[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas the winds blowing through breathing trees Strong ozone, safe sunshine Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly Case Grid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. I'm reasonably sure that those who listen to Sustainability now are concerned about what the administration of ex President elect Trump will mean for sustainability, the environment and climate change. Trump has promised to disembowel every agency, regulation and organization that is in any way supporting environmental conservation, protection and action. None of that, of course, will change the fact that the world has entered a climate regime that promises a growing number of impacts and disasters starting right now. What also remains broadly true is that to avert and adapt to the worst impacts of climate change, a just transition away from fossil fuels is necessary. What will be required to make this transition happen? And what would make a transition just remain open? My guest today is UCSC Assistant professor of Environmental Studies Jay Mijin Cha, whose research examines the intersection of inequality and the climate crisis in which the energy transition is leveraged to advance a more just future. She's an affiliate faculty member in the UCSC Legal Studies department. She's on the faculty advisory board of the UCSC center for labor and Community. And. And she's a fellow at the Cornell University's Climate Jobs Institute. Her new book, A Just Transition for Workers and Communities for a Carbon Free Future, is just about to be published by MIT Press.
Professor Mijin Cha, welcome to Sustainability now.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Why don't we begin with some of your background? You received a PhD in Comparative Environmental Law and Justice from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. And that's sort of unusual. How did you get there and why did you decide to do a PhD there as opposed to somewhere in the US?
[00:02:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean it has a little bit. Been a little bit of a winding journey for sure. I actually went to law school before I went to graduate school in the US at what is now called the University of California Law School, but at the time was Hastings College of the Law.
And when I was in law school I realized that I think law is interesting and can do some good things, but it was not quite what I was looking for in terms of more of a critical analysis of kind of systems and structures.
And so a Professor of mine suggested that I go to soas, the school that's part of the University of London, to do a Master's of Law and LLM degree in Comparative Environmental law to see if I enjoyed it. And when I was there, I really did enjoy it. So is a really wonderful school. It's one of the smaller University of London campuses, but it is actually a truly radical school in terms of the thinking that they promote. And the kind of thought process and meeting people from all over the world was really transformative for me. So I chose to stay and do my PhD there.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Okay, and then how did you get to UC Santa Cruz?
[00:03:49] Speaker C: Well, again, kind of a winding journey.
I studied comparative environmental law and justice as my PhD thesis comparing the legal systems in the US, in India, and kind of how this idea of environmental justice was really advanced. And what I realized during the process was that when you study things like environmental justice, for me, it was not something that I could really just do in books and papers. And so after I finished my thesis, I worked for about nine months in Nepal for a regional NGO looking at access to environmental justice in rural areas. And then I decided that, you know, I think this is a little off the topic of what we're talking about today, but international development I find to be quite fraught. And so I thought as an American, I should really try to make things better in the U.S. and that would actually have much more of an impact than these big donors telling local communities what to do, even though they actually know exactly what to do. So I moved to New York and I worked for nonprofit organizations and think tanks and policy organizations to really try to understand kind of how policy gets made, what politics are involved in policy making, how coalitions form, those kind of things still on the topics of climate and climate justice and environmental justice. And then in 2016, I moved to start teaching at Occental College, and then I moved to UC Santa Cruz in January of 2023.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: So anyway, that's an interesting trajectory, but here you are. So why don't you give our listeners a summary of the main points and arguments that you're presenting in your soon to be published book.
[00:05:21] Speaker C: Sure. And I'll just start briefly because I think maybe this could be like a few minutes or an hour. So let's start with a few minutes. But I think that the two main interventions of my book are one kind of a governance framework that helps people kind of understand how we can think about policy creation and what elements of policies would really help advance, adjust, transition. And as part of that, of course, is the argument that an energy transition must be adjust. And I think the second intervention is really arguing that we cannot have a just transition by replicating the mistakes of the past. Which means that green capitalism, which is the path that we're on now, is fundamentally unable to achieve a just transition because the reasons we are having an unjust transition are largely due to capitalism. So greening it is not really going to do anything for us. So the argument is really thinking about how can we move beyond just these kind of market based mechanisms and these small kind of incentive programs to really thinking about a much broader, much more transformative idea of an energy transition and how an energy transition can then be used to advance a more just society in the future?
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Well, at least two definitional questions. The first one is how do you define or conceive of environmental justice? And the second one then is what is an energy transition?
[00:06:45] Speaker C: I think environmental justice. You know, there's a really robust body of literature that discusses it, but I often tell students it's the basic idea of, you know, the disproportionate environmental burden that communities of color and other marginalized communities bear and the systems and structures that are in place that create these realities.
