Green Energy Meets Jobs
Even activists can stun themselves by speaking up. For a decade, Van Jones, a Yale-trained attorney and cofounder of Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, was mostly known in the Bay Area for fighting to reform police and youth prisons.
In recent years he and other activists have pushed for inner-city job training in the solar, wind, and other energy-saving industries. In June, Oakland became the first city in the nation to create a “Green Jobs Corps” program. A green coalition in nearby Richmond recently installed solar panels on a home, employing at-risk trainees.
That pioneering landed him an invitation last February to a climate change round table in San Francisco hosted by the city’s representative in Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Jones was in the room with Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope. But the round table did not go as Jones hoped.
Jones introduced himself briefly, as he thought he was supposed to do. Everyone else gave speeches. The session nearly ended with Jones saying nothing.
“I was feeling terrible,” he said over dinner in August. “I was nearly in tears. I thought I had blown it. I’m here with the third most powerful person in the United States, someone who can help our cause . . . and I didn’t take advantage of it.”
Just before Pelosi adjourned the round table for a press conference, she asked for last questions.
Jones threw up his hand and said, “My question is, at the press conference, will you say four words?” He said he asked her to say, “Green Energy Jobs Bill.”
Jones said Pelosi let him continue. “Everybody comes to the neighborhood and tells these kids don’t shoot anybody, don’t do drugs, don’t get pregnant, then they drive away. . . . You tell them you can help fix this country, you’re not going to solve just global warming, you are going to solve a bunch of problems in this community.”
At the press conference, Pelosi said there was something said at the round table everyone agreed with. In a video clip on the Ella Baker website, Pelosi said, “Where is Van? OK, you say it for yourself. We’ll say it together. ‘Green Energy Jobs Bill.’ ”
“I was totally floored,” Jones said. “After it was over, her chief of staff says it looks like we’ll be working together. I was blown away. Does this really happen to people?”
By May, Jones was telling a House committee, “We imagine formerly incarcerated people moving from jail cells to solar cells.” In the summer, the energy bill passed by the House included the Green Jobs Act, authorizing up to $125 million to train up to 30,000 people in “green industries.”
One of the bill’s sponsors, Representative John Tierney of Salem said in a press release that Jones’s “personal ‘energy’ greatly advanced this idea.”
Over the phone this week, the Massachusetts Democrat added, “When I originally thought about job training, I was going in the direction of families who used to work at Sylvania and GE and retool them. Van convinced us there has to a significant carve-out to other people. . . . There is a justice and equity side to this.”
Just as the larger energy bill is being bitterly debated over fuel economy, tax breaks, and renewable energy, there is some resistance to green jobs training that might involve nonviolent offenders.
A recent editorial in Investor’s Business Daily called it “foolishness” and “waste.” Tierney said some Republicans questioned, “Why should we be doing anything for them?”
Jones knows why he is doing something for “them.” Several years ago, burned out from police and juvenile justice issues, he attended a retreat. He met Julia “Butterfly” Hill, the woman who lived for two years in a redwood to save if from logging.
In their discussions, Jones said, “I agree with you that there aren’t any throwaway species or resources, but you agree with me there aren’t any throwaway children or neighborhoods, right? So we need to get these movements working together.”
The need is as clear as a drive across the Bay.
“In Marin County, they got organic this and hybrid cars and solar panels and organic denim jeans and 20 minutes later in a car here in Oakland, 1 in 5 kids have asthma because the air quality’s so bad from the ports and people are struggling to get the last entry-level pollution-based jobs,” Jones said. “We’ve already seen this one time before. We’ve already seen a big growth in the dot-com thing and no one benefits in the neighborhood.”
Derrick Z. Jackson’s e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
© 2007 The Boston Globe
“Green Jobs” and the whole renewable energy industry is an area that is being ignored in favour of the ‘fossil fuel economy’ jobs. The old boys like to keep the money circulating within their own world, and the political machine is a beneficiary of that money so there isn’t much governmental help to start up the green economy. Change is a threat to that powerfull group, but for the average person - the majority - it will be a real benefit. Global warming could be the catalyst.
The idea of using the troubled youth to build the green economy is terrific. In so many ways, they are victims of the ‘old boys economy’. This is real justice!!
Beautiful!
Green jobs is a visionary proposition. Let us hope whoever is elected president wakes up and actually does something besides pay lip service to the environment.
I have been saying for 10 years or more that changing the economy, making it sustainable again, will only stimulate it in new growth areas and create new careers and wealth for Americans. But let’s see the contents of the Bill before we get too excited. Pelosi has already sold us out several times before. What has she got to say about Soy and Corn subsidies for Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and the like? I will be truly impressed if she does anything more than steal the slogan. Show me something Nancy.
The oil industry really does not employ all that many people. Wind, solar, geothermal and other technologies should be able to surpass the oil industry in job creation, while we still have the oil jobs as well. You can do good and do well at the same time.
Here’s how to do green jobs: Localism. Small independent craftsman shops design, build and maintain renewable energy systems. The law forbids consolidation. That’s it. Sustainable food is done the same way. Most everything can be.
The feds should stay out of it. Bankers are not needed. We teach the people to ignore the feds, to shift all exchange/association away from power centers to the local level. That’s localism. That’s the answer.
Localism allows us to maximize prosperity, preserve the biosphere, and eliminate warfare, plunder and oppression. Fossil fuels are entirely replaced by conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy.
Local green energy is the most solid way for Americans to throw off their oppressors. The policy is to be permanent. Call it food/energy sovereignty. Even better: food, energy, shelter, health, education and transport sovereignty. Ready to give the beast capital the boot?
I hope for they day when we realize the cultural propensity to literally ‘vacate’ our daily working lives in order to continue living them. The vacation industry touting luxury ‘getaways’ is a social abberation, discussion of which would probably be beneficial. “Vacationing” in far too many cases perpetuates a deep emotional schism through valorizing the ‘exotic’ - that is to say to make the exotic or ‘other’ a key element in denying the inability of a society’s day to day life being healthy enough to sustain. It is really a rather bizarre phenomenon when you think about it.
We save what we earn in order to get away from what we do and a multi-billion dollar industry is built on it. Not to forget that advertising draws from a profoundly financed bank of information decades old on how to maximize the emotional impact to assure investment in it by the “consumer”.
In terms of an economy that seeks to re-localize, I wonder about the impact this has quite aside from the psychological phenomenon.