Public Employee Press

Part 1 in a series
Green jobs, good jobs

By JANE LaTOUR

Global warming and using the development of new energy resources and “green” ways of living to rebuild our economy are critical issues for working people, the labor movement and President Barack Obama.

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, named a chapter in his new book, “Green Is the New Red, White and Blue.” In it, he calls the potential of green innovation “a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”

Obama, less than three months into his new administration, has demonstrated a commitment to tackling climate change, undoing the destructive policies of his predecessor and funding innovation.

The president recently tapped Van Jones, a strong advocate of a racially inclusive green economy, as a special adviser to help create a climate policy that generates jobs and to ensure equal opportunity in White House energy policy.

In recent books, Friedman and Jones both argue that the crisis resulting from our dependence on non-renewable, polluting sources of fuel, combined with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, presents opportunities for big payoffs — helping to save the planet, restore our position as a global leader in economic innovation and answer our dire need for jobs at all educational and economic levels.

Friedman’s “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America,” clearly and concisely demonstrates the boneheaded backwardness of polluting the air we breathe and overheating our planet. He points to the immense potential of innovative strategies to develop alternative energy forms and urges the United States to take the lead on this frontier, where advances could dig us out of our economic hole.

A recent profile in the New Yorker portrayed Jones’s ability to excite people’s enthusiasm for developing green jobs — from unemployed inner-city youth to policy-making elites. Jones, who wrote “The Green Collar Economy,” works with the Apollo Alliance and the inner-city Green for All group to steer the nation towards alternative sources of energy and jobs.

Jones wrote that we must “deliberately cut demand for energy and intelligently increase its supply.” In other words, invent and invest our way out of our present economic and energy problems. The books by Jones and Friedman are available to members in the Education Fund library at DC 37.