Q&A with Green Collar Economy Author Van Jones

VAN JONES received the $100,000 2008 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship in New York City December 8th. Hamilton Fish, President of The Nation Institute, said, "In a year of change, Van Jones offers an integrated, progressive blueprint that simultaneously promotes jobs, environmental stewardship, and economic progress. He has arrived to pull us back from the brink."

The economy is in crisis. Unemployment is rising. Families are hurting. Despite recent drops in oil prices, the days of cheap gas and oil are numbered. Climate change calls for massive changes in the way we supply and use energy. VAN JONES believes that these crises are connected and that together they present an enormous opportunity. JONES is the founder and president of GREEN FOR ALL and author of THE GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY.

A report recently released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors says that we can create over 4 million green jobs if we aggressively shift away from traditional fossil fuels toward alternative energy and a significant improvement in energy efficiency.

Another report from the Political Economy Research Institute and the Center for American Progress shows that investing $100 billion in a green economic recovery plan can create two million jobs over two years - four times more jobs than spending the same amount of money within the oil industry.

Green For All and its partners are proposing a Clean Energy Corps that includes a revolving loan fund to finance the ambitious retrofitting of the nation's building stock. An investment of less than $3 billion per year would provide financing and can be expected to create close to 120,000 green jobs a year and 600,000 over five years, while also lowering home heating and electricity bills for homeowners and small businesses.

VAN JONES is also co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Color of Change, both committed to equal justice and opportunity for low-income people and people of color. Van has earned many other honors, including the 1998 Reebok International Human Rights Award; the International Ashoka Fellowship; selection as a World Economic Forum "Young Global Leader;" the Rockefeller Foundation "Next Generation Leadership" Fellowship; and Campaign for America's Future "Paul Well­stone Award 2008." A Senior Fellow with Center for American Progress, his first book, THE GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY is a New York Times best-seller.

McNally:
You've followed an interesting path. How did you end up doing the work you're doing today?

Jones:
I got out of law school and moved to the Bay Area for love. It lasted about three weeks, then I had to find something to do with my time. I was a 24-year-old African-American male with dreadlocks and a law degree. So it was pretty obvious that I needed to take on police brutality and the criminal justice system. I did it with fervor, helping to build the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Bay Area Police Watch, Books Not Bars and other groups. But I really burned out -- just too many funerals, too many bad court cases, too many frustrating meetings with the activist world.

Trying to get my health together, I ventured across the Bay to Marin County, where I discovered salads and tofu and hybrid cars and solar panels -- healthy green good stuff that wasn't in Oakland or Bayview Point. I realized there was going to be a huge shift in the economy toward clean energy, poison-free food and all that -- and I wanted to make sure we did not have eco-apartheid, some communities being ecological haves and some being ecological have-nots.

In 2001, I came up with the slogan "Green Jobs, Not Jail" back and started going around trying to get people to look at the green economy as the next source of civil rights. I talked about equal protection from the pollution poison-based economy and global warming, but also equal opportunity and equal access to the best of the green solutions.

Solar panels don't put themselves up. So let's make sure that people who need jobs can get jobs and entrepreneurial, ownership and inventor opportunities in solving these problems to fight pollution and poverty at the same time.

McNally:
So you've been working on these issues for years. You started an organization, you wrote a book. Now how does the global financial crisis impact the possible success of your vision?

Jones:
Well, it makes it that much more urgent and, frankly, that much more doable. Now I think that this economic breakdown is awful and tragic -- and inevitable. We got sold a bill of goods for the past 30 years. Can't dump it all on George Bush. Both political parties said we could run the U.S. economy on consumption, not production; on debt and credit cards, not thrift and smart savings like our grandparents, on environmental destruction not environmental restoration. Well, that -- by definition --is an unsustainable pathway. It had to come to an end.

Now we're going to have to find a new way to power the U.S. economy. Let's stop relying on overseas credit, let's start relying on our own creativity. Let's stop borrowing from overseas, let's start building here again. And let's move forward.

The smartest thing that we can do at this point is to rely on some good old green Keynesian-ism. We need to engage in some government deficit spending to get us through this recession, but let's not do the kind of stupid stimulus we did over the summer: We passed out checks to everybody so they could run down to Wal-Mart and buy a flat screen TV -- building the economy in China but not here.

Let's instead use that money to invest in greening our infrastructure. Millions of jobs retrofitting millions of buildings, putting up millions of solar panels, creating wind farms, fixing our power grid. These kinds of things will cut carbon, cut energy prices, make us more self-sufficient with regards to energy, bring our home values up through weatherization, and create jobs. We can cut a green New Deal to get us through this recession - frankly, depression - the same way we used the old New Deal to get us through the last one.