There's a really wonderful thinker named Hop Hopkins, and he says, you know, you can't have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can't have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism. And so I think that really helps kind of delineate why environmental justice is different from environmentalism in general, and also why we have to be concerned about the impact that on the disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities. When we talk about things like the environment and the climate and energy transition. I think I have a definitional assertion in my book about what just transition is. And the first part is that there has to be an actual transition. And so a lot of folks talk now about an energy transition because there's a lot of renewable energy being developed, which is true. But what we're not seeing is a transition part, which means that the renewable energy that is being generated is more of an addition to the existing energy generation. So it's not really displacing much fossil fuel extraction and use. So what we're seeing is actually just much more energy production in general. And it's great that a bigger percentage of that is renewable energy, but we're not really seeing any kind of decrease in fossil fuel production. In fact, the exact opposite is happening. Right. Particularly in the US where we're seeing an increase in fossil fuel, fossil fuel production. And so there's, there's not a transition happening where we're moving from one system to another. We're just adding more energy to an existing system.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: I mean, arguably there's more money to be made from fossil fuels than from renewables. Still, the fossil fuels, you get payback very quickly. The renewables take some time. Have you been watching the conference of the parties to the climate convention which is taking in place in Azerbaijan? An oil producer?
[00:08:44] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, last year was in uae, so.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I know.
[00:08:48] Speaker C: And I just wanted to say that fossil fuels are making money for fossil fuel companies, but they're not really enriching workers or communities. I am not following the cop. I think that the COP has long since been co opted. There are far more fossil fuel interests there than climate interests. And I think it is a joke to have it in these areas that are not only fossil fuel regions, but also extremely repressive.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: You mentioned green capitalism. And for the benefit of our listeners, what is green capitalism? How can capitalism be green?
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Actually very easily.
So green capitalism is the idea that you really focus on the market as a driver of change. And so green capitalism is how can we incentivize market actors, private firms, to do things that we consider to be green things like tax incentives for renewable energy buildout or tax incentives for homeowners to replace their heat heating systems with heat pumps. These are all of course, very good things, but they are definitely targeted at a certain class. So for instance, many of the incentives are for homeowners. So you have to be able to own your home. Even if we think about things like electric vehicle incentives, electric vehicles are still about $30,000. So they're really out of reach for many people. And again, so these things are all good, but they're not sufficient. We need much more than what we're doing now. These are incentives for people who arguably could already afford afford these things. So in some ways there is an argument that we are subsidizing people who already have the means to adapt these technologies. And two, there is no fundamental change in the way we are approaching emissions reductions. So it is greening the system that we have. But the system that we have is the reason why we have the problem that we have.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Right. Why don't we talk a little bit about science? Because you have some discussion of the role of science and I'm always interested in that particular matter. And you argue that, and this is the quote, climate change is no longer an issue that can be solved solely through technical and scientific measures. It's a political problem that requires a political solution. And so, again, you know, when I, as I wander through the world, I find many, many people thinking of climate change in those technical, technical terms and actually denying or ignoring the politics. So how is it a political problem and what would constitute a political solution?
[00:11:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And in fact, the mainstream environmental movement is still kind of stuck in this. Technology and science will get us where we need. What I mean by that is that, you know, we actually have, with existing technology, we can actually reduce our emissions by about 80%. Something a little bit more. And then in certain sectors, of course, like electricity, we can decarbonize basically our entire electricity system with existing technology.
Which I think then raises the question of why that isn't happening. And why it's not happening is because of politics. And even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ipcc, even they have said that we are no longer in the area where we have to think of climate, where we should be thinking about climate change as a technical and scientific issue. It is a political problem, and we lack the political will to implement the policies that will force this transition to happen. And so we can keep developing new technology, I think, especially for hard to decarbonize sectors like in the industrial sector. But that is kind of a delay tactic in the sense that we are not advancing the policies that would actually result in substantial emissions reductions now because of politics. So we need a political solution, which means things like organizing or putting pressure on elected officials and not just thinking that because we have the answer or because we're, you know, we need to. We need to reduce emissions by X percent, that that will actually drive.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to quibble, but you use that term political will, which always raises my hackles because it sounds a lot like in the general will, you know, that somehow, magically, with the right incentives, everybody can come to agree on something. I do think political action is very important. Right. As opposed to will. But I'm preaching here, and I shouldn't do that. Then you also wrote that the term listen to the science is both a seemingly apolitical slogan and also implies that science should dictate the policy. And it appeals to the rational mind, one that rises above politics. That's also part of your quote. And I guess if we've learned anything over the past decade, it's that emotion trumps rationality and There's a great reluctance to talk about emotions.
