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TechnoratiGreen Jobs Help Climate, Boost Social Justice
Jobs that not only help save the planet but usher individuals and neighborhoods out of poverty - talk about a silver bullet. If the promise of green jobs sounds too good to be true, the simplicity of the logic is difficult to resist: Train and hire people who are economically marginalized in work that is critical but has been neglected. Instead of poor people getting stuck at the back of the line, they step to the front of the new technology.
![[The Bamboo Collective displays a bike made with local bamboo at an event sponsored by the Oakland Climate Action Coalition at Laney College. (Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle)
]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/mn-insight22_jon_0500863348.jpg "mn-insight22_jon_0500863348.jpg")
The Bay Area's Van Jones was a visionary, early recognizing the
social justice potential in the green economy. Jones, you may recall,
was hounded out of his job as environmental adviser to the White House
by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck. Jones is the founder of the
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. In June, the Oakland
Green Job Corps, launched by the Ella Baker Center and the Oakland
Apollo Alliance, graduated its first class of students, previously
handicapped by inadequate education or prison records.
Ian Kim, director of the center's Green-Collar Jobs Campaign, quipped: When organizers began the program three years ago, they didn't imagine that the first class would graduate during the worst global recession in decades. Still, the graduates have fared better than one might imagine. Of the 42, 26 have jobs. Twelve of those are working in traditional construction jobs but report that their green training has been an advantage. They've helped their employers identify ways to reuse materials and save the cost of dump and disposal fees.
The second job corps class is in training, on course to graduate in June. But organizers are well aware of the pitfall of training people for jobs that don't exist.
"All along, we've said that would be a waste of resources and time and it dashes people's hopes," Kim said. "We have to focus on green job creation. The corps is a great start. But before it can grow to train 400 people, you have to make sure we have 400 jobs. A lot has to be done in public policy and the private sector to generate green jobs and help businesses to grow."
In this regard, the city of Oakland has emerged as a leader. In June, the Oakland City Council adopted some of the country's highest targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting those targets will require changes in everything from transportation to land use to solid waste disposal. The Oakland Climate Action Coalition, made up of businesses, labor unions and community organizations, has submitted 30 policy recommendations of needed changes to the city.
In September, 30 sophomores at Oakland Technical High School became the first students of the Oakland Tech Green Academy. The three-year program will teach "eco-literacy." So, for example, students will not only learn how to install solar panels, but they will learn why solar energy is important. In addition, Laney College and several other Oakland groups have innovative green training programs.
"People see hope start in Oakland, and it's become a model for other cities across the state," said Emily Kirsch, Bay Area organizer for the Green-Collar Jobs Campaign. She said they have received so many inquiries about how to set up similar training programs, they are putting together a tool kit that will be published in print and on the Internet early next year.
One of the lessons learned by the job corps organizers is the importance of flexibility. Recognizing the limited number of solar energy jobs, they shifted the program's focus to energy efficiency. But they expect the federal Recovery Act's $500 million allocation for green jobs to kick-start solar and other green construction projects.
A bill introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, would provide a $30 billion revolving loan fund to small and midsize businesses for conversion to clean energy. Supporters say it will create 680,000 direct green jobs and an additional 2 million indirect jobs over five years; 70 percent of the clean energy systems and components in the country are currently manufactured overseas.
"Each wind turbine has 5,000 finely machined parts," Kim said. "Yet wind companies have to import the parts. The U.S. is not manufacturing them. That's nuts to me."
7 Comments so far
Show AllGreen jobs? What green jobs?
Oh, duh! I forgot that 'green jobs' is code for the marijuana-related industry.
Well, no wonder the fascist apologists in the media went into a feeding frenzy over Van Jones. Jones is a transformative figure whose mind sees solutions where other people only see problems.
May the eco-literacy programs grow and the green jobs lead to green manufacturing, green research and development, and green visionaries empowering ordinary people so they do not become helpless wards of the regimenting corporatist state.
Lead on Oakland! Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Fred Thompson would all approve and offer a hearty "right on brothers and sisters".
Poet
The New York Times
November 24, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
SIGNS OF HOPE
By BOB HERBERT
Detroit
I came to Detroit and its environs, the seat of America’s glorious industrial past, to see if I could get a glimpse of the future. Is the economic, social and physical deterioration that has caused so much misery in the Motor City a sign of what’s in store for larger and larger segments of the United States?
Or are there new industries waiting in the wings — some of them right here in the Detroit metropolitan area — with new jobs and bright new prospects for whole new generations of American dreamers?
