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In this bizarre presidential election season, will the Democrats allow petty infighting and lack of vision to successfully put Donald Trump in the White House? Some labor union leaders are doing their best to fuck things up already.

As this campaign has worn on, there have been increasingly worried grumblings from America’s labor unions that a significant chunk of their members might peel off and vote for Donald Trump. Major unions have decided to counter that prospect with a large, coordinated $50 million-plus campaign to both turn out the labor vote and attack Trump. The plan is for a coalition of unions, including the AFL-CIO and the SEIU, to fund the campaign, along with billionaire Democratic climate change activist Tom Steyer. That coalition seemed to be a good example of unity between the labor and environmentalist wings of the party, coming together in support of a common goal.

Until now. A bunch of building trade unions have sent angry letters to the AFL-CIO, which they are part of, objecting to the involvement of Tom Steyer in this anti-Trump project. Their complaint is that Steyer, in his climate change activism, opposed the Keystone Pipeline and other energy projects that the unions are only able to interpret as “jobs.” Laborers Union president Terry O’Sullivan calls Steyer a “job-killer and environmental extremist” whose “vision of leaving oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels in the ground kills jobs, drives up energy cost, and threatens to strangle our economy.” Another letter from multiple building union leaders says, “We are not climate science deniers and have merely sought to ensure that the employment prospects of our members are not negatively impacted in any economic and energy transition.”

Because of these objections, the anti-Trump coalition may fall apart. This makes me want to throw up.

This is the sort of short-sightedness and self-interest to the exclusion of all else that lives up to the very worst stereotypes of unions and their leaders. On the one hand, global warming could inundate hundreds of million of people in coastal cities and wipe out untold billions of dollars worth of property in violent storms and plunge entire nations into war over dwindling resources; on the other hand, the Keystone Pipeline might have created 3,900 jobs for one year. This is insanity. It is the equivalent of construction workers demanding jobs building their own gallows, from which they will be hung at completion.

Is it reasonable for unionized workers in the energy sector to fear the decline of carbon-intensive industries that employ them? Sure. Is the solution to that to put on blinders and demand to continue operating these industries at full throttle even though we know they are poisoning the planet? No, it is not. The solution is for unions to use their political clout to help develop the clean energy industry of the future, and ensure that the jobs in that industry are unionized. When technology changes and the economy changes and our scientific understanding changes and it becomes clear that certain industries must decline and others must grow, only a fool clings to the old industry and prays that nothing will change. What unions—and the U.S. government—owe to workers in dying fossil fuel industries is not the continuation of those industries, which are dying for good reason. It is help for the people. When people are left behind by economic changes out of their control, we must all, through our government, provide those people with economic assistance and job training and relocation assistance and everything else that they need to survive. The people in question are no less victims than those who had their homes wiped out by tornadoes. Their livelihood has been destroyed by the changing economy. And they deserve help—much more help than America has traditionally given them. Securing this promise for left-behind workers is an extremely worthy goal of the labor movement. Ensuring that the world continues barreling down the path to global climate apocalypse is not. If union leaders fail to see that, they are not fit to be leaders.

Fear can make people do dumb things. Donald Trump has promised to revive the US coal industry. He won’t! It is an industry that is on a permanent decline, because it is poison. Leaders of building trade unions are telling their members that it is in their interests to extract every ounce of fossil fuel from the ground. It’s not! We (or our grandkids) will all be screwed if that happens. If Donald Trump had a shred of decency he would promise to help coal workers, rather than the coal industry. And if union leaders had good sense they would focus on getting a safety net in place for their workers and steering them into the industries that will actually exist a few decades in the future, rather than pretending that inevitable change is not coming.

Climate change and economic inequality are the two most important issues that we face today. At the nexus of those two issue sits this union-environmentalist coalition. If we work together, we can make both issues better at the same time. Or, we can fuck everything up. Let’s not, okay.