So, I mean, how do you think about that? Right? I mean, after all, we've just gone through a presidential campaign where emotions were really out there on the table. And, you know, in the case of something like climate change and just transition and so on, can we use emotions to try and engender political action? I mean, how do you think about that?
[00:13:49] Speaker C: It is a really good question. And I would say, for instance, if we think about a slogan like listen to the science, my issue with that is that arguably we're not asking people to just listen. We want them to do something. And so listen to the science as a rallying call is pretty weak. And I should say at this point, it's very important to say that this is not a critique on climate scientists. Right? They do very important work and they are very crucial to our movements. But we don't just want people to listen, we want them to act. And I think the idea of. I guess I would maybe push back a little bit on the idea that we are manipulating emotions and more. The idea that, as we can see from this last election, emotion is what really drives people, emotion and values. And so what I think it is is that while we wish that people were rational, they in fact are not. And I think that when someone is expressing some kind of concern, like they're afraid of losing their job if fossil fuels go away, which is a very valid concern, and we respond with a slew of facts and analysis, you're not really moving that person to make any, to have any kind of change or to really motivate them to fight for a bigger cause. Right. And so I think the idea is that what motivates people, I still believe, is this as an. As a desire for a better life. Like that is fundamentally what we were doing here, right? Like, why are we concerned about the climate crisis? Why are we concerned about all these things? Is because we want a better future for everyone.
And I would even say a better present. Right. Not just in the future. And I think understanding how people relate to issues is a much more effective way, and that includes emotions and values. Rather than thinking that if I just need to you some more graphs and plots to really convince you that this is the right thing to do.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Mijin Cha, professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
[00:15:46] Speaker C: Whose book A Death Transition for All.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: A Just Transition for All, is just about to be published by MIT Press.
And we were just talking about emotions and values because elsewhere, elsewhere in the book, you do talk about individual and community identities and cultures that have been shaped by histories of local resource extraction. And I mean, that's very much tied, I think, to this point. You were just making about emotions and values. You use that example of the Bakersfield High School, whose mascot is the Drillers. They could be dentists, I suppose.
And I just want to note, I grew up in Houston when there was a football team called the Oilers, and I haven't heard of any Silicon Valley school naming itself for the tech industry. What are the implications of that particular insight about history and culture for political mobilization?
[00:16:41] Speaker C: I mean, I think they're really important for understanding kind of where people are at and why they may be somewhat reluctant to, again, listen to facts and data and rationality. Right. Fossil fuel companies have spent decades trying to engender this idea that person's individual identity is tied to the fossil fuel industry. Right. There's a lot of research, wonderful research by the sociologists Richard Bell and Chen in York that really looks at how things like the Bakersfield Drillers or sponsoring local football teams and local softball teams. Right. They've really tied a person's identity to fossil fuels. And so when you think about. And when you talk about, you know, drawdown of fossil fuels and ending fossil fuel extraction, because that identity has been so intertwined with a person, it becomes more of a personal attack in addition to an attack on economic wellbeing. Right. So not only are you making me lose my job, you're making me lose my identity as a coal miner or an oil rig, you know, those kind of identity markers. And so I think it's just helpful. You know, I think sometimes people's analysis stops there and it justifies why we shouldn't do anything about fossil fuels. And I would argue that it just gives us more information to understand how to be more effective. So if you go in and talking to these folks and just start straight away talking about how evil fossil fuels are and all of these things, you're just going to isolate a bunch of people who could maybe, you know, would maybe be more open to listening to you if you had taken a different approach.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Give me a little bit more of an example of that. What did you do in Bakersfield or in Wyoming when you were in the.
[00:18:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, ironically, I was actually born in Bakersfield, but I haven't spent that much time there recently. For instance, I would say when I went to the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, which is in the Northwest Corner. And I actually did grow up in Wyoming, and I went in 2019 because there had been two very large coal mines that had shut down very suddenly and without any kind of notice. So I thought that perhaps there would be a lot of resentment and anger towards the coal companies because of this very chaotic and very sudden shutdown that really resulted in people losing their jobs and income. And in fact, that wasn't the case. And what I found was that people were one, had weathered many of these storms, right? Many openings and closings and sudden closings and bankruptcies and all of those things. But because fossil fuels were so ingrained in the region, their first instinct was not to blame the company, but to blame something else. So many of them blamed, for instance, at the time, President Obama's climate policies, even though they had literally no impact on what was happening. And so I think going in thinking that people are feel the same way that you do is one mistake that many people and organizers make, and it is just not true. So understanding where people are coming from, I think just makes you a more effective organizer.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Well, you know, in a situation like that, I. It seems to me that people feel as though what's happened is not fair, that they're not getting justice. How would you think about that? I'm not trying to say, well, to defend them necessarily, but this is how people are thinking. And I mean, you see a lot of. A lot of resentment. A lot of what we would say is baseless resentment, and yet it's very real there.
