Not what you might expect | The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems |...

book: The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems | Van Jones

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	• The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems Van Jones HarperOne, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 58 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Offers some good suggestions for change

While the author and I do NOT share the same political ideas, with me being Libertarian minded, I did like parts of the book for some simple reasons. Back in 1970 when our family first got involved in a local clean up the community group, we became aware of how big business avoids dumping their toxins in well to do areas or nice middle class suburban areas. Preferring instead to dump in inner city and rural areas, where people either have no political clout, or are few in number to make a big enough of a stink. So yes, race and environmental poisons do go hand in hand.As a Libertarian I am also a constitutionalist, and this means that people have a right as individuals to be secure in their home and persons. When the government turns a blind eye to the health of poor communities they are violating this constitutional guarantee.

The author also is correct that we need to make clean affordable low cost energy alternatives available to the poor and not just the well off or famous amongst us. And this means new businesses that are, when one stops and thinks about it, pro America, pro business thinking. And that's the gist of the book. Getting citizens, government and business working together so we have a win win situation.

And the author does a decent job of showing how in poor congested areas, one often has older cars that are more polluting, and grocery stores that don't provide healthy foods like grocery stores in other communities, and how asthma is higher in poorer communities (both black, white, Hispanic, Asian) because of poor housing, and air pollution.

Heck anyone who is well read knows that tuberculoses is higher in poor communities. Stop and think of places like Detroit where auto workers (blue collar workers) have lost their jobs by the thousands. What about training them to help build solar power panels, or wind power packages? This is how society has evolved in the past. And what about keeping jobs here in the United States and not shipping them overseas?

Again, just because I do NOT agree with someone's political views, doesn't mean a person doesn't have some good ideas that should be considered. Would also suggest that not all polluters are white or white racist, but the ones who are seem to be Fortune 500 connected with white CEO's. Big business can often be about one thing and one thing only....greed. Most of the junk food sold in this country is consumed by white families. So there are many big businesses that are about one thing. Making money. Not providing a clean healthy product. Think tobacco.

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Not what you might expect

This book is clearly not what many readers expected. It is not a data-driven how-to book to solve the energy, environmental, and economic ills of the U.S. It is a position piece on the role of environmental causes as a basis for adding basic skills jobs in the U.S. These jobs are generally non-exportable (though imported laborers will compete for these jobs), but the materials used are generally imported (wind generators come from China and other places, as do solar cells and panels, even his humble caulk-gun and caulk is likely from China). This is a significant error in Jones' analysis - the assumption that things currently made in the U.S. will continue to be made in the U.S. Since the writing of his book, we now import alternative energy production materials. These jobs have been exported as well.

This error should not detract too badly from Jones' basic message; there is a lot of work to be done in the U.S. to improve the energy efficiency of existing buildings, retrofitting buildings with solar, wind, and/or geothermal systems, assessing existing buildings for cost-effective improvements, and the list goes on.

Jones' does take up the mantle of the "new" environmental movement, one which focuses on the relationship between race and being green. In this movement it is no coincidence that the Katrina response was nearly nonexistent while flooding in Iowa and elsewhere along the Mississippi River a few years earlier immediately brought out thousands of state-funded and federally-funded efforts to "save" the unfortunate residents along the banks of the river. When the victims of catastrophe were shades of brown less effort was made than when the faces of the victims were white.

This "new" movement focuses on the role of employment and middle-class attainment by labor-intensive projects to retrofit and upgrade the U.S. energy system. Since the majority of these retrofits are in urban settings, this is an opportunity for the U.S. to lift tens of millions of urban poor into low-middle-income careers. Poor people cannot afford a Prius, solar panels, organic groceries or even post-consumer recycled content toilet paper if they cannot afford rent and food.

Jones makes several useful points. U.S. Policy regarding alternative energy sources has been temporary and haphazard (at best) which leaves decision-making for ten and twenty year payback projects virtually impossible. The current green movement pays more attention to idyllic pastoral themes than the reality that NYC residents produce radically small carbon footprints because they live without cars, in highly efficient apartments (nearly always more efficient than stand-alone houses), and pay exoribitant refuge and disposal fees so they tend to reduce, reuse and recycle at higher than average rates. This pastoral idealism has left millions of city dwellers, especially the poorest, without a voice in the green movement.

Three stars - the assumption that overlooks the possibility of outsourcing production cost this book one star, and the second deduction is for the overkill on faults of the green movement as it was when he started writing. The book jacket and description are accurate. This is a book about the modern green movement, the role of economic growth/development in solving environmental problems, and social justice (race included). Anyone pretending to be blind-sided by a discussion of race within the context of the green movement either did not read the book description, jacket, or reviews, or is being disingenuous.

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Provocative, personal, and inspirational, The Green Collar Economy is not a dire warning but rather a substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country?the failing economy and our devastated environment. From a distance, it appears that these two problems are separate, but when we look closer, the connection becomes unmistakable.

In The Green Collar Economy, acclaimed activist and political advisor Van Jones delivers a real solution that both rescues our economy and saves the environment. The economy is built on and powered almost exclusively by oil, natural gas, and coal?all fast-diminishing nonrenewable resources. As supplies disappear, the price of energy climbs and nearly everything becomes more expensive. With costs and unemployment soaring, the economy stalls. Not only that, when we burn these fuels, the greenhouse gases they create overheat the atmosphere. As the headlines make clear, total climate chaos looms over us. The bottom line: we cannot continue with business as usual. We cannot drill and burn our way out of these dual dilemmas.

Instead, Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, this path has the practical benefit of both cutting energy prices and generating enough work to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral.

Rachel Carson's 1963 landmark book Silent Spring was the pivotal ecological examination of the last century. Now, rising above the impenetrable debate over the environment and the economy, Van Jones's The Green Collar Economy delivers a timely and essential call to action for this new century.

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