What Van Jones' Departure Will Do to Green Jobs: Hopefully Nothing
As we were all flipping our veggie burgers and basking in the end-of-the-summer sun, a notable event took place in the world of greentech politics: Van Jones, one of President Obama’s advisers and one of the most vocal advocates of the need for green jobs, resigned from his position as special adviser for green jobs for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Why? Because the White House and Jones reacted to an uproar — Jones called it “a vicious smear campaign” in his statement — from Republican politicians, including Sen. Kit Bond, as well as media reports, like from Fox News Glenn Beck, pointing out some controversial statements Jones had made in the past.
Those statements included signing a petition that raised the question of whether the Bush administration allowed the events of Sept. 11 to happen (pretty lame, but some are saying he signed before he knew fully what it was), as well as calling Republicans @holes in a speech, and making other controversial statements on race relations. For anyone who’s seen Jones speak in person (I have a half dozen times), you know he is a passionate, lively speaker who is politically liberal and very opinionated.
The fact that Jones has a relatively low rank on the Obama advisory team and apologized several times for his previous statements make the recent attention and resignation all the more unusual. As David Roberts from Grist.org suggested on his Twitter feed this weekend, it’s hard to pretend this has nothing to do with race relations in the U.S.
It’s interesting to me also that Jones’ main work advocating green jobs, for which he wrote the book “The Green Collar Economy” (he also heads up the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green For All in Oakland, Calif.), has always seemed a little bit controversial on its own. As Elizabeth Kolbert put it in her New Yorker profile of Jones: “It’s not at all clear that the number of jobs created by, say, an expanding solar industry would be greater than the number lost through, say, a shrinking coal-mining industry. Nor is it clear that a green economy would be any better at providing work for the chronically unemployed than our present, ‘gray’ economy has been.”
While I never saw him present super-compelling hard numbers on green jobs, Jones’ rhetoric and his effort to build an economy around fighting climate change have had an enormously positive effect on the greentech industry. We need a clean energy economy to fight climate change, regardless of how long it will take to build it, or how many jobs emerge in the near vs. the long term. As Bryan Walsh put it in Time Magazine this weekend, Jones’ resignation “is a loss for the environmental movement, and I think, for the country as well.”
Image courtesy of Flickr, creative commons.
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It really is a shame that Jones and the administration could not ignore the shrill, ignorant smear media. Maybe if everyone stopped listening to them they would go away. Yeah, probably not. We have real work to do and this seems just like the Clinton smear campaign that robbed the American people of having their government achieve actual work… like the rest of us do for our paychecks.
When I first saw Van Jones speak, it was one of those moments that I thought I was looking at someone who finally understood it. That, we needed to begin working with the problems on a local level, and make specific changes there were based on more than images of polar bears.
Then, I read his book.and saw where the mixture of his two agendas (race and environment)met. It was a combination that in my eyes was fatal for the environmental pillar of the book as he was really advocating that through “”green jobs” a means of repayment for previous racial bills could be paid. That race was, and I think still is, top on the agenda.
Now, before the hate mail flows, I think that there is nothing wrong with seeing green jobs as opportunities for minorities who have a long history of struggling to break the economic cycle, but one cannot reasonably expect to pursue that agenda at the national level.
He is an amazing advocate on a local level, has clearly built a national base for himself to leverage, and I predict we have yet to see the full benefit of his involvement in the community, the environment, or the country.
Thanks CGC, Ken, interesting thoughts. I think the resignation also says something about politics in the age of YouTube. Watching some Jones’ previous statements via video, reminds me of watching Howard Dean’s yelling video or Gavin Newsom’s gay marriage video clip. They weren’t huge faux pas but captured on eternal and accessible video, they’re just replayed over and over again and gain a meaning on their own.
no one made him give those controversial words his breath by which to be heard. He should, like everyone in the public arena, think before uttering. Sure some missing “context” may be responsible for misunderstandings. That’s just a way of saying he tailors/pimps his words to the audience at hand. Bad place for someone who wants to get past and move on and have us pull together, wouldn’t you say? Then there is this other perspective: he is a cowardly “yes man” who won’t take up the hard questions even with his own team. Questions like how to engage and bring on board those of “other perspectives.”
I know what he meant about waste dumps in poor neighborhoods. I’ve heard the problem much better put from white schoolchildrens’ mothers who were not part of a political lifestyle. I’ve heard it from Black single women who devote their lives to the rectification of the issue. And he does a disservice to all them with his “racist” corporate slur. Is that anyway to win friends and influence people? Hardly.
I hope his departure will clear some of the poison fumes from the debate. But both sides are doing lots of mental and emotional polluting yet.