[00:19:59] Speaker C: Yes, of course. I think what I was trying to say was that the resentment was not towards the company who was directly responsible for their economic conditions, but towards other factors because they were. They did not think or did not want to criticize the company. And so they of course, felt injustice, and there was injustice that was done because of this sudden and chaotic closing. But the root cause of this injustice was seen differently between different people.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: You have also this discussion about language. And if I can, I want to read this from a quote from an Eastern Kentucky organizer who told you, I could go out to the street or I could go to Walmart. I could stop 25 people. None of them would know what just transition means. You stop anybody and ask them what war on coal means, they know that it's like progressives tend to hide what they're doing and then create a language that's only for the cognoscente. And I think that's what we've done. You know, everybody goes through a transition, right? I'm not going to Go ahead and read the whole quote. But it's basically a language made up by elites, four elites, to keep regular people out of the debate. And you also call this elsewhere outside language, right? So, I mean, here we're now talking about, you know, discourse, right? About the framing, the discourse. And how does that manifest when you're going in and talking to people, when you're trying to make arguments for political action, you know, how do you. How do you think about that or deal with that? And is that a correct observation?
[00:21:39] Speaker C: For sure. And the argument that I make in the book that I think is crucial is that while it may be in opposition to the terminology, it does not necessarily manifest as an opposition to an energy transition. And what I mean by that is that when you go in and you start talking to folks about just transition, they don't really know what you're talking about for all the reasons that were listed by this Eastern Kentucky organizer. For instance, energy is not even in the title, so you don't really know what transition they're talking about. The idea of just is very obtuse and personal, and it doesn't really mean anything.
But when you start talking to folks about what you mean by just transition, then you realize that there is not this. There is not necessarily the same opposition to an energy transition. Right? Coal regions have really suffered from being coal regions.
The coal industry has been in an unjust decline for several years due to the availability of cheap natural gas. And there has been no transition assistance for most of these populations. And so when you start talking to folks about kind of what their concerns are and what is happening, they're not, you know, all these things. There can be identity, you know, ties to the coal industry. There will be some people who will always be opposed. But the point being that when you talk to folks about what you're really envisioning and what they're envisioning, there is not the same kind of ideological opposition to an energy transition. But if you just go in and keep talking about just transition without, you know, explaining what you mean or maybe using a different idea or, you know, trying to really organize to understand what people's concerns are, you're just not going to get anywhere. And so I think too much of the climate movement exists in this plane of a lot of terminology, a lot of jargon, without understanding that those terms are generally meaningless to people. And so I think it's helpful for people who are academics or people who are researchers to kind of have a shared language. So we, when we do our research, we know what each other is talking about that is very different than what average people actually care about or understand or the way that they think about things.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: So how do they think about this? Right? If coal is on a decline and the mines are not going to open again, and of course they're anchored where they are because their houses are their wealth and nobody wants to buy their houses, how do they think about the future?
[00:23:58] Speaker C: I mean, I think it's interesting when you look at a lot of the research that is done with these coal communities and you ask them to do something like envisioning process where they envision the future for their community. Almost none of them have coal in it. And so the idea is not that they are clinging to the past. There are, of course, some people who cling to the past. And so I think we need to acknowledge that there are just some folks that are unreachable. But for most folks, I think we have to think about what opportunities are being offered to them. And so you can't really ask someone to take a leap of faith to leave an industry that they maybe don't like, but they know will be able to put food on the table into some unknown future that you promise will be just, even though their history has shown that there is no such thing as a just transition for the coal industry. And so I think that the question becomes then what are they being offered and what are government policies and programs in place that actually help these communities transition?
[00:24:54] Speaker B: You wrote about that also write about that also in the book about various programs, but they haven't been all that successful, have they? Tell us a little bit about what's out there and what they've accomplished.
[00:25:08] Speaker C: I think that, for instance, we could look at, I write a lot about the Trade Adjustment act, which was an act that was put in place after the first waves of deindustrialization back in the 1960s. And I think what's important about the TAA when I talk about my criticisms, is that the idea of transition assistance in and of itself is not bad. And in fact, when it works, it actually does help workers transition. But we have chronically underfunded the program and in fact, it has not been reauthorized since 2023. And so again, I think the issue is not necessarily sarily that these programs are bad, but we just don't support them to the level that we need to to ensure that they are successful.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Well, I remember reading, you know, now it's 20 years ago, an article by Katherine Bee in the New Yorker, which I think eventually became a book. And she was going down there to look at the impacts of NAFTA and retraining programs.
