Van Jones on the Green Collar Economy

Van Jones — a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and founding president of Green For All has written a new book where he lays out a plan to promote social equity through green jobs, while simultaneously developing  environmental sustainability.

When I found out about the book, The Green Collar Economy, I wanted to diverge a bit from strictly blogging about green IT for a minute. Van Jones is an Oakland, California-based environmental and civil rights activist.

One of the goals in his book and of his organization is to create "green collar jobs," meaning the creation of a new workforce that helps us decrease oil and fossil fuel use, curb greenhouse-gas emissions, eliminate toxins, and protect natural systems. Examples include installing solar panels, retrofitting buildings to make them more efficient, refining waste oil into biodiesel, erecting wind farms, repairing hybrid cars, building green rooftops, planting trees, constructing transit lines, and (I hope) a much more active grassroots electronics recycling and refurbishing industry.

His main theme is that our present economic and energy problems make us ripe for a 'Green New Deal' — an economic recovery based on clean energy (to increase supply) and on wasting less energy (to cut demand). He notes that there is already a thriving green economy, which is growing despite inadequate and inconsistent support from the public sector. In his book, Jones recommends roles that government, entrepreneurs, and the investment community can play in building a green economy that will also promote social equality.

Have a look at this video of Jones explaining the Green New Deal:

See an example of a green collar program already functioning at Greencorps Chicago.

Van Jones is a major voice calling not only for reorienting our economic foundation on clean energy and technologies that improve energy efficiency, but also to include millions of ordinary people, many of whom do not have good jobs right now. To do this he proposes a new Clean Energy Corps that educates and places new workers in to a new green economy.

He cites a National Renewable Energy Lab finding that "the major barriers to a more rapid adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency are not financial, legal, technical, or ideological. One big problem is simply that green employers can’t find enough trained, green-collar workers to do all the jobs."

We now have a huge opportunity to promote social equity, in the course of improving environmental sustainability. Amen to that!