The climate crisis is the greatest threat facing humanity. Given the number of imperialistic wars, white supremacist terrorist attacks, mass extinctions, concentration camps, genocides, and brutal government repression with which we as a species are currently occupying ourselves, that is truly saying something.

A widely cited report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in 2018], warned that, unless a massive effort is undertaken to curtail the climate emergency, the planet only has only a few short years before Earth becomes an irreversibly apocalyptic scenario. According to a 2015 World Bank report, the planet only has until 2030 before the climate crisis forces 100 million more people into poverty.

The effects of climate disaster are already here: cyclones, tsunamis, wildfires, toxic air, disappearing islands. These increasingly common events have had a disproportionate effect on poor people, who have less access to crucial infrastructure and resources when catastrophe strikes; these events will continue to hit the hardest those living in poverty, while the rich continue to profit off their suffering.

For this and many other reasons, the breakdown of our climate is not only a looming peril — it’s a labor issue.

The Green New Deal, a proposal introduced by Democratic lawmakers Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey and galvanized by an engaged youth movement, is perhaps the United States government’s most robust attempt to make a dent in the country’s outsize carbon emissions and end its reliance on fossil fuels, both of which propel the ongoing climate disaster when in use (burning them releases harmful chemicals into the atmosphere) and during extraction (via methods like oil drilling and coal mining, which cause irreparable damage to the environment). The Green New Deal also seeks to address the dire income inequality that has existed since European colonizers stepped foot on this native land, and has only been exacerbated by climate change, both here and on global terms. This policy proposal isn’t a fix-all, but it is an ambitious program that, if implemented, has the potential to enact real, much-needed change, especially if other entities (for example, New York City, whose city council recently passed a Climate Mobilization Act) are inspired to take action on a local level.

At a glance, the proposal seems extremely union-friendly. A core component of the package focuses on workers like coal miners and oil riggers, whose jobs have been and will continue to be impacted by a national pivot away from extractive industries, and promises to create “high-quality union jobs” while protecting the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain. The program also seeks to guarantee health care, housing, and a job with “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States”; an enticing proposal in a nation where approximately 13 million children are living under the poverty line. But the Green New Deal has gotten a surprising amount of pushback from certain sectors of the labor movement. In March, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO) energy committee released a statement against the proposal, written on behalf of a number of manufacturing unions like the United Steelworkers and United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which said the provisions it made for potentially impacted workers were not detailed enough, arguing that its goal to transition away from fossil fuels would immediately kill off jobs. Other labor leaders are skeptical of the proposal’s promises to transition workers and "green jobs" guarantees. As Phil Smith, a spokesman for UMWA, told Reuters, “We’ve heard words like ‘just transition’ before, but what does that really mean? Our members are worried about putting food on the table.”