And there was this one example about training to be an emt, you know, an emergency medical tech, which of course, there is demand for. But the question was, how many EMTs do you need in a town the size of, you know, Brownsville? Brownsville is pretty large. And that was. And I mean, I see that happening around here, too, that this idea of workforce training and upskilling, but nobody ever actually looks at very closely right, at how many people are going to be training for the similar positions. So, you know, again, that seems to me a problem with these. Not that we shouldn't have them, these train, you know, transition training programs, but that it's not really. Ever thought through very carefully.
[00:26:55] Speaker C: I think that's exactly right. And I write in my book about how the focus is on training, because, to be honest, training is cheap and not on job creation. Right. So rather than this happened in 2008 when there was a big push for green jobs and they trained a bunch of people to weatherized homes, but they didn't create the jobs for those people who are trained to go into. And so I think more focus on job creation. And here, I think, is an example of where we could really break from capitalism and in fact, have big, meaningful public programs that are jobs creation, job training, job creation programs. Right. Like during the New Deal, and you just have the government directly employ people. Then you're training people for jobs that exist, but training people just to train them. And in fact, Tony Mazaki, who is the late labor leader who really thought of this idea of just transition was quite critical of training for this exact reason. Training is a really easy way to kind of tick off that you've done something to help workers. And of course, training is important, but you need to create the jobs for the trained workers to then go into.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Right. You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is environmental.
Environmental studies professor Mijin Cha from UC Santa Cruz. We're talking about her forthcoming book, Just Transition for All.
Well, okay, in the book, you talk about four pillars or five, you know, as a. As a kind of a policy and action framework. And tell us about that.
[00:28:24] Speaker C: The four pillars developed out of some work that I did with Dr. Manuel Pasteur down at USC. And really what we looked at was, you know, areas in the country and across the world that have gone through transitions and kind of what were successful elements of their transition programs or elements that could be successful if they had actually been either further developed or further resourced. And we came up with four pillars, which is strong governmental supports, dedicated funding streams, diversified economies, and strong and diverse coalitions. And so the strong governmental support idea is that one, a lot of support programs are already done through the public sector like unemployment insurance and other worker supports. And also when we think they're all kind of tied together. So when we think about the importance of diversifying local economies, you need kind of steady capital for several years before you can expect any kind of return that's not that well suited for the private sector, which really focuses on short term quarterly returns. And so the federal government or public sector is much more well suited to provide that kind of resource and those kind of seeding opportunities in the private sector dedicated funding streams is, if we use the example of the taa, too many programs just have either start and stop funding or are not fully funded to the point where they can actually be effective. And so rather than one of the challenges of the TAA is that it is dependent on congressional authorization. And so as we see these ups and downs and drastic changes between one party and the next between elections, that's a really unstable funding ground.
You can think of instead something like permanent tax on fossil fuel extraction that creates a dedicated funding stream for as long as fossil fuels exist. So you have an amount of money that you can count on that helps also with planning.
Diversifying local economies is really important because one of the reasons why fossil fuel regions are so hit so hard by fossil fuel ups and downs is because they're mono dependent. So the big industry in town is the fossil fuel industry. If you have a diversified economy, you can absorb these shocks better and then you're not as dependent on one industry. And then the strong and diverse coalitions is just to make sure that you have the civil society component that actually as you're creating these policies, ensures that you're actually addressing the concerns that are actually arising and that you can then build the political power to actually press elected officials to adopt these policies.
That was our original four pillar framework. And then as I was thinking about it and as I started writing the book, I realized that but they were necessary but not sufficient for a just transition. And so what I realized was that we need something again that kind of helps us build something new and doesn't just continue this cycle of green capitalism. And so that's why I've incorporated a new pillar. So I call it the four plus pillars in the book of non reformist Reforms, which is learning from abolitionist scholars and labor scholars about how can you ensure that your policy has all of these elements, but also that it is working towards building something new and better and not just reaffirming the existing system.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: You mentioned that Congress is very unreliable in terms of providing dedicated funding streams.
And that of course raises the question of is relying on Congress to do those kinds of appropriations terribly helpful? I mean, I'm not sure what alternative funding streams would look like that would be sufficient, but I think like a.
[00:32:02] Speaker C: Dedicated tax, for instance, a dedicated tax fund would be something like a permanent tax on an, on an polluting industry that just occurs and is in the tax code. So you don't have to depend on Congress to give you the money every session. That money just gets generated.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: But you still have to have the legislation to do that in the first place. Right?
