Blogging the Convention

A Future Star Plugs Energy Shift

By Richard Martin, 8-25-08

	Catch rays, not carbon

Here’s a hot tip for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2016: Van Jones.

Jones is not even a politician, at the moment: he’s the founder and president of Green For All, an Oakland-based organization “dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” He also founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, three years after he graduated from Yale Law – which, as you might recall, is also the alma mater of two recent Democratic presidential candidates.

Jones appeared this morning on the dais at “The Big Tent,” a liberal bloggers’ haven down the street from the Pepsi Center, scene of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, along with former Oklahoma congressman Dave McCurdy, now CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

Blessed with a linebacker’s build, shaven-headed good looks, a baritone speaking voice that shades at times into a Southern Baptist minister’s cadences, and a Clintonian way with phraseology, Jones has a simple but contrarian point: to do something about the energy crisis and climate change, we have to change not only the technology but the values and spiritual ethos around energy production and consumption in this country.

“What we have to day is a vulture culture,” Jones intoned to a sparse crowd at the Big Tent. “We live off death – oil is the dead blood of our ancestors, not just our human ancestors but the dinosaurs and all the species that preceded ours. Coal is the the bones.”

Jones and McCurdy are preaching a message that could underlie not only an Obama victory this year but a persistent Democrat governing coalition: shifting our energy society is not only good environmentally but economically. Jones wants to “solarize America” and create “a green wave that will lift all boats” by creating “greencollar jobs.”

The details on this shift are a bit scant, but Jones spoke of mobilizing a legion of unemployed to weatherize millions of houses in a “crash program” to “keep Grandmama warm and safe in her home.”

He’s also become one of the most forceful advocates of prison reform, creating a “Books Not Bars” campaign that, according to the Green For All Web site, “has helped reduce California’s overall youth prison population by more than 30 percent.”

Jones knack for the poetical parallelism – “We need to give people a purpose, not just a paycheck,” “Government needs to be on the side of the problem solvers, not the problem makers,” etc. – masks what could be a rather clear-eyed strategy for shting the economy from fossil fuels to renewables. Whether that’s really achievable in the sort of time frame that Jones and McCurdy envision is debatable, but there’s no question that a climate-change program based solely on “saving the duckies and the fishies,” as Jones put it, is not going to work. 

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