If you want to know what Jones thinks now, instead of what he thought in his early 20s, read his book: The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. He’s out to save America’s free-market economy and get its people working. If the conservative movement were smart it would take yes for an answer and claim him as one if its own. But then, it’s not smart. It’s Beck.

If it’s not going to claim him, the right is correct to fear him, though.  He has synthesized the best of environmentalism, progressivism, and capitalism into a program with appeal both broad and intense. It’s particularly notable among young people, but Jones gets acclaim from virtually everyone who’s met him or seen him speak. The more his kind of can-do, entrepreneurial, win-win green solutions spread,  the more modern-day conservatives look like panicked, lumbering dinosaurs.

Link via azspot.

I’ve written a lot about this brilliant thinker and charismatic leader.

And that’s not good news. Islands of plastic waste floating in the oceans are filled with supposedly “indestructible” plastics that are decomposing quickly and releasing toxic substances into the water.

Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment that some how, some way, the White House and Congress cobble together a civilized public health care system. Within a decade, Americans are healthier than they’ve been in a generation. Preventative care available to everyone has led to fewer ER visits and fewer instances of chronic, avoidable diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, and some forms of cancer. We have more money in our pockets because we’re not paying for inefficient, privately-controlled health care. More and more of us are spending it on healthier, fresh food, and the obesity epidemic is finally turning a corner.

Guess what? We’re still fucked. Because the Senate decided one crisis is enough.

Bloomberg reports:

The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.

“The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. “I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem.”

The resistance by Lincoln and her Senate colleagues undercuts President Barack Obama’s effort to win passage of legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and establish a market for trading pollution allowances, said Peter Molinaro, the head of government affairs for Midland, Michigan- based Dow Chemical Co., which supports the measure.

“Doing these energy provisions by themselves might make it more difficult to move the cap-and-trade legislation,” said Molinaro, who is based in Washington. “In this town if you split two measures, usually the second thing never gets done.”