Deep Currents

I’ve just gotten around to reading The Green Collar Economy, which the social justice and environmental advocate Van Jones put out last fall as part of his Green For All initiative. (If you want a cheat sheet, check out the wonderful review over at TreeHugger.) His argument is sophisticated but fits comfortably in a nutshell: fighting poverty and fighting climate change are symbiotic political goals which are stronger when pursued together. In other words, if we’re going to use taxes or cap-and-trade to force decarbonization, why not emphasize the social justice benefits of employing millions of “green-collar” workers in the process?

Jones makes the interesting pitch that this should not only appeal to social justice advocates but also to environmentalist leaders. The environmental movement has a problem: where it has traditionally sought support from the white middle and upper class, its current project of taking action on climate change needs support from the mainstream, including many poor families who are mostly concerned with putting food on the table. That’s tough. How do you convince a working-class single mother that she should spend any time and effort doing the right thing for the environment? Especially if she’s black and the only signs of environmentalism she’s ever seen are being sported by wealthy whites in the form of expensive Priuses, high-quality organic produce at Whole Foods, and solar panels that cost tens of thousands of dollars? Jones argues that winning those hearts will not only expand environmentalism’s base of support but also greatly amplify the amount of innovation in response to environmental problems:

We cannot afford that kind of moral shortfall. To solve our global problems, we need to engage and unleash the genius of all people, at all levels of society. Some of the minds that can solve our toughest problems are undoubtedly trapped behind prison bars, stuck behind desks in schools without decent books, or isolated in rural communities. A green economy that is designed to pull them in—as skilled laborers, innovators, inventors, and owners—will be more dynamic, more robust, and better able to save the Earth.

We’re not just talking about getting a better bunch of suggestions on how to conserve energy. We’re talking about environmentalism becoming a genuinely populist movement with the power to motivate hundreds of millions worldwide. This is big.

Much of Jones’ message was echoed in Obama’s promise to create five million green jobs, which brings up the question: are green jobs the way to escape our downward slide? Many politicians are promoting the idea, which the Wall Street Journal examined earlier this month and found lacking, an argument echoed on the blog Environmental Economics. (The stimulus package is only creating somewhere around a million jobs, and the nation lost about half a million in January alone.) But how many green jobs are we talking about? The subtitle of the book is “How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems”; while the “dual crisis” that Jones describes is that of social inequality and the destruction of our ecosystems, he also explicitly references the recession. When Fast Company published its list of the top 10 best green jobs for the next decade, it explicitly referenced his book.

Up to this point his and Obama’s visions ride the same wavelength. But when Jones describes the economic shift we need to fight climate change he strikes the same note asMakani Power’s Saul Griffith and calls for an all-hands-on-deck economic mobilization on par with World War II. That’s where it becomes clear that the vision of green jobs as an economic saviour has to be discussed differently in the short term and the long term. The short-term case is dubious, as the Journal describes. But the long-term case looks rock solid. If we can make carbon expensive, there will be massive new demand for renewable energy, which might well be the industry that keeps the American economy on top for the next few decades. After all, as Jones points out, there’s the same number of parts in a wind turbine as there are in a car. Whether Obama will push us that far or not, he is pushing for both cap-and-trade and heavyweight participation in the 2009, as noted in today’s New York Times (”Obama’s Backing Raises Hopes for Climate Pact“). Here’s hoping he succeeds.

Written: March 2nd, 2009