Good Jobs, Clean Future, and Earth Day’s Union Roots: 22 Minutes with Jason Walsh

Earth Day began as an act of collective belief — a conviction that ordinary people, organized and determined, could force a reckoning with the most powerful industrial interests in the world. That belief was shared, from the very beginning, by the labor movement. The first Earth Day was supported by the United Auto Workers, an expression of the belief that the fate of working people and the fate of the planet are intertwined.

As Executive Director of the BlueGreen Alliance, Jason Walsh leads the only national organization dedicated to uniting the labor and environmental movements — a coalition that collectively represents roughly 50 million members. Under his leadership, BGA played a central role in getting the Inflation Reduction Act passed, the largest investment in clean energy and domestic manufacturing in American history. Additionally, he served as the Director of the Office of Strategic Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and as a Senior Policy Advisor in the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama administration. Named one of Washington D.C.’s 500 Most Influential People by the Washingtonian, Walsh brings more than 25 years of experience in climate, clean energy, and workforce policy. 

EARTHDAY.ORG President Kathleen Rogers sat down with Walsh to talk about the origins of the BlueGreen Alliance, what a just transition actually looks like for workers on the ground, and what’s at stake as rollbacks to the Inflation Reduction Act threaten the clean energy economy of the future.

Jason Walsh is the Executive Director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a national coalition uniting labor and environmental organizations representing roughly 50 million members. He has spent more than 25 years working at the intersection of climate, clean energy, and workers’ rights, previously serving in the Obama administration and playing a central role in getting the Inflation Reduction Act passed.

Earth Day 2026 and its theme, Our Power, Our Planet, highlights how people everywhere — from classrooms and local neighborhoods to national institutions — can drive environmental progress through education, advocacy, and community engagement.

Q: Jason, welcome. To start, can you tell us a bit about your background — what brought you into this work, and what keeps you committed to it today?

I’ll go back to the summer of 1990, when I was living in Seattle, Washington, and just starting to cut my teeth as an activist. In the Pacific Northwest at the time — this was the time of the Timber Wars, which are still ongoing but were really hot in 1990 — environmental activists were trying to protect the remaining old growth forests, using laws like the Endangered Species Act and other tactics, from being cut down.

One of those forests was on the coast of northern California in Humboldt County, where a Houston-based corporation had gained ownership through a hostile takeover of a family-run lumber company. They were planning to clearcut these redwoods to make some quick cash — one of the last, biggest remaining stands of old growth redwoods on private lands. A group of activists organized something they called Redwood Summer — named deliberately to evoke Freedom Summer from the civil rights movement — to defend the forest using direct action tactics. They put out a call for people outside of California to come join them, and I was one of the people who responded.

I hitchhiked down to Fort Bragg, California, where a big demonstration and rally was literally just starting as I was dropped off by my final ride, which, of course, was an old Volkswagen bus. What I walked into was a rally in the middle of a small logging town: the townspeople, most of whom were loggers and logging families, on one side of the street, and activists on the other side, separated by a line of riot cops yelling at each other. On the one hand, this was exciting to me because I wanted to be in the middle of the action and I just got dropped right into it. But even at the time, I was thinking that there was something was just wrong about the fact that these two groups of people were yelling at each other when the decision makers behind the whole situation were sitting in Houston, Texas.

After that demonstration, I hooked up with a small affinity group that was planning an action. To make a longer story shorter, I ended up a few days later chained to a logging road gate. By happenstance, I was the only person the cops couldn’t quickly cut off, and I was directly in the way of a line of trucks carrying workers to the logging site. All the loggers driving to work basically had to drive around me. I shouted to one of them something like, “We’re not protesting you brother,” because I was already trying to fix the dynamic I had noticed just a couple of days earlier. And this logger leaned out of his truck cab and said, and I still remember this word for word: “I’m not your brother, mothereffer.”

That interaction stayed with me — kind of haunted me, actually — because it crystallized all of the reservations I had about the strategy and tactics of Redwood Summer, in which working people and environmentalists were squaring off against each other in defense of something they each valued for legitimate reasons, while a small group of people far away were getting very rich.

I went back to Seattle after that summer and got into the University of Washington. I got involved in some antiwar activism — this was the time of the Persian Gulf War — and once that awful dress rehearsal for the Iraq and now Iran wars was done, I got involved in local organizing in opposition to a free trade agreement being negotiated between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, which became the North American Free Trade Agreement. I went to meetings at a labor temple in downtown Seattle where labor activists and environmentalists sat at the same table, talking with and learning from each other why, from their very different backgrounds, they opposed a trade regime that exploited both workers and the environment.

Fast-forwarding roughly two decades: I’ve had the opportunity to work on public policy at the intersection of environmental, climate, jobs, and justice issues. I’ve spent most of that time on the non-governmental advocacy side, but I had the privilege of working for five years in the Obama administration at the Department of Energy and in the White House. What brought me to this work, and what keeps me in it, is a belief that in some ways was first formed in that experience from my young adulthood: that working people and environmentalists should work together to create an economy and society in which good jobs and a clean environment go hand in hand. I’ve had the good fortune of leading the BlueGreen Alliance since 2019, an organization that places that vision at the center of everything we do.