[00:32:24] Speaker C: You still have to have the legislation, but at least you don't have to fight every two or three to get the money.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:30] Speaker C: Security is another example of a dedicated funding stream. Right. Social Security is just taken from people's wages.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Right. Do you, do you have any cases of successful transitions you can tell us about, you know, real life examples?
[00:32:46] Speaker C: The short answer is not really, because we have seen many transitions throughout history and our. So transition in and of itself is not unjust, right? As economies mature, as societies develop, transition is inevitable. But our inability to support those that are impacted by transition is what makes it unjust. So the example that many people point to, which I talk about in my book, is the Ruhr region in Germany, which moved away from hard rock mining and steel manufacturing.
And they have done many things like seeded new industries, they started some technical training schools there to create some different kind of infrastructure.
And so they have, have ended coal mining and steel manufacturing. And in the process, you know, a lot of reports show that they did lose, for instance, a generation of workers, but because they have such a strong safety net at the national level, they didn't suffer in the way that workers in the US Suffer. And so the other challenge, I think, to thinking about transition, especially in the fossil fuel context, is that we are now starting into this transition era. So there are, we may be, for instance, plant by plant shutdowns. And the response to that has varying levels of being just or unjust, but we don't really see substantial or massive fossil fuel drawdown. For there to be this kind of transition era to have analysis around, I.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: Mean, it would really need to be driven by almost by created scarcity. I suppose I'm just thinking About. Right.
If you really want to push the transition, it would be necessary to somehow make the returns on fossil fuels much smaller. I mean, I guess that's the logic of putting a tax on it or windfall profits tax.
[00:34:38] Speaker C: I mean, I think if you only thought about market signals. But we could think about things like managed decline, where we just mandated 10% reduction in fossil fuels every year.
[00:34:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:50] Speaker C: So right now we are focusing too much on the market incentives and market signals, which is why we're not seeing a transition. But there are other tools that are available that could really accelerate an energy transition.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I just say there's a lot of magic. There's been a lot of magical thinking about the market in the last 40 odd years, at least. Right. And it doesn't seem to be going away.
On another line, you also write, a more just world also requires expanding the idea of extraction to include extraction of all kinds, including the extraction of people, wealth and resources from communities. Well, I mean, we live in an extractive system. Right. I mean, primitive accumulation and capitalism basically going in and trying to extract value.
Right. Not just from resources, but from people's minds as well. You know, and that's really, I sort of feel like that's really the sort of the key point. A key point that. Right. Is at the center of your argument. So how do we, you know, do you have any ideas about how we shift away from this extractive economy? I'm thinking, you know, to a distributive economy, or I don't want to use the term redistribution because then people start screaming, but something that's more justly distributed, for sure.
[00:36:12] Speaker C: I mean, the framing that I use in my book is taken from a movement organization called Movement Generation. And it really talks about how we can move from a system of extraction to a system of regeneration.
And so I think that framing is helpful because one, regeneration is just such a nice idea that the idea that we could become sustainable and regenerate and not extraction is just ending. Like extraction just goes to end.
And I think that this is another argument why we have to move away from green capitalism. Right. Because it is really capitalism that is driving the climate crisis. And so it will be difficult and challenging for sure. But I think if we think about it, the only way that capitalism works is through consumption. And so if people need to buy things for. Right. And that justifies the making of things and that justifies the resource extraction and all of those things.
But there's a lot of research that shows that buying things doesn't actually make us Happy, it's spending time with loved ones and experiences. And so when we talk about this values that we talked about earlier, it's not even a value shift. It's just a question of creating the conditions so that people can actually live their values. Right now people have to work so many hours just to buy these things that will allegedly make us happy, but they're not actually making us happy. And so this idea that we could fight against this continual expansion of both capital and resources is really fundamental to transitioning away from fossil fuels. Right. Like the Earth has a certain capacity that is limited for resources, and we keep trying to pretend that doesn't exist, but that is very true. And so I think that there are ways in which we can think differently about both how economies function, how societies function, that really get us away from this extractive model into much more of a regenerative future.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Okay, well, as a former faculty member of the UCSC Politics Politics department, I was pleased to see that you addressed the matter of power, which I find is all too often left out of books about the environment, social movements and what have you. Again, there's a sort of magical thinking there. So how is power exercised over these extractive regions, resource busted regions, and how can it be grabbed by people in. You know, power isn't, is a sort of difficult thing to define. So first, how do you think about it, about power? You know, what's your sort of conceptualization of that, aside from the sort of, you know, getting B to do what you want B to what you would like be to do, which is sort of the classic definition, right?
[00:38:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:54] Speaker C: I mean, I talk about John Gaventa's work, which is really seminal to my thinking. And, you know, he, he highlights the ways in which power has. Is exerted over folks in Appalachia. Right. So the company not just is your employer, but they own all of the stores in which you have to shop, Right? They, they own all the conditions under which you socialize. They own all the conditions under which you work.
