The greatest victory for both climate and labor was Covid's lockdown, which enabled people to not commute - to drive to and from work every day of the week. Commuting to a cubicle is a climate atrocity and civil rights issue because of the incredible cost to humans and ecology: the staggering waste of life: meaninglessness. The right to work at home, a gift of Covid, is profound for workers everywhere. On the climate side work at home eliminates the hefty portion of greenhouse gas emissions associated with a life of commuting - constant combustion from mobility and ephemerality. The commute is the main event behind climate collapse, and its elimination brought an unprecedented and sustained GHG reduction without any cost to the government: only lost parasitical revenues for businesses dependent on commuter (anti-)culture, the gas stations, restaurants, office building rents, etc.. The ongoing attempts to undo Work at Home, to somehow bring labor back to its knees, the importing of hundreds of thousands of emigrants and Presidential work permits, and the lash of inflation, constitute a war with American labor.
Labor and climate are perfectly aligned here. People need to work shorter distances from their homes. Control of the self is a bastion of human dignity. Land use patterns that appeared unchangeable before Covid have already changed, and should be changed even more. The idea of driving hundreds of miles per day or week, just to pay your bills, is harmful to all. A relocalization of the economy bringing the economy back to people where they live is a sane and believable path out of the climate and human disaster caused by commuting to work.
To defend the right to Work at Home as a labor right: this opportunity must not be missed. To have more control over the hours of your day, to reoccupy a local existence and undo the profound harm done to society, culture, family, and roots by the postwar obsession with mobility and fossil-subsidized labor rat race that defined 20th century America, is a shockingly easy to implement foundation of any Energy Transition.