The Political Whore

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Van Jones: the high-energy advocate for a green economy

October 13, 2008 at 2:41 pm by Wayne Garcia

I love this guy. Thomas Friedman pimped him a few years back in his globalization followup, Hot, Flat and Crowded. Time called him the Hero of the Environment 2008. Now Van Jones — a Yale Law grad, social activist in Oakland, Netroots Nation keynoter and the hottest up-and-coming voice on creating “green-collar jobs — is out with his own book, The Green Collar Economy. It is a great companion to our Fix It Now series and the Green issue we printed in April.

Here’s the cover copy for the new book:

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.