Yesterday’s conference for a million climate jobs was the third organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group. Videos of all the principal contributions will be on the website over the next few days and details of how to get the pamphlet which makes the case for climate jobs are here. Around 150 people attended, making it slightly smaller than last year’s conference, which itself was not as big as the previous year’s. Let’s return to the reasons for this later.

Life’s too short and my boredom threshold is too low to give an exhaustive account of everything that was said so I’ll pick out a few random points from my sketchy notes to give a flavour of the discussions. Feel free to chip in with your own observations.

Tony Kearns of the CWU, who has been deeply involved in all three conferences and displays a better grasp of the issues than most union leaders, took issue with all those apocalyptic  descriptions of the Copenhagen talks as a “last chance saloon” for humanity to take action against climate change. He pointed out that the logic of that position is that all we can do now is wait to die. Not the most positive of messages. Tony was the first to refer to a recurring theme of the day, the growth of climate change scepticism. It’s no longer only the domain of cranks and has started to find an echo both in the mainstream press and among a growing number of union post holders.

Alex Gordon of the RMT offered an interesting contribution which looked at how the European Union’s legislative framework actively prevents national governments taking action. He recounted a meeting with a minister called Lord Hunt who told the union that EU rules made it illegal the British government to put money into wind turbine production. The same rules also make it illegal to remove the railway system from private ownership and put huge obstacles in the way of any attempts at a planned transport system. Alex singled out the Irish and German Green parties for being very pro-EU and he isn’t wrong.  Yet my recollection in recent years is that the Labour Party has been even more so and that many British unions have generally preferred to use European legislation to defend their members rather than do very much themselves.

Speaking on behalf of the Bolivia Solidarity Campaign Amancay Colque offered a refreshing contrast between the way the Bolivian delegation organised and participated in the Copenhagen talks and those of other countries. Behind each negotiator were two trade union officials to whom they were answerable. It’s clear that the real leadership at Copenhagen was offered by the Bolivians and there was a lot of enthusiasm for the upcoming Cochabamba conference.

As you’d expect there was a fair bit of detailed discussion about what types of jobs could be created, the need for these to be unionised and looking at ways to make the demands of the campaign more widely known. And that brings us to the paradox of the day – the contradiction between the objective necessity of the conference and what actually happened. The event was politically hegemonised by the far left and, even though it was on its best behaviour, it was apparent that no significant connection has been made with either the younger radicals who take part in things like Climate Camp or the tens of thousands who took part in the demonstration in London in December. This is despite the fact that every union meeting to which the resolution was put agreed to support the conference with money, buying pamphlets and sponsoring delegates. It just did not translate into significant numbers of non-affiliated union activists turning up on the day.

In a sense it’s hard to work out why. There’s a recession. Unemployment is increasing. An election is imminent. Despite the growing temporary scepticism most serious militants accept the scientific basis of climate change. Partly it may be that there’s still a feeling among many union activists that the climate has nothing to do with either working class politics or their trade unionism and with the exceptions like Chris Baugh of the PCS, Manuel Cortes of TSSA (who gave a very rousing speech) and Tony Kearns it’s not easy to identify a wider group of union leaders who keep plugging away at the issue.

This idea of the objective necessity is an important one. Modest as it was yesterday’s conference represented a serious effort to articulate a working class answer to both recession and climate change. For that reason alone, even though a rethink is needed, the campaign has to be sustained.