Good afternoon.  Thank you, Nancy, for that generous introduction and for all you do for the citizens of Maryland.  I am honored to be here at this distinguished gathering, and to share this podium with Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and with one of the people I admire most in public life, former Vice President Al Gore. 

Let me get straight to the point.  Working people around the world, and working people in the United States specifically, desperately need the effort to address climate change and climate risk to succeed.  Investors—especially the trillions of dollars invested on behalf of workers in our pension funds, must help lead the way.

Why is this need so desperate?  First, we are all citizens of this one planet.  At Copenhagen, the U.S. delegation had a giant globe showing the impact of a one meter rise in ocean levels.  It would be as if a permanent Hurricane Katrina happened on all the world’s coastlines.  This is our future if we do not act.

But the threat of environmental catastrophe is only one important reason to transform the way the world obtains and uses energy.  We are in the midst of the most catastrophic decline in employment worldwide since the Great Depression.  Last week’s U.S. job numbers—85,000 lost jobs, half a million people despairing of finding work and giving up in just one month – those numbers tell us the crisis continues.  Where will the engine for growth come from?  Where should it come from?

The AFL-CIO believes that with the right political and business leadership, the global transformation to a low carbon economy can and should be the engine for growth and good job creation, here in the United States and around the world.  And we have backed up our belief through our support for the Recovery Act, climate change legislation, and now the AFL-CIO’s five point program for job creation that includes massive investments in green infrastructure. 

Together these initiatives involve hundreds of billions of dollars in government investments, building retrofits, renewable energy, public transportation, the smart grid, carbon capture and sequestration for coal, and more.  But while government must lead, our hope is that government leadership will spark private sector investment at a much larger scale—as it must if we are going to create sustainable good jobs or act with the scale and speed necessary to address the multiple threats we face.

But that is not the end of the story from an investor or a worker perspective.  I am sure most of you pay some attention to oil prices.  These last few months, as the world pulled back a bit from the prospect of a second Great Depression, oil prices have been rising inexorably.  As the world economy moves toward prosperity, energy prices rise—and rise to levels that constrain that prosperity.  This dynamic will get worse as the overall size of the world’s economy grows and the supply of carbon-based fuels does not grow. 

I have spent some time underground, and let me tell you, the coal does not grow back after you mine it.  If we do not engage in the task of energy transformation, the world economy may not be able to grow in a sustainable way.  And the world economy must grow in a sustainable way if any pension fund or endowment or foundation is going to meet its investment goals. 

So that is the case for action.  It is overwhelming.  Yet where is the response?  Here in New York City, construction unemployment is over 18 percent, 5.2 billion square feet of commercial real estate is generating immense levels of carbon emissions as we speak and state government is talking about cutting back educational spending and being unable to make pension contributions because of a collapse in payroll-based revenue due to unemployment.  This combination of facts is intolerable.

Here’s something else that’s intolerable—that when the U.S. government gives stimulus related tax breaks to build windfarms in Texas, the windmills themselves are made in China.  That is the result of the U.S. failure to have a strategy for leadership in addressing climate risk.  As a nation, we cannot afford any more delays or baby steps when our competitors are taking giant strides.   

Last month, the global labor movement went to Copenhagen with a call for action on climate risk with speed and scale, the same message the AFL-CIO brought to the last Investor Summit on climate risk.  At Copenhagen, the global labor movement worked with a wide range of governments in the developed and the developing world to build consensus support for the idea of a Just Transition to a low carbon world economy—a transition that improves workers’ lives. 

The concept of a Just Transition is not only the right thing to do, it is the only path toward building the broad social support for action to combat climate change—a just transition to a low carbon economy creating and retaining quality jobs and decent work.  A just transition requires an aggressive sustained commitment of national resources to modernize industry, develop and deploy technology and educate and train current and future workers.  It requires assistance for the workers, families and communities that will be adversely affected by the transition.  And perhaps most importantly, a just transition requires that workers in their workplaces and in their communities enjoy their right to a voice in how the decisions that affect their lives are made.  In the United States, that means we must pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

In the pursuit of these goals, the AFL-CIO supported the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that passed the House last summer, and we have been working with the leadership in the Senate to craft a Senate bill that embodies the same principles of Just Transition. 

In these efforts, as in so many other aspects of our national life, the transformation wrought by President Barack Obama has been remarkable.  At the time of the first Investor Summit on Climate Risk, the United States government under President George W. Bush was hostile to scientific thought and to workers’ rights.  Last month, we saw President Obama fly to Copenhagen to do his all to prevent the conference from failing.  His partner in this effort was President Lula of Brazil – an auto worker, a trade unionist and a leader of the global South. 

We all wanted to see more happen in Copenhagen.  But I ask you to contemplate for a moment how far we have come from the days when Al Gore was a prophet with all too little honor in his own country.   

So what must investors do now to address climate risk?

First, investors must turn away from the fantasies of the bubble era.  Acting on climate change requires investing in the real economy. 

Second, investors must look at new investment structures, particularly in the area of commercial and residential building retrofits.  Energy consumption by buildings generates 40 percent of U.S. carbon emissions and it could be cut in half.  Investing in real estate right now may be hard, but buildings consume energy—as long as they are standing they consume energy, and real estate investors save money if the buildings use less energy.  We need investment products that link pension capital to this need and to the jobs that could be created to meet this need.  Yet it has not happened at any scale.  If government help is needed, the AFL-CIO stands ready to fight to make that happen.  But we need a plan, and it needs to come from the people most knowledgeable about how to spark private sector action—real estate investors.

Third, investors must challenge the public companies in which we invest.  The AFL-CIO supported the call for the Securities and Exchange Commission to require increased disclosures on carbon emissions—and we are grateful to Nancy, to Connecticut Treasurer Denise Nappier of Connecticut, to Jack Ehnes of CALSTERS and to Ann Stausboll of CALPERS for their leadership on this and so many other corporate governance issues.  But disclosure is not enough.  Investors need to use new disclosures to make sure the companies we invest in are leaders in addressing climate risk.  When these companies take action, when they make new investments, long term investors need to support boards and management if they are attacked by short term investors seeking cash payouts rather than value-creating investment.

The AFL-CIO, along with the Laborers International Union, the Communications Workers and the United Steelworkers have supported shareholder efforts to reduce greenhouse gas through the Investor Network on Climate Change.  This year, the AFL-CIO is taking the next step by engaging directly with large cap public companies, including American Express, Best Buy and WalMart, to win their support for Congressional action on climate change.  

Finally, investors need to stop tolerating business support for know-nothing-ism in the area of climate change.  Why do we allow our money to fund organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when they deny the science, oppose acting to help the unemployed and undermine any possibility of action against the threat of climate change?  How is it in the interests of investors in Whole Foods-- a company whose customer base is environmentally oriented-- to allow its CEO John McKay to give interviews on our dime where he talks about "hysteria" on climate risk. All of us here in this room understand what the science means and share a sense of responsibility for our future and our children’s future that requires us to act.  Why should any of us, directly or indirectly, support people that are looking to profit themselves at the expense of our funds, our beneficiaries, our children and grandchildren, our nation and our planet?

So let me close by saying this:  Working people depend on the people in this room to prudently invest our money to provide us with financial security in retirement.  This has been a difficult task in an economy based on unsustainable financial speculation and unsustainable energy use.  And it will be impossible to succeed in the mission of providing workers with retirement security if we do not turn away from financial speculation and short-termism to take on the risks of climate change. 

The opportunity is now.  Now we have a government here in the United States that is a partner in this effort.  Let us not waste this opportunity.  We literally cannot afford to do so. 

Thank you.