Van Jones
Van Jones
Anthony Kapel "Van" Jonesis an American political activist, commentator, author and attorney. He is a cofounder of several nonprofit organizations including the Dream Corps, a “social justice accelerator” which presently operates three advocacy initiatives: #cut50, #YesWeCode and Green for All. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, The Green Collar Economy and Rebuild The Dream. He has served as President Barack Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, as a distinguished visiting fellow at Princeton University, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 September 1968
CityJackson, TN
CountryUnited States of America
The dirty energy crowd can be offset only by the power of the rising clean energy sector and the American people, aroused across party lines.
There would be a cost for dumping carbon into our atmosphere and a cap on total emissions. The government must make a clear and firm decision - terminating the idea in our society it is free to pump infinite amounts of carbon into the air. Once that happens, private capital will flow even more aggressively into developing and deploying the alternative, less-polluting technologies.
Too often we think about the green economy as an elite market niche, one in which affluent people spend more money to consume greener and cleaner products.
We tend to overlook the fact that a mature clean energy economy in fact will give an opportunity to ordinary people to earn more money as clean energy workers/entrepreneurs - and save more money, through conservation and energy efficiency.
There are some cities that are doing good stuff, but there aren't enough of them. If you don't fight for what you want, then you deserve what you get. And in politics, if you don't ask, you don't get at all.
A green jobs bill would include both job creation and job training.
We need a national renewable energy goal. Such a goal, sometimes called a renewable energy standard (RES), would spell out what percentage of our power America plans to get from renewable sources.
I don't like to comment on a specific local issue because there are plenty of people already working on the problem who know a lot more about it than I do.
I think we were naive during the first two years of the [Barack] Obama Administration because the Republicans didn't fight us on this point during the 2008 Presidential Election. Obama and McCain both ran on a clean energy platform. But now, uncontested lies have eroded hard-won public understanding. So, we have to go back and make the case again.
It is extremely disappointing to me to see that even now when leading Democrats and even military veterans try to make our energy future an area of common ground and not a battleground, they are still being rebuffed by dirty energy devotees in both parties and undermined overall by the polluter lobby.
The main obstacle is the entrenched power of the legacy polluters.
Trust your intuition and be resilient. If you have real breakout ideas, even your friends will laugh at you secretly until you can prove their viability.
Unfortunately, we have a 50% unemployment rate among our urban youth of color. It's not about making green jobs more attractive. It's about making them more available. And that requires Congress passing legislation that will give a real break to the people who want to introduce new technologies to the American marketplace.
There's no higher honor, in my estimation, than being asked to serve in the White House.