Van Jones (image courtesy Treehugger.com)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Last week an emerging national star of politics and sustainability, Van Jones, was in Portland to deliver a speech and advocate for green jobs.
After a speech at the University of Oregon's White Stag building, and just hours before President Obama's State of the Union, Jones met with about 30 business leaders, elected officials and renewable energy advocates "to share his perspective on policy and the political environment as it pertains to clean energy," as Christina Williams reported in the Portland Business Journal (which, weirdly, keeps its 'Sustainable Business Oregon' section on an entirely separate website.)
Van Jones, named by Time magazine as one of its "Heroes of the Environment" 2008, was also previously a special adviser to President Obama on green jobs. But resigned in September 2009 when a preposterous controversy arose over his past political activities. Jones had made a public comment disparaging congressional Republicans, who of course do the same thing in reverse from minute to minute. His name appearing on a petition for 911Truth.org, and last time I checked it is perfectly legal to hold conspiracy theories. (President Kennedy's assassination, anyone?) Finally, Jones allegedly had associations Marxist group during the 1990s. This, however, omits one key context: In 1990, Jones was 22 years old. I believe it was Winston Churchill who, rightly or wrongly (or half correct), said a young conservative has no heart and an old liberal has no brain.
More importantly than all this, the Yale Law School-educated Jones is also the author of The Green Collar Economy, which rose at one point to #12 on the New York Times bestseller list - something all but unheard of for a sustainable business book. Here's a short excerpt:
It takes energy to make anything and everything. So when energy costs go up, all prices tend to go up. At the same time, those very same steep energy prices eat into consumer confidence. They depress nonessential pending and discourage hiring. So consumers stop buying, employers hold back on making job offers, and tourists travel much less. As a result, the economy starts to stall—with all the attendant job loss and pain. Yet prices throughout the economy, driven by rising fuel costs, keep going up just the same. The result is that society finds itself stretched on the rack, with soaring costs and punging jobs puling the body of the nation in opposite directions.
The solution for the economy is simple: deliberately cut demand for energy and intelligently increase its supply…But all of that is a lot easier said than done.
So who will do the hard and noble work of actually building the green economy? The answer: millions of ordinary people, many of whom do not have good jobs right now. According to the National Renewable Energy Lab, the major barriers to a more rapid adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency are not financial, legal, technical or ideological. One big problem is simply that green employers can’t find enough trained, green-collar workers to do all the jobs.
Let’s be clear: the main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. Hundreds of thousands of green-collar jobs will be weatherizing and energy-retrofitting every building in the United States."
In his talk last week, Jones was critical of sustainability as boutique endeavor, citing the cost of organic, healthy food at markets like Whole Foods (he cited the "Whole Paycheck" moniker). He also took on the regulation-laden and subsidy supported energy market.
Jones the environmentalist is not to be confused with recording artist Van Jones
"Every American should be able to be an energy producer, should be able to produce energy for themselves or with their community rather than be an energy serf," Jones said.
He also predicted that the likely next steps by the Obama administration would be establishing a national goal for clean energy production and a green bank to finance renewable energy investments. Sure enough, later that night in his SOTU address, the president called for 80 percent of the nation's electricity needs to come from clean sources by 2035. "It's a fight worth having," Jones told the assembled Portlanders. "Clean energy companies have gone down because banks are sitting on their money...We've got to be able to bring the private capital into play."
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