Green for All

I really enjoyed The New Yorker profile of Van Jones, “Greening the Ghetto”. Jones has written the Green Collar Economy and is the founder of an organization called Green for All. The subtitle of piece in The New Yorker was a question: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty? Jones seems to think the answer is absolutely, yes, though at times he admits his push to get green economy thinkers to add the topic of urban poverty to the equation has been new territory that he didn’t understand along the way.

There is another answer to the question at the end of the article from a professor of business and government at Harvard. He gives an analogy:

Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single-policy instrument.

Jones has his own answer, but a better answer to that was in the letters a few issues later:

In Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece on Van Jones and his attempt to address both poverty and the environmental crisis, the Harvard professor Robert Stavins suggests that it might not be effective to address climate and poverty together (“Greening the Ghetto,” January 12th). If climate were purely a technical issue—an efficiency challenge—he might be right. But climate disruption is at least as much about equity as efficiency. The prosperity that some of us enjoy is powered primarily by fossil fuels. If we are to deliver real climate solutions, we must build a new prosperity powered by efficient use of clean energy. This new prosperity must be “sustainable” not only in the sense that it can last but also in the sense that it works for a lot more people than our current (faltering) prosperity does. This is both a moral imperative and a practical political one. The rich cannot tell the poor, “Sorry, the atmosphere is already full of the emissions that created our prosperity, so there’s no room for yours.” If reducing emissions amounts to hoarding wealth, the coal and oil lobbies will successfully resist effective climate policy by appealing to the economic interests of the poor and the middle class. In order to avoid catastrophic climate disruption, our economic vision must include more broadly shared prosperity.

K. C. Golden

Policy Director, Climate Solutions

At a time when it is hard to get your head around the environmental complexity, I appreciate the way a person like Jones reminds us that we can’t solve a problem like the environmental in isolation.