Van Jones and the Green Economy

Check out Van Jones on Meet the Bloggers.

I just heard what I think might be one of the most creative policy ideas of the year, and it came from - of all people - Click and Clack on Car Talk.

I believe it was Clack's idea, to be specific, and it went as follows: now that gas prices have come down to close to half of what they were just a couple months ago, raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents a gallon. Use the extra $50 to 100 billion in revenue building a national high-speed light rail system, and - here's the clever part - hire the Big Three automakers to build it.

It's smart, it's sensible, it's bold, it's visionary, and it's something we could pass in the first 100 days of Obama's presidency.

For the last eight years, an idea like this has been unthinkable in the Bush White House, and not just because it violates not one but two of the GOP's sacred diktats - never raise a red penny in taxes and protect the domestic market for oil at all costs. An idea like this has also been unthinkable because it is predicated upon an assumption that does not compute in the Republican mainframe. For decades, Republican intellectuals and policymakers have pitted what's good for the environment against what's supposedly good for the economy. For Republican tacticians and corporate lobbyists, whatever the issue, it's always a zero-sum game: protection of the spotted owl versus jobs for loggers in the Northwest; fuel efficiency standards versus the survival of American car companies; combating global warming versus expanding the GDP. Since most Americans consider themselves environmentalists but few put environmental problems at the top of their list of priorities, Republicans could always play anxieties against each other, wedging environmentalists against economic progressives, "tree huggers" against working families. The tactic has been successful for so long that Republican ideologues simply cannot imagine a world in which environmental and economic health dovetail. "The eternal tension of environment vs. economy has been largely pooh-poohed by environmentalists in recent years of high-flying economic performance," argued The American Enterprise Institute's Kenneth P. Green in a Washington Post opinion piece earlier this year, "but it will not be as easily waved away with the U.S. standing at the threshold of a recession and with the U.S. automotive sector in serious competitive trouble." In his critique of Obama's energy plan, Green states it as a simple matter of fact that "as for creating green jobs, 'job creation' is simply a myth." He will keep arguing this point until he's blue in the face - with Exxon money funding AEI's research, his job depends upon it.

This kind of ideological myopia is what has accounted for the rapid dumbing down of GOP talking points over the last few years. Newt Gingrich was full of bad ideas, but at least they were new ones. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a coherent Republican proposal for rebuilding New Orleans, negotiating the credit crisis, keeping Americans in their homes, providing healthcare to the uninsured, saving the auto industry or almost anything else that doesn't boil down to cutting taxes and letting the magical market do its work.

The fact of the matter is that we are both in an economic crisis and an environmental one, and we don't have the luxury of picking between them. We have to come up with solutions that address both. Last week on Meet the Bloggers, Green For All's Van Jones described his vision for retooling the economy to meet the environmental challenges of the present and future. Like Clack's, the idea is straightforward and elegant: transition our post-industrial, service sector economy into a green economy, and provide the green-collar jobs (weatherizing buildings, constructing wind farms, etc.) the transition generates to poor inner city communities. It's an idea that will likely find no small number of advocates in Hilda Solis' Labor Department.

One of the most important consequences of Obama's victory last month is that it has made the unthinkable thinkable again. As Milton Friedman advised the conservative movement, it is necessary to have ideas "lying around," to be available for that moment when "the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." The Republicans have forgotten their mentor's counsel. Progressives have not. In the early days of the new administration, it's time to make the thinkable inevitable.

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Comments

[KennethGreen]

I'm flattered to be so quotable, but it's a shame you think you choose to impugn my credibility rather than offer a logical counter-argument to my own.

The fact is there IS an eternal tension between the economic and the environmental, because most environmental spending is less economically productive. That's why most of it has to be forced by government action: if it were already more profitable, people would invest in it out of that hated "profit motive"

If you have a billion dollars, you can invest it for maximum return on investment (rarely an environmental activity) OR you can invest it on a less-profitable environmental activity, but you can't do both. I sometimes think I'm talking to children who don't understand that you can't use the same dollar bill to buy a dollar's worth of candy AND a dollar's worth of toys, and tantrums won't change that. No matter how many environmentalists deny it, trade-offs are real.

As for the ExxonMobil bogeyman, be real. My philosophy formed in college, before I was being paid. I've written against oil company subsidies; and in favor of taxing carbon and other pollutants as well from stationary and mobile sources. That's in the public record. You think ExxonMobil or Detroit would look favorably on those ideas? You might try giving people the same assumption of sincerity you'd like them to give you. Or is being environmental incompatible with living by the golden rule?

Happy Holidays!

[Leighton Woodhouse - Huffpost Blogger]

You're arguing against a straw man. I'm more than happy to concede that there is often a tension between environmental health and the economic self-interest of many corporations. "Eternal" is a bit melodramatic in my opinion, and it's disingenuous of you to pretend that there is one singe economic interest rather than often competing interests, such as the respective interests of workers and their employers, or consumers and producers. But if your main point is that looking after the well-being of the environment and staving off potential ecological catastrophe is at odds with what market signals dictate, then you'll find no argument here. Unlike the AEI, however, I believe that there's more to life than acting as the faithful servant of the market.

Continued in next comment....

[Leighton Woodhouse - Huffpost Blogger]

As the economic calamity we're living through today is showing us, markets fail. And not only do they fail, but even when they operate perfectly, they react only to those interests that their architecture is designed to accommodate. Consumers, investors and managers can all send signals to the markets, through millions of daily choices to sell, buy, invest, liquidate and produce. Markets are exquisitely sensitive to those signals, and are constructed to react to them in predictable ways. But they are also notoriously deaf to other signals that matter just as much to human lives, such as obvious signs of environmental degradation. Indications of climate change, declining biodiversity and increasing pollution don't move stock or have much of an effect on consumer choices at the supermarket. They do, however, represent material threats to people's lives and to the quality of life of present and future generations. The market doesn't respond to those signals, so other actions are called for, which belong to the political arena. That includes forcible government intervention, absolutely. If your sponsors at ExxonMobil refuse to make morally responsible choices out of their slavish devotion to their shareholders, then there is a role for a democratic society to play in overseeing those choices.