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.

The goal of Dot Eco LLC:

.com, .net, .org, … .eco: it feels so natural to have a top level domain for the environmental movement, and yet it still doesn’t exist. Working with Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate protection, our goal is to make this vision a reality.

It seems sort of arbitrary. Why isn’t .org enough? And wouldn’t companies rush to get a .eco domain, taking green-washing to a whole new level? How could we trust that .eco is used ethically? Who would regulate it?

mallisser:

First company: Aquafina.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that bottling water in general is bad for the environment, what with the amount of oil it takes to produce, transport & refridgerate the bottles.

Great point.  Read more about the evils of bottled water here.  But on a positive note, David de Rothschild is upcycling water bottles for reuse as an ocean-going catamaran and organizing a competition to find other ways to make use of the ubiquitous product (as an alternative to recycling).

sharingtime:

When the going gets tough, the tough eat things that destroy their bodies and the environment.

Brian Beutler writes:

I see that John McCain is holding up David Hayes’ nomination to be Deputy Secretary of the Interior Department because he once wrote “the conservative political agenda in the West is grounded in hoary stereotypes about the region and its people” and that “out of this conservative world view emerges the stereotypical Western man (and it is unquestionably a ‘he’)—a rugged, gun-toting individualist who fiercely guards every man’s right to drill, mine, log, or do whatever he damn well pleases on the land…. Like Ronald Reagan before him, President Bush has embraced the Western stereotype to the point of adopting some of its affectations—the boots, brush-clearing, and get-the-government-off-our-backs bravado.” […]

On the substance, of course, Hayes is completely correct. Hayes, as noted above, is slated to do high-level work in the Interior Department. And, as McCain should recall, Reagan’s own Interior Secretary was James Watt, who’s a weird man in all kinds of ways, but, on the issues, held that federal land should just be handed over to private, polluting interests to do whatever they wanted with, particularly if that involved mining or drilling or any unsustainable practice. He didn’t care about endangered species or the water supply or anything else, not simply because he was cold hearted, but because he thought the rapture was extremely nigh! Watt hinted at those dispensationalist religious views in testimony before Congress, when he said, “That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have, to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.”

Judging by his environmental record, he presumably didn’t think we had much time left. And his record belongs to Ronald Reagan.

Over 12,000 young adults attended the recent Power Shift 2009 summit in Washington, DC. Their goal? Building the largest youth movement in decades to save the world from global warming.

Largely missing from Power Shift, however, was a critical group: young scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Maybe it was mid-terms. Perhaps the event seemed too political. Or maybe the summit recruited too many traditionally-defined “activists.”

Whatever the cause, we have very little chance of overcoming climate change without enlisting young innovators at a drastically greater scale. Simply put, they represent one of the most important catalysts for creating a clean energy economy and achieving long-term prosperity.

The reason is this: at its core, climate change is a challenge of technology innovation. Over the next four decades, global energy demand will approximately double. Most of this growth will happen in developing nations as they continue lifting their citizens out of poverty and building modern societies. But over the same period, global greenhouse gas emissions must fall dramatically to avert the worst consequences of climate change.