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link Cleaning some of the Fox off of Van Jones

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.

September 2, 2009

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link An Environmental Brain Drain to D.C.

During the Bush administration, environmentalists wandered in the wilderness. Now that Washington has suddenly become the promised land, many are leaving their groups and heading to jobs in policy.

I feel like I know half the people cited in the blog post (Van Jones, Cathy Zoi, Jonathan Pershing) — they’re always sending me emails! ;)

April 7, 2009

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Set your DVR for two shows on sustainability this week.

Tonight on the History Channel: Modern Marvels looks at Environmental Tech

Take a look at the innovations designed to hold off a global warming meltdown. Visit giant solar energy towers in Spain, install a rooftop wind turbine and ride in a car that runs on air. Will a daring attempt to remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere by dumping iron in the ocean really work? Discover how everyone can go green with the flick of a switch.

Wednesday on the Discovery Channel: “Earth: The Sequel” (watch preview above)

A show based on the bestselling book of the same name.  In an email to supporters of Green For All, Van Jones wrote:

Our friends at the Environmental Defense Fund have partnered with the Discovery Channel to bring green energy technologies to life as never before.

Am I really writing to ask you to watch TV on Wednesday?

Yes.  Because this special tells the story that the whole nation needs to know: 

We have an abundance of clean energy alternatives already available to solve the global warming crisis and rebuild a clean, green America.

March 10, 2009

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link (Now) It’s Official: Van Jones Tapped as Green Jobs Adviser

There were rumors Jones was going to be the Administration’s “green jobs czar,” which would have been frankly awesome.  But “special adviser” is pretty cool, too.  Just the fact that this means he will have a national platform is great; there is no more inspiring evangelist for environmental justice.   Get this man on CNN and millions will be singin’ the praises of green jobs and demanding that we green America’s ghettos.

White House House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) chairwoman Nancy Sutley has announced that Van Jones will help direct the Obama administration’s efforts to create new green collar jobs.

The AP is reporting that Jones, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, will be begin work next week as the special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation, with a particular focus on “vulnerable communities.”

March 10, 2009

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“Green Anthem” by Rapper, Activist, and Green For All Academy Fellow, Tem Blessed.

Tem Blessed spoke at the Good Jobs Green Jobs conference; they played this music video to pump up the crowd before Van Jones took the stage.

February 17, 2009

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photo After his knock-out speech at the Good Jobs Green Jobs conference, Van Jones invited the whole Green For All team up on stage.  I had tears in my eyes.  Talk about hope! If you get a chance to hear Van speak, run, don’t walk.

After his knock-out speech at the Good Jobs Green Jobs conference, Van Jones invited the whole Green For All team up on stage.  I had tears in my eyes.  Talk about hope!

If you get a chance to hear Van speak, run, don’t walk.

February 8, 2009

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photo New Yorker environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of Van Jones is well worth reading: “Greening the Ghetto: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?” I found the account of his beginnings and growth as an activist — in just ten short years — to be particularly interesting.  He was greatly influenced by Julia Butterfly Hill, the young woman who spent two years in a California redwood to protect it from being cut down. “We fit together like pieces of a puzzle,” said Hill, who, after saving the tree, founded a nonprofit group called Circle of Life. “I brought the piece that we are not separate from this planet. His piece was we need to uplift everyone. We were committed to seeing how those pieces fit together.” First, the two spoke together in private; then they began to appear together publicly. Sometimes, when Hill was invited to lecture at a college campus, she would ask Jones to come along. “We could see underneath all of it was the idea of disposability,” Jones told me. “The idea that you’ve got disposable people, a disposable planet. We would just kind of go around and talk about this. People would listen and they would come to one conclusion: they must be sleeping together. We weren’t, but it was the only thing anybody got out of it. It was very frustrating.” I also enjoyed an anecdote about how the rallying cry of “green jobs” came to Congress.  In early 2007, Jones was one of 40 environmental activists who Nancy Pelosi invited to a roundtable discussion in San Francisco to discuss approaches to climate change.  When she asked if there were any more questions before adjourning, Jones raised his hand. “I said, ‘My question is: Will you say four words at the press conference?’ And she just kind of looked at me. So of course at this point everybody in the room started to lean away from me. “I said, ‘If you say these four words, I guarantee you that you’ll keep the Democratic majority in the House for the next twenty years. If you say these four words, you’ll expand the coalition around global warming in a way that nobody even thinks is possible. If you say these four words, you’ll give help and hope to people who haven’t had any for a long time.’ Finally, she said, ‘Well, what are the four words?’ I said, ‘Clean Energy Jobs Bill.’ ” A little while later, at the press conference, Pelosi called Jones up to the microphone. “We’ll say it together,” she said. “Clean Energy Jobs Bill!”

