Top unionist Trumka, ex-coal miner: Carbon must be cut, but coalfield concerns should come first

Former coal miner Richard Trumka, who once headed the United Mine Workers and is the nation's top labor leader as president of the national AFL-CIO, told the United Nations Investor Summit on Climate Risk on Thursday that global warming is caused by burning coal and other human activity, "and we have to act to cut those emissions, and act now." (Photograph of Trumka by Rainer Hosch, which accompaied a great profile of Trumka in Esquire magazine by John H. Richardson)

"We need dialogue between environmentalists and workers and communities about the future of coal," Trumka said. He said the call to "end coal" makes no sense, and in Nemacolin, Pa., where he grew up, "It sounds like a threat to destroy the value of our homes, to shut our schools and churches, to drive us away from the place our parents and grandparents are buried, to take away the work that for more than a hundred years has made us who we are." He said labor unions want power plants retrofitted to "create good jobs [and] save lives."

Congress is "effectively controlled by climate-change deniers," and "mass unemployment makes everything harder and feeds fear," Trumka said. "Sometimes it seems like fear, and the power of money, has paralyzed our government. But the antidote to fear is trust." To build that trust, he said, there must be a measured approach that is gauged not by "how well it fits the needs of the well-positioned. We must ask ourselves, 'How well does this pathway serve the least, the hardest to reach, the most likely to be left behind?' Places like West Virginia and the Ohio Valley must come first, not last." (Read more)