Van Jones: How We Can Lead Our Country Out of Crisis

When Green For All founder and green jobs advocate Van Jones started writing The Green Collar Economy, it was a book about how to get green solutions to poor people. But by the time he was done and the book was released this fall, its scope had grown: Global warming had become common parlance, and the economy was on everyone's mind, regardless of class.

His new book looks at how we can fix our environmental and economic crisis with a program that will create jobs, lower pollution and return some dignity to working Americans.

It sounds great, but what's in the fine print? AlterNet's staff writer Joshua Holland and managing editor Tara Lohan sat down with Jones and talked about whether green jobs are actually legal under our international free trade agreements, what happens if we get an Obama White House, and how the progressive movement must go from "opposition to proposition, from protest to governance" in order to lead our country out of crisis.

TL: Tell me about your vision for a green economy.

VJ: We've got an opportunity as soon as the election is over to move in that direction with a green recovery program to make sure the stimulus package (Treasury Secretary Henry) Paulson is talking about includes green stimulus. The best thing we can do now to get the economy going is to invest in repowering and retrofitting America.

We have millions and millions of homes that are going to be facing extremely high energy bills this winter. I think we should immediately support cities and utilities that want to begin to weatherize and retrofit those buildings -- so if costs jump up 20 percent, but the home is 30 percent more efficient, then people are actually held harmless.

The benefits of that are that jobs go up. Right now our construction sector is idle. Why have all these people sitting around doing nothing? Let them rebuild America. Energy bills will come down for regular homeowners, but if we weatherize a couple billion homes, that will cut demand for energy, which will bring all prices down. So everybody benefits.

It also means the air will be cleaner, which means asthma will come down. These kinds of programs will bring down carbon and pollution and will bring up jobs and home values.

This is the kind of eco-populist, social uplifting environmentalism that we need to put forward so people will increasingly associate green politics with saving them money, with helping them to earn money, and it will not be the kind of politics that is going to cost them a lot of money.

TL: So who gets to participate in this?

VJ: A lot of the home weatherization stuff can be done by regular contractors, including people of color and women-owned enterprises. They can be pulled into this. A lot of the initial energy auditing can be done by high school students that can be trained in a month to walk around with a clipboard and to begin to help bring some income into struggling homes.

So, the wingspan on the green economy goes from the people with the green lab coats on to the people with the green hard hats on, the skilled laborers who frankly built this country and can help rebuild this country. I think a part of talking about green jobs and a green economy is to restore the dignity of labor to the national conversation.

We got sold a bill of goods for 30 years by both parties to go down this reckless road of globalizing, not just to get more products, but globalizing risk, recklessness and building up our country based on credit cards. You cannot build a sustainable economy on credit cards, but you can on solar panels, on retrofitting, on a wind sector that comes back on building a national green energy grid.

That is what the book is about, that is what Green for All is about.

TL: So do you initially see the funding for this coming from the federal government?