[Sosfbay-discuss] The Green-Collar Solution

[Drew Johnson]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/opinion/17friedman.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
October 17, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Green-Collar Solution
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Van Jones is a rare bird. He’s a black social activist in Oakland, Calif.,
and as green an environmentalist as they come. He really gets passionate,
and funny, when he talks about what it’s like to be black and green:

“Try this experiment. Go knock on someone’s door in West Oakland, Watts or
Newark and say: ‘We gotta really big problem!’ They say: ‘We do? We do?’
‘Yeah, we gotta really big problem!’ ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta save
the polar bears! You may not make it out of this neighborhood alive, but
we gotta save the polar bears!’ ”

Mr. Jones then just shakes his head. You try that approach on people
without jobs who live in neighborhoods where they’ve got a lot better
chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than a melting glacier,
you’re going to get nowhere — and without bringing America’s underclass
into the green movement, it’s going to get nowhere, too.

“We need a different on-ramp” for people from disadvantaged communities,
says Mr. Jones. “The leaders of the climate establishment came in through
one door and now they want to squeeze everyone through that same door.
It’s not going to work. If we want to have a broad-based environmental
movement, we need more entry points.”

Mr. Jones, who heads the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland,
which helps kids avoid jail and secure jobs, has an idea how to change
that — a “green-collar” jobs program that focuses on underprivileged
youth. I would not underestimate him. Mr. Jones, age 39 and a Yale Law
School grad, exudes enough energy to light a few buildings on his own.

One thing spurring him in this project, he explained, was the way that the
big oil companies bought ads in black-owned newspapers in California in
2006 showing an African-American woman filling her gas tank with a
horrified look at the pump price. The ads were used to help bring out
black votes to defeat Proposition 87. That ballot initiative proposed a
tax on oil companies drilling in California, the money from which would
have gone to develop alternative energy projects. The oil companies tried
to scare African-Americans into thinking that the tax on the companies
would be passed on at the pump.

“The polluters were able to stampede poor people into their camp,” said
Mr. Jones. “I never want to see an N.A.A.C.P. leader on the wrong side of
an environment issue again.”

Using his little center in Oakland, Mr. Jones has been on a crusade to
help underprivileged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities
understand why they would be the biggest beneficiaries of a greener
America. It’s about jobs. The more government requires buildings to be
more energy efficient, the more work there will be retrofitting buildings
all across America with solar panels, insulation and other weatherizing
materials. Those are manual-labor jobs that can’t be outsourced.

“You can’t take a building you want to weatherize, put it on a ship to
China and then have them do it and send it back,” said Mr. Jones. “So we
are going to have to put people to work in this country — weatherizing
millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms.
Those green-collar jobs can provide a pathway out of poverty for someone
who has not gone to college.”

Let’s tell our disaffected youth: “You can make more money if you put down
that handgun and pick up a caulk gun.”

Remember, adds Mr. Jones, “a big chunk of the African-American community
is economically stranded. The blue-collar, stepping-stone, manufacturing
jobs are leaving. And they’re not being replaced by anything. So you have
this whole generation of young blacks who are basically in economic free
fall.” Green-collar retrofitting jobs are a great way to catch them.

To this end, Mr. Jones’s group and the electrical union in Oakland created
the Oakland Apollo Alliance. This year that coalition helped to raise
$250,000 from the city government to create a union-supported training
program that will teach young people in Oakland how to put up solar panels
and weatherize buildings.

It is the beginning of a “Green for All” campaign (greenforall.org) that
Mr. Jones — backed by other environmental activists like Majora Carter
from Sustainable South Bronx — is launching to get Congress to allocate
$125 million to train 30,000 young people a year in green trades.

“If we can get these youth in on the ground floor of the solar industry
now, where they can be installers today, they’ll become managers in five
years and owners in 10. And then they become inventors,” said Mr. Jones.
“The green economy has the power to deliver new sources of work, wealth
and health to low-income people — while honoring the Earth. If you can do
that, you just wiped out a whole bunch of problems. We can make what is
good for poor black kids good for the polar bears and good for the
country.”