Interview with Former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones on his Work and the Climate Movement

If anything, his roller coaster career seems to have given the
preternaturally strategic Jones even more political savvy. Among other
observations, Jones feels that environmentalists specifically, and progressives
generally, do a poor job of celebrating their victories.

“Depending on what you call a green
job, there are as many as 3 million green jobs,” he told me. “I don’t know
why people say, ‘Well, jeez, green jobs are such a failure,’ … I’d like to have
a few more failures like that.”

Me, too. It would help demonstrate, as Jones himself has proved, that the arc
of the moral universe isn’t as long as we might fear.


Mark: When we talked to you right before the Forward on Climate rally in Washington you had some pretty
strong words for President Obama, saying that if he approves the Keystone XL pipeline, the first thing it will run over will be
his credibility. If you were a betting man, where would you put your money on
whether the president is going to approve the pipeline?


Jones: Well, I think if you look at the signals that [the
administration] is sending, you would have to come to the conclusion that it’s
more likely that they will approve this awful pipeline than that they will
reject it. However, they did just receive a million online comments almost
entirely opposing the project. The EPA [U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency] just came out saying that the State Department’s environmental review was inadequate, which I think shows there
are cracks inside the administration. And I don’t think this fight is over. I
think you would be kidding yourself if you said that the environmentalists are
in the lead—but I think you’d also be wrong to say that the race is over. I
think that environmentalists—and not just environmentalists, but people who have
the good sense to understand economics and math and have any intelligence at
all—can still win. But it’s going to take more pressure. The other factor I
would say is that never underestimate the power of a really good film. Al Gore showed
that. He changed the entire global conversation with one really good film. Well,
Bill McKibben
just put out in the online world arguably an equally powerful film, Do the
Math. Never underestimate the power of that to wind up on the screen
of someone with power, or that person’s spouse or child or neighbor. So this
fight is not over.


Mark: Some important progress was made in President Obama’s
first term, including a significant down payment on the green economy via the
stimulus package and increased fuel-economy standards for car and trucks. But in
general I think many people are disappointed that the president hasn’t shown
more leadership around the climate
crisis. Why haven’t we seen more passionate leadership from the president on
the environment?


Jones: I don’t think we have seen consistent and passionate
leadership from any part of society—including the environmental movement—on the
climate issue. With the exception of a few lonely voices. I think the failure to
pass cap and trade left the entire environmental movement somewhat disoriented.
When you get as close as we did and you come up short, it takes a while for
people to get life back into them. I think that 350.org, the youth and the other people
that are in this fight—the Native Americans and the farmers and the ranchers have been
fighting against the [Keystone XL] pipeline—and Bill McKibben have been carrying
the banner since 2010. And it’s definitely good work. But in general a president
does not get too far ahead of the public on any major issue. If you look at
civil rights, it wasn’t Lyndon Johnson who led the civil rights movement. There
was Selma, and you had people in the streets, and you had people going to jail
and you had a spokesperson like Dr. King—and it was in that context that Johnson
did what he did.
I think we have this myth that presidents lead great movements. What happens
is that presidents ratify the achievements of great movements. And you see that
in the LGBT
movement. The president was able to come out and say he was personally for
marriage equality after a tenacious movement and fight in the streets, in the
courts and in the media. Hollywood had already won ground so he can safely
occupy it.
Usually presidents don’t bail out failed movements. They usually stand behind
rising movements. You can see that with immigration, you see that with marriage
equality.


Mark: This is the 64-million-dollar question that everyone
in the environmental movement is asking, but what do you think are some of the
explanations for why we haven’t seen an ascendant movement that would create the
political space for the president?