Q: Labor and environmental movements have had moments of alignment going back to the first Earth Day. What brought them together in a lasting way with the BlueGreen Alliance launch in 2006? And what did the response to that first Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference in 2008 tell you about the appetite for that kind of coalition?

The early history matters here. The United Auto Workers (UAW) were the biggest financial backer of the first Earth Day, which started life as a mass student walkout. UAW president Walter Reuther — one of the great unsung heroes of American history and a critical early backer of the civil rights movement — was famously quoted as saying that the fight against pollution is a fight for the survival of the human race. That represented the lived experience of industrial unions like the UAW and the United Steelworkers, whose own members and communities bore the brunt of industrial pollution because that’s where they worked and lived. These unions were some of the earliest and most important backers of environmental laws. In fact, both were instrumental in passing the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970.

That history certainly mattered in the formation of the BlueGreen Alliance, particularly the throughline to the steel workers. But the later spark for our creation in 2006 was lit in the 1990s, when unions and environmental groups found common cause in opposition to NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. Workers and their unions were watching manufacturing jobs go overseas to countries with little to no environmental protections. Environmental organizations and their activists were learning that the environmental protections in those same countries were minimal or unenforced. Both movements shared a growing sense of injustice over the course of that decade, rooted in a shared analysis that the new global trade regime enriched multinational corporations at the expense of people and the planet. In many ways, the culmination was the Battle of Seattle in 1999.

Fast forward to 2006, when two of the folks who were in the streets of Seattle in 1999 — Leo Gerard, a hard rock miner from Canada and president of the Steelworkers, the nation’s largest industrial union, and Carl Pope, an environmental lawyer from San Francisco who was executive director of the Sierra Club — decided that if they could find common ground around trade, there were other issues they could unify around. In particular, the climate crisis — which at that time was Al Gore, an inconvenient truth — was starting to hit as a real and urgent concern, clean technologies were emerging, and attacks on workers’ rights were ongoing. They signed a joint resolution establishing the BlueGreen Alliance, premised on the shared belief that we don’t have to choose between good jobs and a clean environment — that we can and must have both.

BGA held its first Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference in 2008. A lot of energy, a lot of turnout, which was certainly an affirmation of that founding vision. Over the last 20 years, through thick and thin, through good times and bad, we have grown into a coalition of labor and environmental organizations that collectively represent roughly 50 million members.

Q: The BlueGreen Alliance began with a simple but powerful goal: bridging the perceived divide between good jobs and environmental protection. How has that mission evolved since 2006 as the climate and economic landscapes have changed? 

The climate crisis has worsened since 2006, as has the crisis of economic inequality. BGA’s mission has evolved with those deepening crises, reflecting our belief that we need to advance policy solutions to both that are as intersecting and mutually reinforcing as their causes.

The other change to acknowledge is that we have gone from what was a very aspirational energy transition 20 years ago to a very real one in 2026, which has caused both enormous economic opportunity and enormous economic disruption. Our mission and our work has changed in response to how that has played out, particularly for working people and the communities they live in.

Q: The phrase “just transition” is used a lot by both labor and environmental groups. From your perspective, what does a just transition actually look like in practice for workers on the ground?

The term “just transition” was first coined by Tony Misaki, president of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, back in the 1980s before his union merged with the Steelworkers. At the time, because some manufacturing was leaving or manufacturing jobs were being lost — this was also a decade of a lot of environmental litigation — he and his union were calling for something they called a superfund for workers. It was premised on the idea that: there’s going to be a lot of economic change as we move from really polluting technologies to more sustainable ones, and the workers need to be kept whole.

That was before the time of the 1980s and BGA, but the policy issues — again, there’s this throughline through the steelworkers and other industrial unions — involved in just transition have been among BGA’s highest priorities. We have a whole policy platform. We actually don’t call it just transition. We call it simply a policy. Fairness for workers and communities, straight up. I want to emphasize three kinds of threads or points that come out of that platform and that really animate our work.

Number one, a transition that is truly fair or just for workers is not going to happen organically. It will only result from deliberate policy choices that directly support workers who are impacted. Every major economic shift in the last 50-plus years in the U.S. has been manifestly unjust for American workers, because policymakers have not crafted a response that is fair and effective.

The second point is very much related to the first. In the U.S., we don’t have policies and programs in place that adequately support workers who lose their jobs, in any sector. In the energy sector, this has created a lot of economic hardship among workers who have experienced layoffs from the energy transition, which has been ongoing now, pretty intensively, for the last, say, 15 years. These are coal miners, workers in coal-fired power plants, oil refinery workers. What these workers have in common is that their jobs were often the best-paying blue collar and union jobs in the communities where they lived and worked.

The third and final point for the energy transition to be just for workers is that we need to create and support those dislocated workers, as well as enact policies that ensure that the new jobs that are created in clean energy sectors are high quality, family-sustaining, and ones where workers have the ability for form unions without being harassed, intimidated, or fired. And we need policies that target public investment, in particular to the communities that have been most reliant on fossil fuel economies — the places that have largely suffered and experienced more economic pain than economic gain from this transition.

