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Climate change cannot afford a culture war with the working class
We have solutions to climate change ready — but the political will to enact them cannot cannot come at the cost of working-class support, writes ANDY NEWMAN
Activists invade a power station near Leipzig, November 2019

THE urgency of the need to address climate change is undisputed on the left. Nevertheless, while it is clear that action must be taken, there has to be a discussion about what those actions need to be.

The danger is that if the socialist left does not move the debate towards the shared goals of both lowering carbon emissions and protecting well-paid and skilled jobs, then the issue will become another culture war divide.

In the last year, we have seen the defeat of the Australian Labour Party in a general election where a major factor was its inability to bridge the gap between its greener, urban and often university-educated supporters in the big cities and its traditional working-class voters, particularly in Queensland, who support coal mining.

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