Jones: Well, I think that to the extent that climate
solutions seem abstract and the concern of an intellectual elite, it makes the
movement more vulnerable to being dismissed. And then there’s the importance of
the state of the struggle. Al Gore raised the alarm with his film An
Inconvenient Truth, and then an overlapping set of people
raised up the solution of a green economy that would fix the problem while
delivering more work, more wealth and better help to people who who need that.
That particular formulation really threatened the polluters. The idea that we
were coming forward with economic solutions that were business-friendly,
pro-innovation, pro-investment, pro-American independence, that could actually
deliver more jobs than the coal companies—that scared the bejeebers out of the
Koch Brothers. And it scared the bejeebers out of the Heritage
Foundation. And it scared the bejeebers out of Big Coal and Big Oil. Those forces don’t
get together and attack ideas they think are weak and stupid. They get together
and attack ideas that are strong and promising. And they declared on the front
page of the Heritage Foundation website that “ending the myth of green jobs” was
their number one priority. And then they came after the idea, hammer and tongs,
to obliterate it from public discussion.

Rather than the environmental movement, and the labor movement, and the civil
rights movement and the anti-poverty movement rallying around the idea—saying
that if they are attacking the idea with this much force, we must be onto
something—people backed away from it and handed them a victory. The reality is
it’s very hard to deliver economic change of any kind inside of 12 months. You
can easily say, “Well, they passed the stimulus bill, and there are no green
jobs, and therefore the idea didn’t work.” But that’s a pretty stupid idea for
us to buy. The very first time that green jobs was even incorporated into
federal law was in the 2007 energy bill—the Green Jobs Act of 2007 that Bush
signed. And there was not a penny put behind [the idea] until 2009. The very
first time that you had any federal funding for green jobs at all was in 2009.
And people were already saying, “Green jobs do not work.” I mean, it was the
most ridiculous surrender of high ground that I have seen in a political
movement. To actually give up on your best idea 12 months after you just got
your first penny for it. And then to never mention green jobs again.

That shows the fragility of the commitment to this idea. That’s why I think
there isn’t a very broad [environmental] movement. A very broad movement would
have to be an eco-populist movement, not an eco-elitist movement. It would have
to be an eco-populist movement pointing to solutions that would help ordinary
people. When we had that, we got hammered as any promising movement is going to
get hammered. But rather than staying the course, and fighting it through and
doubling down, I think there was this sense of running for the hills as soon as
the polling numbers started to tank on the idea.

Even civil rights was not popular at one time—obviously, since it took 100
years to get to civil rights. Civil rights was desperately unpopular for 344
years. The forces that convened and converged to make green jobs such a hopeful
possibility couldn’t even withstand 344 days of hard attack. So we have to go
back and look in the mirror and think.


Mark: Speaking of an eco-populism, despite some good-faith
efforts to forge more solidarity between environmental groups and people of
color organizations, the environmental movement continues to be very
monochromatic. As I wrote right after the election, if your social movement
looks more like a Romney-Ryan rally than an Obama-Biden rally, you’re in
trouble. What will it take to have an environmental movement that really
reflects the diversity of this country?


Jones: That may be the wrong question. In may be that trying
to figure out how to make the environmental movement more brown might not be the
right question. It might be that the better question is: How do we make other
movements more green? It could be you just have some built in cultural patterns
inside of whatever is now called the environmental movement, patterns that will
be too difficult to overturn in a frontal way. It might actually be more
fruitful to say, “How do we take these rising movements that are much more
diverse already and get them to be more green?” Get them to hold ecological
solutions much closer in their own hearts as they try to solve their economic
problems. That might actually wind up being more fruitful.


Mark: OK, then—how would that happen?


Jones: Well, the Latino community polls off the charts as
pro-environment. The African-American community polls nearly off the charts in
numbers. In fact, by polling, not by intensity, but in terms of broad support,
the African-American community is much more environmentally friendly than the
white community. And so I think we should go fishing where the fish are. There
is a lot of environmental sentiment in the rising majority already that we don’t
have to go fight for. We don’t have to get the Tea Party to join the
environmental ranks. I think there’s a lot to work with in existing rising
movements. The challenge is that those communities have a lot of other tough
problems. So there’s an intensity question. But I mean, honestly, most Latinos
and African-Americans are not going to get jobs in the coal industry. They are
not going to get jobs from the oil industry. But they could get jobs in the
clean energy economy, either putting up solar panels or selling them or marketing them. Or creating
the hydroponic, organic food co-ops. There are a lot more economic solutions
available to the rising majority that are green than what the Koch Brothers are
going to be offering.

