Repower America with Green Jobs Now!
September 25th, 2008 | Posted by WeCanSolveIt
This Saturday, September 27th more than 600 events will take place across all 50 states in an historic National Day of Action designed to show that what’s good for the environment can help to end poverty and strengthen the economy as well.
Organized by Green For All, 1 Sky and the We Campaign, the Green Jobs Now National Day of Action is targeting low-income communities and communities of color with the message that Americans from all walks of life are ready, willing, and able to build the new economy.
“A lot of the language around global warming and the unfolding financial crisis can be overwhelming,” says Van Jones, Executive Director of Green For All. “We’re organizing these events to talk about the opportunity instead, to put a positive focus on the things we can do to Repower America and help people become optimistic about the future.”
Jones believes there are millions of people ready to work, those he describes as “unlikely faces in unlikely places” ready to tackle the challenge of generating 100% of America’s electricity from renewable energy sources within ten years. “If our leaders are serious about meeting the challenge Al Gore described,” he says, “there are countless jobs to be done.” Thousands of buildings need to be weatherized, solar panels have to be installed, and wind turbines erected. Communities need local and sustainable food and people ready to farm the crops. Public transit systems and smart electricity grids need engineers and electricians.
Maisha Everhart, of the Alliance for Climate Protection says Saturday’s events are an exercise in coalition building to show that green collar jobs can lead our economy’s underserved communities out of poverty. “We can make Americans living in poverty part of a revitalized middle class,” she told us, “the green economy will create millions of new jobs as industries transition to a clean energy economy, and this can be the first step out of poverty for millions of people in urban and rural communities.”
WE will be there on Saturday and we hope you will join us!
5 Responses to “Repower America with Green Jobs Now!”
[...] is a sudden interest in green jobs among the Americans. As we recently discussed, jobs in the green sector will run in [...]
To get jobs, you have to have money coming in from where? to the govt., because private enterprise is pretty cash short now. The one place to start would be a fuel tax increase of 10-15 cents per gal. as we did not hurt really with the dollar plus surge in gas prices. That money goes to the Transportation Fund, and we can get some people back working on road and bridge rebuilding. Some of the money could go to green jobs, the most important one would be to develop hydrogen as a fuel as several catalysts have been reported to be able to split water to hydrogen using the sun’s energy. Unfortunately big oil has been giving lip service to hydrogen but does nothing as it would have to write off huge amounts in investments.
Green jobs are not going to develop out of the blue now, so someone better wake up to get this tax increaqse to get Americans back working,earning,spending and paying taxes.
The first step though will be to get some road rebuilding to put some unemployed construction workers back to work, and then working on electrification of rail traffic systems to get rid of the diesel part of diesel-electric engines. These engines can still run using a third rail pickup device such as BART has, but would no longer emit GHGs or microparticules causing health problems.
Another big green job no one considers is taking care of organic wastes and separated sewage and other fecal solids to stop them from biodegrading to reemit trapped GHGs and even more importantly to destroy the germs, toxics and drugs so that they can not pollute water. This can be done by a process called pyrolysis and has another benefit of greatly reducing the costs of maintaining new dumps as old dumps require costly constant monitoring to insure against escapes of those hazards.Several other benefits accrue from using pyrolysis, on these wastes, and I can e-mail anyone interested a more complete outline on using pyrolysis. Dr. J. Singmaster, Fremont, CA
A quotation Al might want to use, or someone might:
“Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”
This is quoting a Cree Indian prophecy, and I got it from
p. 233 of a book called Immunity, by Lori Andrews.
Hi WeCanSolveIt,
I agree – I think that green job development is so important! I’m working with a green bank called ShoreBank to promote their Online High-Yield Savings Account. Please contact me directly if you would like to know more about what they are doing to promote green job development. Thanks!
To: Dr James Singmaster
We need to communicate as we are working along similar lines.
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