The Million Climate Jobs Campaign is an alliance of trade unions, social movements and popular organisations campaigning for a million climate jobs as part of the transition to a low-carbon and sustainable development path. The campaign is based on two fundamental points of departure. First, people want work. Globally, we are mired in an economic depression, the impact of which is aggravating already very high levels of unemployment and precariousness. Second, we have to stop the advance of climate change. To do that, we have to cut current annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by seventy to eighty per cent within a ten-to thirty-year time frame (Neale 2008: 15).

Technically, that is quite feasible. We already have all the technology we need. The problem in getting action on climate change is political, not technological. The governments of the world say they cannot act because it would ‘cost too much’. But the cost would be the wages paid to workers to construct new renewable energy systems, public transport routes, buildings, etc.

In this instance ‘cost’ means jobs, yet jobs mean so much more than people just working. They mean dignity and giving expression to our creativity, and they establish the basis for our society's overall welfare. Just as there are unpaid externalities in the form of pollution from industrial processes, so there are unpaid externalities from the unemployment crisis in the form of crime, gangsterism, substance abuse, violence against women and children, and depression, which society has to bear.

Climate jobs are different to green jobs (Neale 2008). Green jobs can encompass any and all environmentally friendly jobs, such as in conservation and cleaning up oil spills. Climate jobs are those that help to reduce the emission of GHGs and build the resilience of communities to withstand the impacts of climate change. Examples of climate jobs include those in developing renewable energy plants; in energy efficiency, especially in retrofitting buildings; in public transport that reduces the pollution from cars and trucks; and, significantly, in small-scale organic agriculture, which reduces emissions of GHG in agriculture (AIDC 2011).