New Yorker environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of Van Jones is well worth reading: “Greening the Ghetto: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?”

I found the account of his beginnings and growth as an activist — in just ten short years — to be particularly interesting.  He was greatly influenced by Julia Butterfly Hill, the young woman who spent two years in a California redwood to protect it from being cut down.

“We fit together like pieces of a puzzle,” said Hill, who, after saving the tree, founded a nonprofit group called Circle of Life. “I brought the piece that we are not separate from this planet. His piece was we need to uplift everyone. We were committed to seeing how those pieces fit together.” First, the two spoke together in private; then they began to appear together publicly. Sometimes, when Hill was invited to lecture at a college campus, she would ask Jones to come along.

“We could see underneath all of it was the idea of disposability,” Jones told me. “The idea that you’ve got disposable people, a disposable planet. We would just kind of go around and talk about this. People would listen and they would come to one conclusion: they must be sleeping together. We weren’t, but it was the only thing anybody got out of it. It was very frustrating.”

I also enjoyed an anecdote about how the rallying cry of “green jobs” came to Congress.  In early 2007, Jones was one of 40 environmental activists who Nancy Pelosi invited to a roundtable discussion in San Francisco to discuss approaches to climate change.  When she asked if there were any more questions before adjourning,

Jones raised his hand. “I said, ‘My question is: Will you say four words at the press conference?’ And she just kind of looked at me. So of course at this point everybody in the room started to lean away from me.

“I said, ‘If you say these four words, I guarantee you that you’ll keep the Democratic majority in the House for the next twenty years. If you say these four words, you’ll expand the coalition around global warming in a way that nobody even thinks is possible. If you say these four words, you’ll give help and hope to people who haven’t had any for a long time.’ Finally, she said, ‘Well, what are the four words?’ I said, ‘Clean Energy Jobs Bill.’ ”

A little while later, at the press conference, Pelosi called Jones up to the microphone. “We’ll say it together,” she said. “Clean Energy Jobs Bill!”

January 10, 2009

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3Qs with Dan Handeen of the University of Minnesota

The building industry has a nasty impact on the planet.  One of the most common building materials, concrete, is alone responsible for 5 to 10 per cent of global CO2 emissions (!!).  Dan Handeen is working to change this.  A Research Fellow at the Center of Sustainable Building Research in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, Dan holds a Master of Architecture degree from the institution and a long-standing dedication to sustainable design and construction.

One of the projects he’s worked on is the Athena EcoCalculator, an application that allows architects and designers to analyze building materials based on their environmental impact.  Unlike other tools, which categorize materials according to attributes — whether they’re recycled or locally sourced — but say little about their cradle-to-grave impact, the EcoCalculator factors in information through the entire lifespan of materials, from extraction from the earth to transportation to disposal or recycling.  The power of the tool is that it makes a complex set of information accessible and easy-to-use, encouraging and enabling architects to make wise, eco-conscious decisions.

Dan is also an assistant project manager to the University of Minnesota’s Solar Decathlon team.  Students compete in the biannual contest to make a small house that is heated, cooled, and powered entirely on the sun’s energy.

He grew up on Moonstone Farm outside of Montevideo, Minnesota, on land homesteaded by his great-great-grandparents in 1872.  In the 1980s, his parents switched from raising soybeans to grass-fed beef because the latter had less of an impact on the land (“Cooking Naturally at Moonstone Farm”).

