The notion of uniting the concepts of jobs, justice and global warming must surely rank as one of the greatest leaps of illogic of recent times. Let's look at each of the three concepts briefly to see if there are rational links between them.
A job is something one earns by offering to exchange value for value with a willing trader - the employer. A job is created only when both parties agree the contract will be mutually beneficial. If one cannot find an employer willing to pay what you ask as compensation, the logical step is to lower your demand for wages until you are able to make a trade. Of course, this is how things work in a free market, but we do not have that. By dictating thousands of rules regarding employment, competing for wages and making it illegal for wage contracts below a fixed price, government massively distorts the market and creates unemployment. Since there is an unlimited amount of work to be done to maintain and improve the human condition, only government intervention or an unwillingness to improve skills or be flexible on wage demands can create anything more than temporary unemployment.
Justice is the recognition of the facts of reality when it comes to judging the character and actions of men. Justice means that a man receives what he is due and nothing more or less. If a man earns a billion dollars through free exchange of values with millions of others, it is justice. If a man takes one dollar from others through the initiation of force then it is an injustice. The Naomi Klein's of the world invert the meaning of justice, often under the cover of package deals such as "social justice", which is really a demand for the massive initiation of force against producers for the benefit of non-producers. As philosopher Leonard Peikoff states:
"Every man, they argue, is morally the property of others—of those others it is his lifelong duty to serve; as such, he has no moral right to invest the major part of his time and energy in his own private concerns. If he attempts it, if he refuses voluntarily to make the requisite sacrifices, he is by that fact harming others, i.e., depriving them of what is morally theirs—he is violating men’s rights, i.e., the right of others to his service—he is a moral delinquent, and it is an assertion of morality if others forcibly intervene to extract from him the fulfillment of his altruist obligations, on which he is attempting to default. Justice, they conclude, “social justice,” demands the initiation of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships."
With regard to jobs and justice, a proper relationship between these two concepts would be to recognize that an employment contract formed of free will by both parties is a just one and one that is formed when one or both parties is acting under force, especially the force of government, in an injust one.
Now to the connection between jobs and global warming, now euphemistically hidden under the package deal of climate change. Economically, every person in the world could have a job instantly if we fulfilled the highest wishes of the carbon dioxide fear-mongers and banned all use of fossil fuels tomorrow, because every living person would be forced into immediate starvation, survival and protection mode. Their supply of food, health care, transportation, education, communication, shelter and every other economic benefit of capitalism would cease within hours. They would have a job (but no pay), one that requires 15 hour a day of effort and vigilance, yet still billions would die within months and civilization as we know it would end. Philosophically, this would represent perfect justice - justice for having abandoned the great advances brought to us and the great virtues enabled by the discovery and construction of industrial scale energy systems. Such devastation would be justice for having abandoned the highest virtue, the one that literally defines us as humans - rationality.
The link between justice and global warming the alarmists wish to draw is that they wish to use the excuse of planetary salvation to justify the massive use of force against innocents. In their view, the people who have created wealth are the ones guilty of encouraging energy production and thus of, in the carbon dioxide zealot`s view, of destroying future life on Earth. The fact that these people almost certainly created their wealth by producing goods and services highly valued by many fellow humans and that they are innocent of any action to violate the rights of others is immaterial to these people. Under their view of justice, the producers should be shackled and forced to comply with the wishes of anyone who claims the right to do so on the basis of their not producing wealth. This is the system brought to its fullest expression in the former Soviet Union and China, which we know resulted in the suppression and devastation of human life on an unprecedented scale.
The proper way, the just way to unite the concepts of jobs, justice and climate as they are distorted by the Naomi Kleins of the world would be to set aside a large piece of un-populated but fertile land and invite everyone on Earth who wishes to participate in a new society to move there without bringing any of the fruits of our fossil-fueled industrial civilization with them. Justice would demand that we ask these people to put up or shut up - to demonstrate they can develop an advanced civilization and persuade the rest of the world to join them, or to cease their bleating about capitalism, industrialization and the associated marvels of modern energy systems. That would be true justice.
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