Earlier this year, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its famous ‘Doomsday Clock’ forward two minutes – to three minutes to midnight. The Bulletin’s panel explained that international leaders were failing to perform their most important duty, “ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.” There were two main dangers: “Unchecked climate change,” on the one hand, and “global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals,” on the other.

While life on Earth is resilient, it is not at all clear that humanity has a future. The prospects for organised human societies, threatened by both runaway climate change and nuclear are dim.

Even a “small” nuclear war involving just 100 or so Hiroshima-scale warheads could throw over six million metric tons of “black carbon aerosol particles” (soot) into the atmosphere, reducing rainfall and temperatures across the world for a decade. The possible impact on global agriculture has been assessed in a number of studies. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility summarised their findings in 2013: “In addition to the one billion people in the developing world who would face possible starvation, 1.3 billion people in China would confront severe food insecurity.”

There are over 10,000 nuclear warheads in the world.

Peace researcher Seymour Melman of Columbia University, New York once observed that the United States had an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington that did not include ‘one single person directed to think about problems of how to formulate, negotiate, or implement a reversal of an arms race’. (The ACDA’s successor, the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, doesn’t seem terribly interested in reversing the arms race either.)

Melman added:

“Indeed the idea of reversing the arms race as a way of improving security is virtually wiped out from public discussion. The press doesn’t talk about it. The journals of opinion don’t talk about it. The universities don’t talk about it. And worst of all, in my view, the peace organizations don’t talk about it. As long as peace organizations don’t take up the reversal of the arms race and the parallel problems of what to do with the state capitalist controlled economy of the arms race, then the peace organizations are participating in a type of charade. A lot of talk about peace, but what is peace? In our time, peace is not simply the momentary absence of war. Because of the sustained operation of war planning, war preparation, peace has to mean diminishing the decision power of the war-making institutions. If that is set in motion then we are moving in a peaceful way.”

Melman emphasised the need to empower working people in the process of economic conversion. The legislation that he supported laid down that, in every military factory, laboratory or base employing at least 100 people, an “Alternative Use Committee” should be set up of at least eight people, “with equal representation of the facility’s management and labor.” Workers were to have an equal say with management.

Melman wrote: “The firsthand knowledge of defense establishment employees is essential for conversion. Thus, conversion must be done locally; no remote central office can possess the necessary knowledge of people, facilities, and surroundings.”

So there would be national legislation supporting economic conversion planning, and there would be decentralised action at military facilities themselves. There is a clear parallel here with the approach to introducing renewable energy that Naomi Klein advocates in her brilliant new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate:

“The solution is most emphatically not energy nationalization on existing models. The big publicly owned oil companies… are just as voracious in pursuing high-end pools of carbon as their private sector counterparts…. A better model would be a new kind of utility – run democratically, by the communities that use them, as co-ops or as a “commons”, as author and activist David Bollier and others have outlined. This kind of structure would enable citizens to demand far more from their energy companies than they are able to now.”

Klein notes that the recent dramatic increase in the supply of renewable power in Germany has occurred, “within the context of a sweeping, national feed-in tariff program that includes a mix of incentives designed to ensure that anyone who wants to get into renewable power generation can do so.” This has encouraged small, non-corporate players to become renewable energy providers – farms, municipalities, and hundreds of newly formed co-ops.

The German renewable revolution created nearly 400,000 jobs as the share of renewable power in electricity generation went from 6% in 2000 to nearly 25% in 2013.

Klein adds: “That has decentralized not just electrical power, but also political power and wealth.”

Another aspect of Melman’s work that might be relevant to climate policy is that he also proposed “a national commission directed to encourage capital investment planning by cities, counties, states and the federal government in all areas of infrastructure – the network of facilities and services that are the underpinnings of a modern industrial society.” This national commission, which would also publish a manual on local alternative-use planning, would help to create demand for capital goods, for socially-useful production organised by Alternative Use Committees in the converted military facilities.

The three functions of such conversion institutions would be to reassure people working in the military economy that they could have a future in a demilitarised society, to reverse economic decay, and to win gains in the decision-making powers of working people within a still-capitalist society.

Similar institutions serving the same three functions in a climate context could support a socially-just pathway to a decarbonised economy.

In 2008, the British Trade Union Congress (TUC), the national federation of trade unions, defined a “Just Transition” as one that wins public support for desperately-needed environmental policies by ensuring “a fair distribution of the costs and benefits of those policies across the economy,” and by involving those affected by the changes in making the economic plans.

Among the Just Transition provisions were a “national framework or mechanism to ensure long-term planning and representative decision making on environmental transition.”

The TUC emphasised that “Just Transition measures are needed to ensure that job loss as a result of environmental transition is minimised and that change within sectors does not occur at the expense of decent work and decent terms and conditions.” They also pointed out that a “Just Transition strategy is also required to ensure that environmental initiatives not necessarily related to employment – for example, green taxes – do not impact on lower income groups.”

There are moral responsibilities here, and also strategic issues. If this kind of provision is not made for workers in high-carbon industries, they and their families, and the communities they live in, are likely to resist and slow down the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Naomi Klein has praised the One Million Climate Jobs plan drawn up by trade unionists and environmental campaigners in Britain for massive government investment over 20 years to move Britain towards a low-carbon economy:

“We need workers to build enough wind power, solar power, wave power and tidal power to meet all our energy needs. We need workers to insulate and retrofit all our existing homes and buildings in order to conserve energy. And we need workers to run a massive public transport system powered by renewable electricity. We have people who need jobs, and jobs that must be done. So we want the government to hire a million people to do new climate jobs now in an integrated National Climate Service.”

Insulating and renovating buildings, building new buses and railways, manufacturing and assembling wind farms, building a new national energy grid, and so on: these are “climate jobs” that reduce emissions, not “green jobs” (for example, park rangers) that don’t affect the climate.

The idea is that the government should hire 90,000 new workers each month to carry out new climate jobs: “In a year we will have a million new jobs.” Anyone who loses their job in a high-carbon industry should be guaranteed a job in the National Climate Service at the same rate of pay they enjoyed in their previous work.

The cost of the programme to the government could be just £19bn a year, once you take into account revenues from new income taxes and new services, according to the One Million Climate Jobs campaign. They believe this could be paid for by increasing income and wealth taxes on the richest 1%, by a small Tobin tax on financial transactions, and/or by government loans similar to the £75bn-a-year quantitative easing programme. This is all without diverting money from the military budget….

According to their calculations, the One Million Climate Jobs plan could cut Britain’s emissions by 80% over 20 years, ‘the lion’s share of what we need to do’. Cut energy demand in half, and turn almost all energy supply over to wind, waves, tides and sun – to cut Britain’s domestic emissions from 528 megatonnes of CO2 to 106Mt.

In South Africa, there is also a One Million Climate Jobs campaign, drawn up by 40 civil society organisations, including trade unions. The campaign writes: “We are aware that in the long term, climate change requires a massive change in how we live, how we produce and consume, and how we relate to nature and each other. We need systems change, and we need a bridge between where we are now and this vital but longer-term outcome. The One Million Climate Jobs Campaign offers such a bridge.”

It is crucially important that we develop, demand and organise around more of these kinds of programmes that can bridge the gap between the grim realities we confront today, and a decent society with a real chance of survival. The hands of the clock keep moving.

Milan Rai is editor of Peace News.