grist reports, that’s like adding 10 million new vehicles on the road. The UN just published a study stating that by 2030, data centers will account for 3% of the world’s total energy use, a total of 935 terawatt-hours of electricity, emitting 440 million tons of carbon dioxide

This week, Columbia Riverkeeper (a fantastic org that deserves your support) dropped a startling report on what planned data centers will do in their corner of the Pacific Northwest. The study exposes how fossil fuel companies, utilities, and Big Tech are colluding to use the surge in data center development to expand gas-fired power plants and more pipelines.

“After years of progress toward achieving our region’s climate goals, we’re suddenly a potential new market for the fossil fuel industry,” says my friend Audrey Leonard, a staff attorney for Columbia Riverkeeper. “Cloaked under a shroud of secrecy, Big Tech opened the window, and now the gas industry is poised to seize an opportunity to build.”

This is a microcosm of what is happening nationwide. Data centers, fueled by massive capital investments in AI, will make it even harder to reduce the country’s contribution to climate chaos.

Then there’s the issue of water.

A crowdsourced map compiled by Erin Brockovich shows that many data centers in the United States are operating in areas experiencing extreme drought. This isn’t good news where water conservation is needed, which may soon be much of the country. As mentioned above, data centers in the US, by one estimate, directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons of water per year. As more of these centers get built, that amount is expected to grow to 38-73 billion gallons annually.

That’s a lot of water, more than the cities of Seattle or San Francisco use in an entire year.

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In this week’s good news, I’ll leave you with these little nuggets.

As Jared Kushner, Trump’s right-hand man in the Middle East, moves forward with a $1.6 billion luxury resort in Albania, thousands have taken to the streets to protest, arguing that the development will destroy vital wetland habitats. The pressure appears to be paying off, and a corruption probe has been initiated.

Wild elephants have returned to eastern Zambia for the first time in 50 years, and locals are learning to coexist. And an endangered condor flew in Oregon for the first time in over 120 years.

Pack that in, and I’ll see you next week.

Colby Groves and Joshua Frank in JTNP, photo by Chelsea Mosher.

JOSHUA FRANK is co-editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio. He is the author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, and the forthcoming, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who are Selling Off Our Future, both with Haymarket Books. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can troll him on Bluesky @joshuafrank.bsky.social