For as long as most people can remember, environmentalists and trade unionists have been on opposite sides of most issues.

Since the advent of the great modern environmental awakening of 40 years ago, when many of the modern agencies of government were created to deal with the degradation of the environment, there have been clashes between the two groups.

It was “jobs versus the environment.” That’s how it was characterized…simple, succinct, to the point. If you were to have jobs, you had to sacrifice the environment. If you were to have a clean environment, you had to sacrifice jobs. And so the debate and the arguments went. Either or, either or, either or…

When the states created their first environmental agencies, such as the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York State, or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, there were many in the union movement who thought that it spelled the end of job creation. After all, if a corporation could not pollute its immediate environment, how could it stay in business? How could it keep providing jobs? So went the logical line of thought.

At that time, 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) created an agency that was to make workplaces safer and healthier. For a while, it did just that, but it was only a beginning. Within 10 years, Ronald Reagan was elected president and he slashed the budget for OSHA and it never really became the powerhouse of protection for American workers that its creators envisioned. However, there were some leaders in some unions, who saw the value of workplace protection and were able to translate that into an ability to see the great value of protecting the general environment.

In fact, some at least, came to see that protecting the environment inside the plants and factories and in the immediate area actually protected and improved the general environment. Jobs did not have to be lost to protect air, soil, and water. Thus began a long slow process of experience which showed that it was not protection of the environment that caused the loss of jobs, it was the wholesale transfer of U.S. industrial and manufacturing work to other countries, usually where wages were lower than at home, and the lower the wages, the better.

When globalization of the economies of the developed countries began to be understood, we were witness to the famous joining of the trade unionists and the environmentalists in November 1999 in Seattle, during the giant protests against globalization at the site of a meeting of the World Trade Organization. It was a meeting and conjoining, at least for a short few days, of “sea turtles and hard hats.”

Although it has been an on-again, off-again relationship, the cooperation between trade unionists and environmentalists has been building, because it has become very clear that the earth is in trouble, no matter what measure is used. If one has ears to hear and eyes to see, the evidence is all around, and whether jobs are created or lost, we need a healthy planet to live upon. People are beginning to understand that.

Right now, there is another project that millions of Americans and Canadians fear will further degrade the environment of North America, the Keystone XL pipeline that, if it is allowed to proceed, will bring “tar sands oil” from the Province of Alberta, south nearly 2,000 miles to Texas. The oil there is very difficult to extract from those tar sands and the process itself uses a lot of energy, but it leaves devastation in its wake. Once it is produced, it would travel through the 30-inch pipe at a rate of 435,000 barrels a day.

Pipelines leak and a pipeline that long is liable to leak a lot, as it wends its way through five states of the American mid-west, to Texas, the sixth state. That’s what the environmentalists fear, as they try to promote alternative energy sources to replace the tar sands oil and other sources of oil, which is becoming ever harder and more expensive (financially and environmentally) to retrieve from the ground. We are running out of cheap and easy oil.

Once again, trade unionists (at least some of them) and environmentalists are on the same side of a major issue, but this time, they also are on either side of a national frontier, Canada and the U.S. While it is true that union leaders are concerned about the loss of jobs, should the pipeline be built, there are also those who can see that a huge area of a huge province would be devastated by the tar sands oil process.

The Alberta Federation of Labour says it wants Keystone XL stopped, because it would create 465,000 new jobs in the U.S. and few new jobs in Canada. The unions of the federation liken it to the shipping of raw logs to China for processing, rather than processing the lumber in Canada and selling the higher-value finished products on the world market.

In the U.S., at least two large unions, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) - which represent a total of more than 300,000 workers - said several weeks ago that the pipeline could leak and lead to groundwater pollution, as well as increase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that escape into the atmosphere. According to Dow Jones news, the unions called for public investments in energy conservation and climate change as a way of putting people to work.

Other labor unions, notably the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), have voiced support for Keystone XL, saying the project would create thousands of jobs and generate taxes for local governments. A final report by the U.S. State Department was to be issued by the end of the year. Now, it looks as if that report will not be presented to President Obama until sometime in 2012 and he said recently that he will decide.

There is not unanimity among unions on this issue, because there are those who are for tax revenues and jobs, regardless of the cost to the environment. Looking on the bright side of “tax revenues and job creation” requires the observer to ignore or disregard the cost of the ill health of the planet and its denizens. There always will be those who look only at the bottom line and fight for the jobs, no matter what. It takes too long for a “greening” economy to develop. Already, the “energy extraction” industry (that is, oil) is warning that the $7 billion pipeline will cost an additional $1 million a day, if construction is delayed.

The Keystone XL pipeline is yet another step along the way toward understanding and cooperation between the organized labor and the environmental movement, but there are indications that things are going that way, just painfully slowly. Everyone, though, is looking toward Obama’s decision on the project. In this case, he’s the “decider.”

Being the “decider” on such a huge and potentially dangerous enterprise puts Obama in a very strange position. The Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) pointed out recently that another “decider” signed legislation several years ago that appears to make American use of the tar sands oil illegal.

The network noted that, in 2007, George W. Bush (who originally said he was the “decider”) signed into law Section 526 of the Energy Independence and National Security Act of 2007, which prohibits the U.S. government from using taxpayer dollars to purchase fuels that have a higher carbon footprint than conventional oil. “This little-known law is significant because Congress crafted it, in part, with the explicit intent to block the U.S. from buying Canadian tar sands oil, considered the dirtiest oil on the planet,” LNS said in a statement.

It is now up to “Decider II” to make up his mind whether “Decider I” was correct in signing the legislation, which, in effect, makes it impossible for “Decider II” to allow Keystone XL to go forward without breaking the law. Look for him to use the “national security” gambit, if he gives the go-ahead to the pipeline.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.