So there are innovations out there that we could drive more deeply into
communities of color that might actually have the effect of more environmental
ideas taken into the bloodstream without having to overturn 30 or 40 years of
cultural dynamics in the self-identified environmental movement.


Mark: Your newest organization, Rebuild the Dream, is
focused on bread and butter issues. How do you put these ecological solutions
“into the bloodstream,” as you say, while working on student loan debt, the
foreclosure crisis, the continuing unemployment crisis?


Jones: Well, first, I want to come back to the green jobs
thing, since a lot of people are critical of it. According to Brookings, there
are 2.4 million green jobs in America right now. I don’t think anyone knows
that. According to the Department of Labor, there are 3.1 to 3.2 million green
jobs in America right now. That’s compared to 80,000 coal miners. There’s 70,000
people who got up today and went to work in the wind
industry alone. We almost have job parity between coal and wind, and that’s
despite the fact that fracking has
flooded the market with cheap natural gas that is undercutting the wind
industry. We still have 70,000 Americans who went to work in the wind industry
today, this morning. That doesn’t include the solar industry. Depending on what
you call a green job and how you define it, there are as many as 3 million green
jobs. So why is that considered a defeat? I really just want to circle back on
that before I talk about the other stuff I’ve been working on. We don’t claim
the victories we get. I don’t know any other movement that got its first nickel
of federal money in 2009 that’s got 3 million jobs. I mean, I don’t know why
people say, “Well, jeez, green jobs are such a failure.” OK, can we ask for some
more failures like that? I’d like to have a few more failures like that. I think
the main problem is that we didn’t say, “We want a million green jobs by 2013.”
Had we said that, we would have overshot our goal by twice. If you completely
shift the economy into a clean energy economy I suppose you could have 7 million
green jobs. What happened to the green jobs idea is that it suddenly became an
overnight panacea to produce a utopia—as opposed to an economic development
opportunity pathway to create a few million jobs. In our enthusiasm for the
solution we kind of suggested it would happen in 12 months—and then it was a
failure. I think that kind of mistake is understandable for a young movement,
for a new movement, for a new idea. But there’s not even an idea to replace
it.

This is where my frustration comes in. For some people this was just another
way to frame what they wanted to do. For some of us, it was survival. Like, this
is how we’re going to have jobs for our children. In a survival fight, you don’t
give up in 12 months just because the mainstream media has given up on it. In a survival fight, you
don’t give up on it in 12 months just because Koch Brothers don’t like it. In a
survival fight, you don’t give up in 12 months because the polling data isn’t as
strong as it was. So I think that is part of the problem. For some people, it
was never a real commitment to marginal communities, to laid-off workers, to
folks in Appalachia who could have better work while we fix the climate. It was
just a frame. And once the frame was damaged, it was just a sound bite. And once
the sound bite took heavy fire from our opponents, a lot of people just walked
away. When they walked away, they forgot to look over their shoulder and see 2
to 3 million Americans working right now who wouldn’t be working. And since
you’re not looking for that, you don’t see it.

People say, “I don’t know anybody with a green job.” Well, how many people do
you know who work in coal mines? There’s only 80,000 of them. You probably don’t
know any of them. But the people who are pro-coal sure make sure you see them
everywhere. You can conjure up the image of a coal miner in your mind. Because
the people who believe in that make sure it’s in the public mind even though
there are not that many people coal mining. There are just as many people
working in wind. But how much time do we spend celebrating them?

