Today is Labor Day, a holiday created in the late 19th century to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers in the U.S. It’s a good time to consider how organized labor interacts with the environmental movement.

Unions were set up, starting the late 1800s, to give workers some leverage in bargaining with their employers. A large company can mistreat workers and keep wages low when there are more job-seekers than jobs. Unions allow workers to negotiate collectively with employers, and to strike when negotiations reach an impasse. …

Several times a week I see allusions to groups characterized as “front-line communities of color who are bearing the brunt of climate change.” This characterization is based on a number of assumptions that deserve looking into.

Global heating is a global problem that affects every human, and most plants and animals. Carbon pollution is different from conventional air pollution in that its effects are not localized around emissions sources. The classic environmental-justice scenario locates a polluting coal plant in the middle of a low-income community of color. The plant emits mercury, particulate matter, NOx, and particulate matter, which directly harm human health. …

Looking back at the present moment from a thousand years in the future highlights sustainability: we can’t keep indefinitely increasing harms we do to the Earth. Even small increases eventually add up. If we keep increasing the amount of land we use for housing, for example, by one percent per year, the increases will compound into a 20,959-fold increase in a thousand years.

There are many environmental increases that are not sustainable: the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the amount of land that’s used for human purposes, and the population of the planet, just to name a few.

Businesses profit from these increases. We keep building more housing and developers make big profits. We keep burning oil and gas and the oil companies make big profits. Businesses know that the status quo is not sustainable and therefore can’t last; they just want to be allowed to continue making money for a while longer — as much longer as possible. They’re like the fat guy who eats enough to gain a pound a month. …

We (everyone) are failing to effectively deal with the world’s two biggest crises: COVID-19 and the climate crisis. Both are global problems. The U.S. should be leading on both, but it is bungling them. The U.S. has way too many COVID cases — 50% more than in all of Europe, though its population is smaller. And its per-capita greenhouse-gas emissions are around three times the global average. The U.S. abdicated its leadership on climate when President Trump set in motion the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change. The U.S. …

This is the first in a series of articles on climate ethics. The climate crisis is primarily an ethical failure of humankind. In a recent poll, two-thirds of Americans said the federal government is doing too little to reduce effects of climate change. In an international poll, global heating came out as the top threat in 13 of 26 surveyed countries. We know the climate crisis is real, that it’s caused by human actions, and that it’s a major threat to Earth and the economy.

The problem is that we’re not doing much about it, and may not be willing to do much until climate impacts become a lot worse. Seventy percent of Americans in a recent poll said they would vote against a $10 monthly climate fee added to their power bill to deal with the climate crisis. As we will see in a later installment of this column, the costs of reducing climate impacts to the point where we keep global heating to less than 2˚ C will be much higher than that. …