Van Jones has a strategy to build a clean energy economy. Why is that so scary?
A couple months ago Van Jones, White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs, was all over the news. The right wing noise machine had been attacking Jones since July—ostensibly because he had once signed a petition calling for further investigation into the 9/11 terror attacks, but in reality because he had founded an organization, “Color of Change,” that in 2009 (two years after Jones left the group) had organized a successful boycott against the corporate sponsors of Fox TV’s Glenn Beck program. Jones resigned from his White House job early in September.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/31/glenn-beck-uncovers-van-j_n_249044.html
Many progressives were shocked that the Obama White House could be so easily intimidated by right-wing attacks. However, both the White House and Jones said that it was Jones’ decision to resign. The he said / she said of the attacks and counter-attacks continues, even on the Wikipedia site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Van_Jones
What always seems to get lost in this kind of media fireworks display is a serious discussion of the issues that we face as a nation. In this case the real issue is not 9/11, Glenn Beck, or even Van Jones. The real issue is climate change. The actions we take in the next few years will have a huge impact on successive generations. In fact, the future of life on Earth could depend on decisions we make (or fail to make) in the next few years. Scientists tell us that we have reached a tipping point in our output of greenhouse gases: 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
(http://www.350.org/understanding-350)
As the atmosphere warms, we are beginning to see the melting of the Arctic permafrost. As the permafrost melts it releases methane, which is even more harmful than CO2. Increased concentrations of methane will push up the greenhouse gas ppm count even further, leading to ever more intense weather patterns and hastening the rise in sea levels. These events will be followed by global famine and a variety of social and political crises as successive waves of refugees move to those places where life is still tolerable. It’s a scenario that will exceed the worst nightmares of apocalyptic Christians. Unlike the Christian vision of Hell, however, this is no scare story. It’s real.
And if the world ends this way, in the whimper of an eco-apocalypse, rich and poor will suffer alike. Christians will fry right alongside atheists.
A “List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions” on Wikipedia gives us an at-a-glance summary of which nations are most responsible for the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
As the chief culprits of climate change, the United States and other industrialized nations are in a position to take the lead on this issue. Many initiatives have been floated, (Tokyo Accord, “Cap and Trade,” “Green New Deal”) yet, for all the talk, to date this group has made scant progress in actually reducing carbon emissions. There’s always some excuse, of course, whether it’s a big corporate polluter or the guy on the street. Curbing emissions will hurt our business, whines the auto executive. Taking the bus is a bother! scoffs a disgruntled suburban commuter.
The latest excuse American are using for doing nothing is the recession, yet it would be particularly tragic if we were to allow this relatively brief crisis to delay us from dealing with the much larger and much more threatening prospect of irreversible climate change. During economic downturns, there are always those who claim that austerity is the solution and who focus on balancing the budget to the exclusion of all else. Indeed, there are certain parts of the federal budget that should be shrunk— the Pentagon’s trillion dollar-a-year budget and multi-billion dollar subsidies to the fossil fuel sector for starters. However, at the same time we’re cutting back in some areas we should be growing in others: like renewable energy, energy conservation, and local sustainable agriculture. We need more jobs in sustainable sectors of the economy like these, and fewer jobs in the unsustainable ones, like auto manufacturing.
We are finally starting to understand that the solution to the economic crisis and the solution to the climate change crisis are the same. Van Jones helped catalyze that understanding with the publication of his 2008 book The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.
http://www.amazon.com/Green-Collar-Economy-Solution-Problems/dp/0061650757
Like the other common-sense authors we’ve discussed in these posts, Jones is no radical. He doesn’t advocate outlawing capitalism, for example, or hanging corporate polluters from lamp posts. Instead, he lays out a strategy to create a powerful new political movement that can counter the interests of the “military-petroleum” complex so we can get on with the job of preventing a climate catastrophe.
The key to understanding Jones’ strategy is to consider the lessons of California’s failed 2006 ballot measure, Proposition 87. Prop 87 proposed that California levy a tax on all oil and gas extracted from the state. (Alaska has already had such a tax in place for years, but instead of being reinvested, the money is distributed as an annual dividend to every state resident.) In the California initiative, the money raised would have funded the development of clean energy. At first the idea polled very well, but the oil and gas companies ran a $100 million campaign against the measure, claiming the entire tax would be passed on to consumers and prices of gasoline would go through the roof. (Thanks for taking no responsibility for fixing the crisis once again, Big Oil!) In any case it was a false argument. The tax on each barrel of oil and gas would have been small, between 1.5% and 6.0%, and wouldn’t have had a drastic impact on retail prices, since retail oil and gas price are actually determined by a combination of several factors. But many voters bought Big Oil’s arguments and the measure went down to defeat.
Jones argues that the problem lay with Prop 87’s leadership. The proposition’s sponsors emphasized only the environmental benefits of the proposition, not bothering to talk about how little the measure would actually cost a typical family. Perhaps their biggest mistake was their failure to focus on the fact that a clean energy economy in California would provide plenty of good jobs in addition to improving people’s health. To quote Jones: “a clean energy economy is more labor-intensive—meaning it creates more jobs [than a dirty energy economy]. After all, somebody has to install and maintain all those solar panels, build all the wind farms, construct the wave farms, weatherize those millions of homes and office buildings.’ (p. 97).
Environmentalists tend to be upper-middle class and well-educated people, people who have an aptitude for the arcane science underlying the climate change debate. Though well-meaning, these folks often come across as academic nerds who assume everyone they meet has a BS degree and can appreciate the scientific fine points of the climate debate. What needs to happen, if we’re going to move forward, is that these folks, the Al Gores of the world, need to join forces with the rest of us working stiffs. If the leaders of the Prop 87 campaign had done more to address the concerns of working class and poor Californians, perhaps they would have framed their argument differently and won the election. Without the cross-class unity manifest in the idea of green jobs, Jones thinks we will not be able to win the political power we need to prevent climate chaos. And we believe him on that.
For the time being, Jones himself is without a job and is probably thinking a lot about the future. Let’s hope he finds another job in the same line of work and continues organizing from outside the White House.
—John Repp and David Preston
Members, West Seattle Neighbors for Peace and Justice
http://www.westseattleneighborsforpeace.org
(This posting is dedicated to all those enlightened Seattleites who didn’t bother voting for the “Bag Tax” proposition because they were sure it would pass anyway.)
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