We’d rather talk about how we couldn’t have done better and shouldn’t have
done better. It’s just to say that it’s very hard to do better tomorrow if you
don’t claim your victories of yesterday and today.
I’m in this strange position of being frustrated and critical. But I don’t
only want to be frustrated and critical, because we have actually done some
amazing things. Think of the big picture. Gore’s movie came out in 2006. Nobody
was talking about climate change on the national stage in 2005. In the 2004
campaign between Kerry and Bush, climate wasn’t even an issue. In 2008, four
years later, it was one of the main issues. In 2012, it didn’t fall off the
radar—it was driven off the radar by a concerted effort of some of the most
powerful forces in American society. After we had got $90 billion of funding
though the stimulus bill—90 billion with a B—for the biggest clean energy
investment ever, after we had got the House of Representatives to pass climate
legislation, and after we had gotten the president to push fuel economy on
automobiles for the first time in years—then we got a counterattack. Which is
understandable. But we didn’t have a strong enough coalition who was committed
to our strategy to withstand that. So now we’re back on our heels, and now we
have to get back in the game. But that’s not, “We suck, and green jobs
mysteriously never happened.” It did happen. It just didn’t happen at the scale
people had hoped. But people’s hopes were ill-defined in the first place.


Mark: You’ve worn a number of hats in your
career—community-based attorney, author, White House official, now CNN pundit.
In which of those roles did you feel the most empowered to make progressive
social change?


Jones: Well, it’s interesting, because it’s the two
extremes. But I think that when I was a broke, marginal, grassroots organizer I
felt like I could get a lot done because you have no ties to the system. You can
just fight the fight you just want to fight. And often you end up winning.
Because it’s that kind of David and Goliath syndrome where you don’t know how
much strength you have until you throw the punch. And you don’t know much
strength they have until they get punched. Sometimes you end up pulling these
miraculous victories. I was very happy, for instance, to play a big role in
preventing the construction of the superjail for kids they were going to build
in Oakland in the early 2000s. I’ve always been proud of that victory, more than
anything else I’ve ever been a part of. Or in the mid-1990s, getting the SFPD
[San Francisco Police Department] to fire Marc Andaya for his role in beating to
death Aaron Williams. That fight was back in 1997. It was my first real true
victory for community justice. I look back to those fights with joy because it
just shows what ordinary people can do with literally nothing more than
determination.

And then, on the other extreme, working in the White House was a great
opportunity. Getting the chance to basically play the role of an organizer
inside the federal family. The inter-agency process that I headed was moving $80
billion out the door into communities across the country. I got a chance to work
with almost a dozen agencies on behalf of the White House. So all my organizing
skills from my grassroots days suddenly became incredibly handy. So at the
furthest end of being an outsider and the furthest end of being an insider were
the two times I probably felt the most effective.


Mark: So what would you say to young, up-and-coming
progressive organizers who are not going to find themselves on either of those
ends, but instead somewhere in the squishy middle?
Jones: I think finding mentors and role models always pays
off. I’ve been so lucky. In my early life I had veterans from SNCC [the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] who took me under the wing. Dinky Forman and
Dottie Zellner were two SNCC workers who took me under their wing and continue
to give me council. Carrie [Caroline] Kerry Kennedy and Arianna Huffington at
different stages of my journey were instrumental in connecting me with
opportunities, advisors and donors. Josh Mailman, who founded the Social Venture Network, was
there for me at critical times. Al Gore was one of the first people to call me
after I left the White House to encourage me. He said, “People have lost much
bigger jobs in the White House than you have.” Which I thought was the perfect
thing to say. So I’ve been open to getting that kind of help.

What worries me about some of the younger activists is how isolated they seem
to be at times in their own sub- sub- sub-cultures. And people in my age group,
who are in their 40s, have a real responsibility to go above and beyond the call
of duty to reach out, to be supportive, to be encouraging and to learn from the
next generation. I think that’s critical.

If there’s anything I would say, it’s embrace failure. Almost all of the
things that get put on your resume are successes, and that’s what tends to make
it into your self-esteem bucket. But all of my failures are the things that tend
to give me real insight about what works and what doesn’t work. Your successes
give you your confidence and your setbacks give you your character. And you have
to have a lot of setbacks, and as a result have a much more sober and realistic
view about how hard this work is. But, I’ve never been beat up, I’ve never been
shot at, I’ve never had dogs set on me or fire hoses on me. Compared to earlier
generations of activists, that’s pretty good. I think it’s important to keep
that perspective. Any good planet needs a lot of sunshine and a lot of shit in
order to grow. The question is if you can turn the shit into fertilizer.

Related Article
Van Jones Succumbs to Republican Pressure