The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems »

Van Jones is the founder and former president of Green For All. In March of 2009, he became the special advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Van Jones lives in the Washington D.C. area with his wife and two sons.

Provocative, personal, and inspirational, The Green Collar Economy is not a dire warning but rather a substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country the failing economy and our devastated environment. From a distance, it appears that these two problems are separate, but when we look closer, the connection becomes unmistakable.

In The Green Collar Economy, acclaimed activist and political advisor Van Jones delivers a real solution that both rescues our economy and saves the environment. The economy is built on and powered almost exclusively by oil, natural gas, and coal all fast-diminishing nonrenewable resources. As supplies disappear, the price of energy climbs and nearly everything becomes more expensive. With costs and unemployment soaring, the economy stalls. Not only that, when we burn these fuels, the greenhouse gases they create overheat the atmosphere. As the headlines make clear, total climate chaos looms over us. The bottom line: we cannot continue with business as usual. We cannot drill and burn our way out of these dual dilemmas.

Instead, Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, this path has the practical benefit of both cutting energy prices and generating enough work to pull the U.S. economy out of its present death spiral.

Rachel Carson's 1963 landmark book Silent Spring was the pivotal ecological examination of the last century. Now, rising above the impenetrable debate over the environment and the economy, Van Jones's The Green Collar Economy delivers a timely and essential call to action for this new century.

Boston Globe

“Van Jones has made a national name for himself by finding one solution to three persistent problems: poverty, racial inequality, and the environmental crisis. He wants to solve these problems by creating green jobs filled by the poor and people of color—the groups often left behind during technological advances.”

Foreword Robert F.Kennedy Jr. ix

Introduction Reality Check 1

1 The Dual Crisis 25

2 The Fourth Quadrant 41

3 Eco-Equity 67

4 The Green New Deal 85

5 The Future Is Now 121

6 The Government Question 151

7 Buoyancy and Hope 189

197

Action Items 205

Resource List 209

Notes 227

Acknowledgments 245