1. What was your environmental epiphany?

Growing up on a farm, I was actively exposed to relationships between natural elements, which became my foundation for looking at the world at a holistic level.  Then I took a permaculture course and learned about the role of humans in constructed systems, and how one aspect can have influence the other.  I got into home building for a small company and it was like, Holy crap!  I was seeing all these wasted materials.  It kind of drove me crazy.  And it got me into architecture.  In architecture school, there was a seduction of high tech materials that were going to save us from global warming.  I started to realize that lower tech things are going to save us in the long run.

2. Who or what are you inspired by right now in the green movement?

Van Jones, obviously.  I think he should be Secretary of Energy.  He understands the human relationship component in sustainability.  Janine Benyus, a biomimicry guru.  And people just doing cool stuff in the back yard, like urban chicken farmers.

3. What are three ways you actively reduce your carbon footprint and one way you don’t?

I bike or bus to work.  I compost.  I eat beef only if it’s from my parents’ farm.  On the other hand, I fly a lot for my job.  And I really like shoes.  Tennis shoes — Nike, Adidas, Pumas….

December 9, 2008

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New York’s Green-Collared Future

Over lunch yesterday, my friend Liz, a teacher at a Brooklyn public high school, told us about a student who can read only monosyllabic words.  Liz works with students with learning disabilities, many of whom will end up in jail and/or chronically under- and unemployed (consider this: America has 5% of global population yet 25% of the world’s incarcerated, the direct result of the loss of fair-wage, blue-collar jobs and decades of underinvestment in public schools and other after-school programs.)

Since she started teaching, we’ve heard countless similar stories from Liz — but yesterday, finally, I had good news: it is becoming ever-more certain that in the next five years, New York will begin investing in green collar jobs, and her students will have both a pathway out of poverty and a crucial role to play in the new, ecologically-sound economy.

What gave me such hope?  On Friday, I attended a policy briefing called “Green Jobs NY,” sponsored by the Center for Working Families (CWF) and attended by many key activists and state politicians.  The keynote speaker was Van Jones, a community activist entrenched for the past 15 years in Oakland’s low-income communities and communities of color.  He’s made it his mission to prevent “ecological apartheid,” a nation of “eco haves and have-nots,” by ensuring that “this beautiful green wave lifts all boats.”

The emerging green economy, led in no small part by Mr. Jones, promises to restore the kind of skilled labor jobs that went overseas in the end of the 20th century.  Weatherizing buildings and homes (sealing the cracks and installing insulation to minimize leaked — that is, wasted — energy), installing sonar panels, building wind farms: these are jobs that will be integral to reducing our collective carbon footprint and, crucially, cannot be outsourced.

CWF’s proposed plan for New York has the potential to change both the fate of many of Liz’s students and the ecological impact of New York.  The goal is is to retrofit one million homes in five years — and in so doing, create 30,000 jobs (in addition to “up-skilling” thousands more jobs.)

Standing in the way are still significant hurdles, principally economic.  A representative of the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation noted that banks are uncomfortable with lending homeowners the money for weatherization work, despite a body of studies that show predictable energy cost savings as a result of the improvements.  The Foundation is leading an effort in the philanthropic community to develop a $30 million loan fund, which is but a fraction of the total estimated cost of weatherization, but would be the signal to the public and private sectors to invest in job training programs and would send a message that New York is setting a determined pace.

On Friday, New York’s Governor Paterson announced $49 million for energy efficiency initiatives to help low-income families pay their ever-increasing heating bills this winter.  It’s a first step — but the fact that efficiency is so central to the plan is encouraging.  In the closing remarks at the briefing, Majora Carter, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx, a ground-breaking economic justice organization, blinked back tears as she invoked the new green-collar worker: “he has traveled the road from being a societal burden to an environmental hero.”  This is the hope I shared with Liz.

September 14, 2008

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Getting to 350 means changing everything about our global economy. It means providing clean-energy jobs to rewire every corner of the world and catalyzing a global transformation built on principles of equity and opportunity.
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Van Jones, civil rights and environmental activist, and founder of Green For All, a national organization “dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.”

We’re working on these issues on a much smaller scale at the Building Performance Lab, and we’ve followed Jones’ work.  I’ve got a lot of admiration for him.

August 19, 2008

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