"New York Aims To Fight Climate Change By Creating Green Union Jobs"

"Effort to build offshore wind turbines to power up to 6m homes will create more than 10,000 jobs under Climate Jobs New York plan"

"As global warming has worsened in recent years, environmentalists and union members have often protested against each other, whether over fracking, oil pipelines, coal production or the Green New Deal.

But an innovative new labor-environmentalist effort in New York – to build offshore wind turbines to power up to 6m homes – is a sharp departure from all that feuding and shows that these two groups can work together to advance renewable energy and reduce dependence on carbon-based energy.

Giving this plan a vital boost, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has announced plans to have the state’s energy authority invest billions of dollars to build hundreds of offshore wind turbines. For Cuomo, this plan is key to New York state’s ambitious mandate to obtain 70% of its energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, by 2030.

Pushed by a professor at Cornell University, more than a dozen unions came together to develop what they call Climate Jobs New York, a plan that they say will create more than 10,000 jobs; jobs that they agree should be middle-class, union jobs."

Steven Greenhouse reports for the Guardian May 16, 2019.

Source: Guardian, 05/17/2019