What Van Jones' Departure Will Do to Green Jobs: Hopefully Nothing

vanjones1As 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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