And those are forms of control, which I think is very tied to the idea of power in this way of how it's deployed.
But, you know, even in these conditions, there are still examples of resistance.
Right. And so when I think about power, I think about, you know, you build power either through money or through people. And we will never have enough money as the fossil fuel industry. So we need people, and that is why we need to think about what motivates people, what are their concerns, and understand that those are all climate considerations. Right. They may not talk about emissions or degrees Celsius, but these are all climate considerations.
And so I think power is, I think, missing from a lot of climate discussions because again, this apolitical kind of over technocratic nature of it. But the true reason why we don't have meaningful climate action is because we don't have enough power and the other side has too much power.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: So how do you grab power? How do you increase power? What do you. I mean, this now gets to the sort of the mobilization question, right? Which often goes beyond just sort of policy formulations.
[00:40:29] Speaker C: I mean, I think if I can use a real world example that's happening now, which is that there are some elements of the climate movement, those that have bigger platforms, that are trying to normalize and legitimize parts of the Trump administration. So for instance, the incoming Department of Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, they have lauded as he has energy experience. He's a serious energy person, like, you know, someone we can work with. This man is an oil and gas executive. But he also believes that climate change is a communist plot. And so when we think about what we're doing as a movement, right. Besides the fact that I think that if you think someone you can work with, someone who thinks climate change is a communist plot, you are so politically naive, you shouldn't be allowed to be anywhere near power centers. But what does it say to the millions of people who are in fear of being deported or that their loved ones aren't being deported, that we ignore that very real threat and terror and try to legit, legitimize this insane person because we want to save whatever tax credits are in the ira, Right. When we think about power, it is about, like what power you have and how are you using it. So those with a platform that are in the climate movement, that are trying to normalize and legitimize fascism, what are you doing? Right. This is part of a climate issue. And so I think when we think about how do you build power, it is that there is more of a world than just you. And so when you say these things, you need to understand what impact that has on our ability to build a mass movement that is multiracial and multi class. Because you are signaling that we don't care about these other issues that very clearly are threatening and terrorizing people that we care about.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: Yeah. There is the idea that you can always negotiate, right. And compromise and, and find sort of midpoints, right. Where both sides get satisfied. Again, it's a very liberal economic sort of notion. Right. It is almost transactional.
In the sense that, you know, you give me some, I give you some. And it strikes me that the big organizations are terrified, but they don't know anything else than to sort of operate as normal, which is what they've been doing, you know, And I think that's.
[00:42:48] Speaker C: Absolutely right and that's exactly what they're thinking. But we are not in normal times. And so I think either you're a fascist or you're anti fascist. And so if you're trying to legitimize, if you're trying to negotiate with fascism.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: So where does that lead you? You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Mijin Cha.
We've been talking about, most recently about politics and power and what one does in the face of the kind of power that looks like it's going to be wielded after January 21st.
Right. So what is it that we can do?
And I don't want to get sort of too broad with this. Okay. But to get back to the focus of your book, right, to the just transition, do we widen our focus? Do we narrow our focus to the state of California, let's say, you know, and how do you think about that?
[00:43:53] Speaker C: You know, I think that one thing that I'm hoping my book will help people understand is a little bit about how we got here, because our vision was so narrow. And I think part of how we got here was that, you know, to your point earlier about these big organizations and how they kind of advanced neoliberalism, you know, when people tell you that they, they care about the cost of eggs because their groceries are getting expensive, and you answer that with a bunch of charts and graphs that show all these indicators, it's not that helpful. And what I'm seeing now post election is that people are kind of mocking this, right? Like, you know, when you, whenever something crazy comes out of the trumpet, you know, the Trump team, they're like, oh, I guess this was worth it for the price of eggs. But that's not really fair, right? Because people are, what they're telling you is that they're really struggling. And so what I think about is that this is now a moment where we can actually stop, to your point, doing what we've been doing because it's not working, and do something different and we need to do something different. So part of that, I think, is, you know, focusing on the state and local level, which, to be honest, has always been the venue in which the most change has happened in terms of climate change because the federal level has just ignored it for a very long time.