We were starting to make progress on all of those fronts during the Biden administration, and in particular with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. But then 2024 happened.

Q: Manufacturing has long been the backbone of the American middle class, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) aimed to strengthen that through clean energy investment. With recent rollbacks and funding cuts, where do things stand now?

Manufacturing is still the backbone of the blue collar middle class in this country, and it is central to U.S. competitiveness, economic security, and our innovation ecosystem. BGA and our labor and environmental partners did a ton of work with the Biden administration, particularly with the 117th Congress, to include substantial investments in clean manufacturing in the Inflation Reduction Act. We wanted to ensure, from an equity standpoint, that manufacturing workers and the communities they live in would share in the economic benefits of the clean energy transition. Federal policymaking was mostly focused on deployment of those technologies and not on producing them, building domestic supply chains, and decarbonizing our existing manufacturing base. We got a lot of those investments into the IRA. 

I think it’s important, for the historical record and as we think to the future, that these policies, these investments, were working right after the enactment of the IRA. U.S. investments in the manufacturing of batteries, fueling equipment, and critical minerals processing each grew about 45% relative to the pre-IRA period. 2022/2023 saw the greatest acceleration of manufacturing facility construction in a generation in this country, with hundreds of thousands of jobs already being created or committed to. The IRA was not only the biggest investment in clean energy in history anywhere in the world, but it was also an industrial policy that targeted sectors critical to the economic future of this country and the fate of the planet. Those investments were bearing fruit and then Donald Trump got elected.

One of the most painful ironies of the Trump presidency, among many, is that this guy who claims to be a champion of American manufacturing, to love American manufacturing, has led a whole-of-government assault on clean energy and clean manufacturing — through legislation, permitting illegal systems, executive action, and canceled grants and loans, including a loan program office that Jigar used to run. Through those actions, they have killed thousands of jobs and put thousands more at risk, many of them union jobs. They have literally tried to stop construction of offshore wind turbines that were 80 to 90% complete, barely even pretending to justify it. They’ve thrown all of these industries into a state of uncertainty, or they have literally arm-twisted individual companies, like the French-based company Total Energy who had to abandon offshore wind that they had already sunk so much money into. They are making a series of investments in fossil fuels in an attempt to embed the U.S. as this petrostate. And then they started a war with the only country that actually has the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil and gas prices skyrocketing.

All of that is effectively surrendering the production of technologies that are the future of the global economy — probably the most important economic race of this century to China and other countries.

Q: We’ve seen some tension lately — around tariffs, EV adoption, and broader shifts in the green economy. What are the main friction points today between unions and environmental advocates? And are we still seeing some of those political divides that surfaced during the last election?

Dealing with friction and tensions between unions and environmental groups is part of BGA’s reason for being. We have always dealt with it, we always will. We have hard conversations. But we and our partners always come back to a recognition that there is far more that unites us than divides us. One of the things that united us was the IRA — defending it and holding this administration accountable. We didn’t lose everything, so that’s home for some optimism that is a part of what we’re doing right now.

But also what unites us is a president who is trying to gut every federal program protecting workers and the environment. He is already the biggest union buster in American history, stripping roughly a million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights. At the same time, he’s a climate denier trying to kill virtually every form of climate action. That’s very unifying for our coalition, but it won’t be sufficient for our partners and our movements to be united only in defense. We also need to be united on offense. We work not only at the federal level but in nine states across the country where the political landscape is different and where we’re moving the ball forward. And ahead of the 2028 elections, BGA is committed to developing and releasing a new consensus platform of policy recommendations, supported by all of our partners, to build the worker- and community-centered clean economy that is our mission. We will present it to every policymaker and candidate who is interested in learning what our priorities are. That has yet to be written, but I already have a sense of what some of the things that’ll be in it are, and it will be very forward looking — because this is still the direction we’re headed in, and this country and our workers and our communities will either take center stage or they’ll be off stage.

Q: Finally, what’s the BlueGreen Alliance’s top priority for the next five years to ensure that the clean economy we build also strengthens union jobs and protects workers’ health and safety? 

One of our very top priorities as an organization over the next few years is to really deepen our coalition work and lean into our unique role as a unifier of the labor and environmental movements. We’re the only national organization that does that anywhere in the world. That unifier role has always been central to our theory of change, but we think it’s more important than ever now in response to an authoritarian president who is always looking for ways to divide people and social movements.

We know from research, scholarship, and examples from around the world that the most effective resistance to authoritarians is broad-based, big-tent coalitions of people and stakeholders coming together — linking arms to defend democracy and work toward a better world for everyone, in defiance of men who only care about their power, privilege, and the enrichment of themselves and their cronies. BGA has always been that kind of organization, and we are doubling down on that role now and in the years ahead.

In this Earth Week, it’s worth reminding ourselves that Earth Day was created by leaders who believed in the power of people and social movements to make a better world. That vision is more important this week, this year, than it probably ever has been since the inception of Earth Day.