green jobs

A new report lays a road map for creating green jobs while fighting the climate crisis

A major new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) provides a detailed roadmap for avoiding catastrophic global warming and restoring our energy security, while maintaining economic development.

The report, "Capturing the Energy Opportunity: Creating a Low Carbon Economy," is by CAP's John Podesta, Kitt Batten, and Todd Stern. It is well worth reading, and I say that not because I am a senior fellow at CAP, but because the 88-page report lays out the most comprehensive set of plausible job-creating climate/energy policies I have seen.

The authors understand the scale of the problem:

The challenge we face is nothing short of the conversion of an economy sustained by high-carbon energy -- putting both our national security and the health of our planet at serious risk -- to one based on low-carbon, sustainable sources of energy. The scale of this undertaking is immense and its potential enormous.

The urgency of this issue demands a president willing to make the low-carbon energy challenge a top priority in the White House -- a centerpiece not only of his or her energy policy but also of his or her economic program -- to produce broad-based growth and sustain American economic leadership in the 21st century. This task is so encompassing it will demand that the incoming president in 2009 reorganize the mission and responsibility of all relevant government agencies -- economic, national security, and environmental.

The report explores the crucial steps needed to meet the challenge:

A great summary of recent studies on green jobs

Clean energy, a job-creation engine already generating impressive performance, will rev up to even higher levels in coming years. A comprehensive new fact sheet (PDF) from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute strongly documents these trends with capsule summaries of dozens of recent studies on the topic.

In the last several years, numerous studies have validated the emergence of renewable energy and energy efficiency as a major new economic and employment driver. EESI -- a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that educates Capitol Hill on energy issues and the general public on energy legislation -- has created this invaluable fact sheet to survey many of the major national, state, and industry studies. Here are a few samples:

Van Jones looks to sustainability for pathways out of poverty

Will the burgeoning "green" economy have a place in it for everyone? To a packed auditorium in Seattle last Wednesday, Van Jones said: It can. And to be successful, it has to.

In the chorus of voices against climate change, his message rings true and clear: "We have a chance to connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done."

Van Jones is a civil-rights lawyer and founder and executive director of an innovative nonprofit working to ensure that low-income, working poor, and minority youth have access to the coming wave of "green-collar" jobs. Jones -- brought to Seattle by Climate Solutions, King County, El Centro de la Raza, Puget Sound Sage, and Earth Ministry -- made a compelling case that social justice is the moral anchor required to fuse the climate movement into a powerful and cohesive force. He sees that the solutions to global warming are the solutions to the biggest social and economic problems in urban and rural America.

His point is this: You can pass all the climate legislation you want, but you have to provide the local workforce to make it happen on the ground. "We have to retrofit a nation," he says. "No magical green fairies are going to come down and put up all those solar panels." This is going to take skilled labor. "We can make a green pathway out of poverty."

And it gets better, he says. These jobs can't be outsourced. "You can't put a building on a barge to Asia and weatherize it on the cheap." This is about kitchen table issues: jobs, industry, manufacturing, health, education.

How to find a job in your local area

I’ve been on the road. I started the first week in October at the University of Michigan and ended it at a “career visioning” retreat in the Connecticut woods with students from Yale. My impressions? At both universities, I found aspiring environmental professionals who are committed to building a sustainable society. (I also found great […]

Manufacturing a new economy

If we eat food from local sources, we can decrease our ecological footprint, reduce carbon emissions, and eat better food. In addition, any society that cannot produce its own food is vulnerable, as it cannot create one of society's main sources of wealth. It just makes sense to grow food locally.

The same principles apply to manufacturing. Grow locally, eat locally; more generally, consume locally, produce locally. In the case of manufacturing, "producing locally" would mean consuming goods that were mostly manufactured within your major metropolitan area, with most of the rest coming from around the country, but certainly not from around the world.

The Mustache discovers Van Jones

Tom Friedman just introduced Van Jones to a large new audience. All he had to do to make it a great column was get out of the way and let Van speak.

From black to white: An argument for green-collar jobs

"Spiritually fulfilling, ecologically sustainable, and socially just" is the title of a recent speech by Van Jones, who has been appearing in strategic places for a few years now. As cofounder of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, he has been attempting to fight environmental pollution that has been poisoning the residents of inner-city areas in Oakland and all over the country. As such, he is in a unique position to bridge a rather wide chasm: the African-American community and the environmental community.

In my previous post, I put forward a utopian realist agenda that, I hypothesized, would solve many of our global environmental problems -- that was the realist part -- but that was completely utopian politically. But another definition of utopian is envisioning a better place -- and I want to pursue the possibility in this post that such an agenda would create a basis for a widespread coalition, of the sort that Van Jones has been pursuing.

For instance, he has been lobbying for green-collar jobs legislation that could be used to increase employment in poor areas while helping to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions. Jones shows up in another interesting place: in a critical section of Nordhaus and Shellenberger's essay, "The Death of Environmentalism" (p.26):

Van Jones, the up-and-coming civil rights leader and co-founder of the California Apollo Project, likens [labor unions, civil rights groups, businesses, and environmentalists] ] to the four wheels on the car needed to make "an ecological U-turn." Van has extended the metaphor elegantly: "We need all four wheels to be turning at the same time and at the same speed. Otherwise the car won't go anywhere."

Van Jones has helped push equity to the center of the green discussion

Back in March of this year, I interviewed Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif. He was excited because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had adopted his "green-collar jobs" language and agreed to craft legislation around it. In August, such legislation was introduced in the House. Now things are taking off like crazy. […]

Pelosi’s plan to save the polar bears — and poor kids, too …

There has been a lot of discussion about the energy package that is set to pass the U.S. House this week. But the media so far has missed one of the most interesting and innovative proposals that will be voted on: the Green Jobs Act of 2007. This ground-breaking legislation will make $120 million a year available across the country to begin training workers (and would-be workers) for jobs in the clean-energy sector. When the bill becomes law, 35,000 people a year will benefit from cutting-edge, vocational education in fields that could literally save the Earth.