I found real reason to hope when a gentleman named Stan Ovshinsky took me on a tour of a remarkably quiet and pristine manufacturing plant in Auburn Hills, which is about 30 miles north of Detroit and is home to Chrysler’s headquarters. What is being produced in the plant is potentially revolutionary. A machine about the length of a football field runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, turning out mile after mile after mile of thin, flexible solar energy material, from which solar panels can be sliced and shaped.
You want new industry in the United States, with astonishing technological advances, new mass production techniques and jobs, jobs, jobs? Try energy.
Mr. Ovshinsky knows as much or more about the development and production of alternative energy as anyone on the planet. He developed the technology and designed the production method that made it possible to produce solar material “by the mile.” When he proposed the idea years ago, based on the science of amorphous materials, which he invented, he was ridiculed.
But the thin-film photovoltaic solar panel was just one of his revolutionary ideas. He invented the nickel metal hydride battery that is in virtually all hybrid vehicles on the road today. And when I pulled into the parking lot outside his office in Bloomfield Hills, he promptly installed me in the driver’s seat of a hydrogen hybrid prototype — a car in which the gasoline tank had been replaced with a safe solid-state hydrogen storage system invented by Mr. Ovshinsky.
Within minutes, I was driving along a highway in a car that produced zero pollution. No carbon footprint whatsoever. How’s that for a wave of the future?
The point is that these (and many more) brilliant, innovative technologies are here. They are real, tangible. They exist. What’s needed now is the will to develop policies that will vastly expand these advances and radically reduce their costs. The United States should be leading the world in the creation of whole new energy technologies and industries, instead of allowing the forces of the old carbon-based industries — coal, oil, gasoline-powered vehicles — to stand obstinately in the way of real progress.
“Now,” Mr. Ovshinsky told me, “is when we have to build the new industries of the future.” He has always been driven by the desire to use science and technology to solve the real-world problems of real people, and that has meant creating employment and stopping the pollution of the planet. He and his late wife, Iris, formed a company (to become known as Energy Conversion Devices) in Detroit in 1960 with the idea of using their considerable talents, as he put it, “to do good, to change the world.”
After nearly a half-century of revolutionary innovations with the company, Mr. Ovshinsky retired two years ago to focus his attention on the difficult and time-consuming effort to make solar energy economically competitive with coal and oil. “I know solar energy can’t live up to its possibilities unless it’s a hell of a lot cheaper,” he said.
He believes he has assembled a team that, with sustained, intense work under his direction — and if sufficient funding can be secured — will bring the price of solar power below that of coal and oil within a few years.
What’s weird is that this man, with such a stellar track record of innovation on products and processes crucial to the economic and environmental health of the U.S., gets such little attention and so little support from American policy makers. In addition to his work with batteries, photovoltaics and hydrogen fuel cells, his inventions have helped open the door to flat-screen televisions, new forms of computer memory and on and on.
So when Stan Ovshinsky tells us that we should be putting our chips on hybrid and electric vehicles, and that solar and hydrogen power can be the cornerstone of an industrial renaissance in the U.S. as well as a cleaner planet, we should be listening very, very closely.
As oil defined the 20th century, new forms of energy will define the 21st. The U.S. has the opportunity, the intellectual resources and the expertise to lead the world in the development of clean energy. What we’ve lacked so far has been the courage, the will, to make it happen.
I appreciate this as a probe towards cleaner transportation, but the claim of zero carbon foot print is false. Any manufacturing leaves a footprint. Where does the hydrogen come from? The metal, the batteries? The solar cells, sheet or other, can't even come close to providing enough power to propel a vehicle. It is a step in the right direction, but shouldn't be over stated.
Hydrogen fueled planes were built in Germany in the 1940's. Producing the hydrogen was/is energy negative. When/if Ovshinsky crosses that hurdle hydrogen could be an option. Until then, it is as impractical as bio-fuel.
Eco-jobs to help save Amerika; buy German wind turbines, have them installed by cheap labor from Latin-America for a Dutch energy company that out sources it's customer service work to lndia, buy them with loans from China and pay some Wall Street firm a bundle to put the whole package together. As Lee Greedwald sang "God bless the USA"
Here in southern Wisconsin many machinists would love the work.
The government has been contacting them to make death machine parts, but the offers were declined. While I can't speak for them, I'm certain they would proudly accept.
"Each wind turbine has 5,000 finely machined parts," Kim said. "Yet wind companies have to import the parts. The U.S. is not manufacturing them. That's nuts to me."
Let's get on it, America!!!