Barcelona Metropolis

Capitalism cannot resolve the environmental crisis. Efforts to enforce robust climate policies have exacerbated economic insecurity among citizens and sparked violent reactions. However, a green public job guarantee could offer a solution. For this to succeed, monetary sovereignty for governments and the involvement of both the working class and rural communities are essential.

European governments face a major dilemma. They must dramatically accelerate progress toward decarbonisation and other ecological goals. It’s clear that this requires transforming or even scaling down certain ecologically destructive industries. But attempts to do this have often harmed or alienated working-class and rural communities, creating a popular backlash against climate policy.

Spain is a case in point. Government ministers know that decarbonisation must include plans to reduce industrial meat production. Globally, meat production is responsible for around 13% of total emissions, including from land-use change and crops for feed. In Spain the figures are similar. Unlike electricity and transport, this problem cannot be solved with renewable energy technology.

Industrial meat production also uses massive quantities of land very intensively, causing biodiversity loss and often leading to severe ecosystem degradation. This is particularly dangerous in Spain, as climate change is causing desertification in many parts of the country, with lands degraded by livestock farming particularly vulnerable to this crisis. When travelling around the Spanish countryside you can see it with your own eyes – the land is ravaged and dying.

Reducing meat production entails astonishing benefits. It would radically decrease emissions in the food sector, thus helping Spain meet its climate obligations. Even just removing beef, mutton, and dairy and shifting to other sources of plant and animal protein could cut total land use by more than 70%. This would liberate large tracts of land that could be regenerated, to reverse desertification, improve biodiversity, and protect against climate change.

But when these problems were discussed in Spanish media in recent years, there was a major backlash, for understandable reasons. The meat industry provides livelihoods for 100,000 workers, many of them in rural communities. These people felt accused and blamed. It was difficult to escape the narrative that elites in Madrid were attacking working-class people in rural communities and threatening their livelihoods. What would happen if the meat industry scaled down? For the people who rely on it for jobs and income, what are they supposed to do? Wouldn’t this just cause migration to the cities, further hollowing out Spain’s rural communities?

The backlash was enough to shut down the conversation and little to no progress has been made on the issue since then. The episode stands as a lesson in how climate policy will never succeed if it antagonises working-class people and undermines livelihoods. People already face severe economic insecurity under capitalism with the constant threat of unemployment, unaffordable housing, and cost-of-living crises. Any climate policy that threatens to exacerbate this problem is unacceptable.

This problem isn’t limited to Spain. Similar dramas have played out in France and the Netherlands recently. It’s not just a problem for agriculture. Production has to be scaled down in many other sectors if we are to meet our ecological objectives: fossil fuels, private cars, mansions, cruise ships, fast fashion, and more, all of which are destructive forms of production that contribute little or nothing to human well-being. For anyone who depends on income from these sectors, ecological policy can seem profoundly destabilising. Even if they support strong action on climate, they may object when it comes to specific policy implementation because it could leave them in a difficult situation.

Agents of transformative change

But there is an alternative approach. One that can place working-class and rural communities at the centre of radical climate policy, as agents of transformative change, while securing and improving people’s livelihoods at the same time. The key to unlocking this possibility is a green public job guarantee.

For rural communities, here’s what the narrative should look like. Spain’s land – its most valuable asset – is degraded and dying. People in rural communities know this better than anyone else. They are on the front lines of climate change and ecological breakdown. They are close to the land, and they know exactly how to heal it. They have the knowledge and the tools. They can be the heroes of the ecological transition. Spain needs them. The same goes for working-class communities, more broadly speaking. They have the strength, they have the labour power, they can build a better society and an ecological civilisation.

How can this be realised? By establishing a public job guarantee linked to green public works. Such a program would enable anyone to train and participate in the most important collective projects of our generation: developing community-owned renewable energy sources, expanding public transit systems (particularly in rural areas where they are basically non-existent), insulating buildings, restoring the land, regenerating forests, and more. This system could create opportunities for farmers to produce agroecological goods under regenerative methods that enrich the soil and improve biodiversity, moving away from destructive products such as beef and mutton.

These are urgent, socially and ecologically necessary activities. Everyone can agree on this. Yet private capital does not undertake them because they are not as profitable. This is really at the core of the problem. When capital controls production, it organises our productive capacities – our labour, our land, our resources – around producing whatever is most profitable to capital, rather than what is most necessary for people and the planet. The result is that we get massive overproduction of things like fossil fuels, industrial beef, and SUVs, because these are highly profitable to capital, but we get perpetual scarcities of obviously necessary things like affordable housing and regenerative agriculture.

The job guarantee helps to solve this problem. It steps in where capital fails and directs production toward urgent social and ecological objectives. It also permanently abolishes the economic insecurity that so many people experience under capitalism. It can be used to set labour standards – such as living wages, shorter working hours, and workplace democracy – across the whole economy, compelling private firms to rise to these standards or otherwise risk losing staff. Because if people can opt to do dignified, socially important work in a democratic workplace, why would they agree to do unnecessary work under worse conditions for corporate firms that are just seeking to maximise profits? They wouldn’t.

A widely accepted idea

The good news is that this idea is extremely popular. Polls in the UK, the US and France show that nearly 80% of people want their governments to establish a job guarantee program. There are few policies of any kind that enjoy such widespread support, and recent research shows that it can appeal strongly to working-class voters.