Review of The Green Collar Economy by Van Jones

By Bill McKibben

Van Jones is, beyond any doubt, one of the rising stars of the American environmental movement and the American civil rights movement. He’s fused the two of them in a new way, and in so doing constructed a powerful political argument for how we might move forward with the twin challenges of preparing the country to fight global warming and pulling our economy out of its dangerous current weakness. 
  
The longtime head of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, and now of the Green For All campaign, Jones took advantage of the odd politics of the Bay Area to reach a vital epiphany. He saw the very real environmental passion, and very real wealth, of folks in San Francisco, the Berkeley Hills, and the coastlines of Marin County, and he saw as well the abysmal poverty of the flatlands along the East Bay. How did they need each other? Well, in a practical way, and in a political one.

Practically speaking, the task of actually making all those affluent homes “green” would require lots of workers. Workers that could, and should, come from the communities passed over by prosperity in years past—“green-collar workers” who would need to go past high school but perhaps not to a four-year college to learn the real skills required to make American energy-efficient. “Let’s be clear,” he writes. “The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. . . . Another bit of high-tech green technology is the clipboard . . . used by energy auditors as they point out energy-saving opportunities to homeowners and renters. . . . Other green-collar workers can then follow up with other tasks for building owners: wrapping hot-water heaters with blankets, blowing insulation, plugging holes, repairing cracks.” The point, he insists, is that when we think “green future” the image that should spring to mind is not George Jetson with a jet pack but “Joe Sixpack with a hard hat.”
  
And one of the best features of this kind of work is, it simply can’t be outsourced—no one is going to ship their house to China for new insulation.

The investment in real training for real jobs for people in real need would pay all kinds of dividends for traditional environmentalists, he insists. Recounting the sad tale of California’s Prop. 87, when the oil companies managed to manipulate black voters into helping turn down a tax that would have brought their communities huge gains, Jones concludes that “the eco-elite cannot win major change alone, not even in the Golden State.” (By the way, for those interested in the political futures market, I’ve heard more than one person murmuring about the possibility of Jones making a strong bid for the California Senate seat now held by Dianne Feinstein. He is a sparkling orator, with a mirthful soul and a commanding presence—this book would have been even better with a DVD insert of one of his speeches.) 

Jones includes a number of examples of this budding coalition, including the quite inspiring story of how entrepreneurs in the poor and violent California city of Richmond managed to build a powerful solar business in short order, meeting the fast-growing demand for solar panel installation with local hires. He tells local food stories from Chicago’s inner city, and tales of innovative water, trash, and transport projects. But he’s canny enough to know that data is not the plural of anecdote: For real action, we’ll need much stronger involvement from the federal government. If there’s one sadness to reading this book in the weeks after its publication, it’s that the federal bailout of our pasteboard suburban home-mortgage crisis has likely eaten much of the money necessary for this work. But if a like-minded new president was looking for a plan, it’s spelled out in enough detail here to let him get down to work: Jones proposes everything from a new Clean Energy Corps to a serious effort to address the “Greenhouse Development Rights” of poor countries around the world. 

This book could be read quite profitably next to Tom Friedman’s new tome,Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Jones takes Friedman’s high-octane account of the next green revolution and brings it right down to earth, which is where it needs to be. This is an important contribution to the environmental debate, from an important environmentalist, one who’s redefining the meaning of that word.

Progressive Book Club editorial board member Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. He is the author of many books.