And I think the second thing we can do is not comply in advance. You know, like this call for, like legitimizing Chris Wright is not only offensive, but what are you doing? Like we should be. You cannot legitimize this illegitimate incoming administration. And so I think this is going to be uncomfortable for a lot of climate folks, particularly those that are in the listen to the science camp. But whether you like it or not, you are now an anti fascist. And so that means you do not comply in advance. You have to protect the people. We have to protect the people that are most vulnerable. And you can't just keep talking about emissions and degrees Celsius and whether or not we're going to be higher. Global warming will be 1.5 degrees Celsius because protecting people that we care about is the best climate policy that we can do.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the important points that you make, I think, although you don't use the term, is that sub politics matter, you know, and sub politics is this concept that there is a lot that's political that doesn't take place in the legislature. People tend to think that if you pass a law, it will happen, you know, and they're really not aware of all the other levels, which actually, you know, I mean, I think that's what Trump keeps inveighing against. Right. Is the fact that there's a lot of politics that goes on in agencies and other kinds of institutions.
And I just wanted to read again this quote from Carolyn Farrell, who was executive director of the center for Race, Poverty and the Environment.
We all were focused on the decision makers, like the elected officials. They don't run the city. The clerk at the city council runs the city. The attorney runs the city, the city manager runs the city. The board or the city council are like, they're just voting on what gets put in front of them, but if it's not in front of them, they don't vote on it. So, you know, what are the practical implications of this? I mean, I fully agree with you, but what are the practical implications of that kind of perspective? You know, where do you, where do you focus? Where do you try and act?
[00:47:20] Speaker C: I think, you know, it highlights how democracy is a verb. Right. And something that we have to be exercising at all times.
And I think the maybe upside of that is that there are lots of places where you can create change. Right. It's not just Congress. It's, you know, getting to know your local decision makers. Getting to know their staff. You know, a friend of mine worked on Capitol Hill, and she told me that most people, most staffers kind of reflect the congressperson, meaning that most of them come from private schools, are elites. And so when they think about things like a $7.25 minimum wage, it doesn't really necessarily move them as shocking, because they don't really. They would never make minimum wage.
[00:48:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:48:01] Speaker C: So I think even, like, there's just so many places where change can happen that I think it is somewhat of an, at least, kind of the optimistic way for us to think about the next couple of years is that a lot of things are going to happen, and some of them are. Many of them will be very bad. But that also means there are a lot of places for us to exert pressure and change. And so it's kind of up to us to really understand where those are happening and to make sure that we are engaging in all of these forums.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: Well, I mean, so we'll take California. Right.
If you want to push the. Just transition. Energy transition.
Where would you focus.
[00:48:42] Speaker C: If this.
[00:48:43] Speaker B: I mean, if somebody, if a student came to you and said, you know, where should I. Where should I do something? What would you say to them?
[00:48:52] Speaker C: My instinct is always to say organizing. Right. Getting people involved, getting people engaged. Because the other thing is that someone like me has a certain perspective and a certain set of skills, and it's not everything that we need. And so we need a lot of people. And I think organizing is something that is under resourced and undervalued, but it's truly how things change.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: Okay, well, is there anything else that you want to talk about that was in the book? I mean, there were lots. It's a. It's a rich piece of work, you know, and, and, and you started it toward the end of the first Trump administration, and now it's being published as the second one looms over us.
[00:49:34] Speaker C: Yeah. Which maybe is an indication of how long it takes to write books, but also kind of a bummer since I, I didn't think that I'd have to, you know, like, one Trump administration is bad enough as it is. Well, one. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about these things, Ronnie, so thank you for inviting me on.
[00:49:51] Speaker B: Oh, I know I wanted to ask you one other thing before we go. And that is, what are you going to work on next?
[00:50:00] Speaker C: I have a project now which is funded by the Sloan foundation, which is looking at the just transition list of the lithium life cycle. And so some colleagues of mine a couple years ago did something called the Just Transition Listening Project, where we interviewed 100 people who either faced transition or had gone through transition to kind of understand what their concerns are. And we're using that same methodology to look at the life cycle of lithium. So extraction, manufacturing, processing and battery storage to see kind of what we're hoping is that we can create a framework where we're not just displacing injustice, meaning that we don't care about what happens in extraction sites as long as lithium is mined so that we can build electric vehicles. And thinking more about how can we actually have a truly just transition along the life cycle.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: Well, when you finish the project, I'll have you back on the show if.
[00:50:50] Speaker C: It'S still hopefully it won't be another Trump administration during that time.
[00:50:56] Speaker B: Well, anyway, thank you so much for being on Sustainability Now.
[00:50:59] Speaker C: Thanks so much, Ronnie. I really appreciate it.
[00:51:02] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with UCSC professor of Environmental Studies J. Mijin Cha, whose new book, A Just Transition for All Workers in Communities for a Carbon Free Future, is just being published by MIT Press. If you'd like to listen to preview shows, you can find
[email protected] SustainabilityNow and Spotify, YouTube, and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K SQUID your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
[00:51:47] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find.
Temperate zones and tropic climbs and all through currents and thriving seas, the winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
