Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

The Green Collar Economy covers a very important issue, at a very important moment in history, so I wish Van Jones had done a better job.

My largest complaint is that so much of this book (the first 65 pages) covers nothing but Hurricane Katrina and race relations. You would never tell from the cover descriptions or introduction that this really is a book about race and class. Van Jones comes across as obsessed with this issue, yet fails to convince me of a real connection between race and the environment.

Van Jones is also very non-specific throughout most of the book. He desperately needs more evidence, comparisons, and statistics to back up his claims. Not until the second to last chapter do we learn of specific policy solutions.

The Green Collar Economy also neglects some of the most important green issues. He dedicates less than one page to suburban sprawl vs. transit oriented development, which is really a paramount topic. Intercity rail is barely mentioned. He rarely brings up Europe, even though the US has so much to learn from them (How can you write book on anything green without drawing comparisons to Europe?).

Bottom line is I'm not sure who this book is for. Environmentalists will be unsatisfied with the lack of new information, and conservatives will remain unconvinced that Van Jones' proposals will actually work.

More nuclear power is produced here in American than in France and nuclear power provides 77 percent of France's electricity. But yet Van Jones dismisses nuclear power in one short paragraph (13 lines). Is he serious that things like more caulk guns will solve our growing energy needs? And if he really believes that there are viable energy solutions contained in this book why didn't he bother to create an index so that they can be found more easily by readers seriously looking for realistic answers to our complex energy challenges?

As someone who is interested in energy and the environment, I took the book from the library in order to get an in depth view from the "green" side of propositions for rational (economy-wise) "green" policies.
I was sorely disappointed.
The book spends a lot of pages on irrelevant racial justice issues. If I wanted to read about the misbehavior of sheriffs of Gretna LA to hurricane Katrina survivors, I would have taken a book on hurricane Katrina.
On the other side, the book is very light on details. For example, "cutting emissions to California's per capita level would allow the U.S. to surpass Kyoto targets". What are the Kyoto targets, where is California with regard to that, how do you extrapolate from California to the rest of the country.
It mentions that we may run out of Uranium and coal. When? Based on what rates on consumption?
A lot of emphasis is given to weatherizing homes. However, the author does not talk how it can be done (e.g tax incentives).
There is no treatment of the cost of green energy and no mention of the true economical problems with going green (e.g efficient batteries and photovoltaic solar cells).
In addition to the missing details, there are glaring inaccuracies and biased information. For example, the author mentions that we can be completely get rid of both carbon based energy and nuclear energy by 2020. No mention is made with regard to the economical cost California is paying for its "green" policies, e.g driving heavy industries (and jobs) to other states; insufficient energy generation resulting in blackouts and brownouts; high energy cost (electrical and gas).
Bottom line: do not waste your time.

If you take 20 minutes out of your life to watch one of Van Jones' speeches in Youtube, you have the bulk of the information provided in this book.

If you are hoping for an explanation of the seemingly contradictory elements inherent in his program, and how they come together, this book isn't going to help you.

Van Jones' motivation in making his speeches and writing his book is to try and pull together a political movement. His greatest fear is that his youthful disciples he attracts are inclined to sell out every interest group but their own. The subculture whose members cheerfully visit Whole Foods market and spend triple the going rate for organic food have little in common with the poor family, headed by a single parent, who would rather buy the cheapest groceries she can find, thank you very much.

Van Jones' message is that we need to reconcile the needs of these groups by providing cheap, green groceries. How this can be done is never made clear. He says in his speeches that unicorns and fairies are more likely to exist than clean coal; perhaps he can enlist their help in making green products more affordable.

His book oozes political correctness. In the search for common ground, literally no Democratic party interest group is ignored. I am still not clear on how the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender movements have even the slightest connection to his goals, but in his program they have a place. So do small time Entrepreneurs, Native Americans, Hispanics, Unions, Prisoners and even Coal Miners. Coal Miners? He is on record as saying Clean Coal is like asking unicorns to generate power! Well, the Movement is going to eliminate their jobs if it is successful, but hey, here's a job retraining package and you can go out and renovate old buildings. Or something.

For a book proposing to talk about the economy and how it works, there are precious few numbers, and none that are relevant to an evaluation of the programs. Everything is subjective.

For example, he visits a co-op farm in Chicago. The co-op has been provided with free land courtesy of the Mayor of Chicago, an enormous subsidy. He interviews the owners. They say how fulfilling it is to run a green co-op. He interviews workers. They say how great their new green jobs are. Jones does not consider how much they cost per job to create, a common sore point with public sector supported programs. He does not address the issue of how much subsidy has to be plowed in every year, and where that has to come from. And Jones certainly doesn't tell us how much an apple from one of these local projects costs, whether it can be obtained year-round (impossible!) and how that compares to competing supermarket apples. He does tell us that these co-ops employ ex-prisoners. In fact, it seems to me that the employment of a treasured member of a Van Jones approved interest group is far more important to him than how many apples are grown, how much they cost and how the quality is to the consumer, all of which is vital information to any evaluation of a program.

Van Jones' clear model is President Obama. The Obama administration created a health care law and a stimulus package by creating a broad outline ("You can keep your existing health plan if you like it!") and leaving details to Congress. In the case of the health care law, it turns out the law very clearly says that you cannot keep your existing plan if it doesn't conform to the new law. Van Jones looks like he operates in the same basic way. Create the broad strokes, including contradictions necessary to sell the program, and leave the details (which somehow have to reconcile the contradictions) to someone else. No wonder President Obama loved him. If you liked the way the stimulus and health care proposals came out, you'll love Van Jones. If you didn't (and that seems to include most people of both parties), Van Jones plans are pure poison.

The book is well-written and I think Van Jones is passionate and sincere about his ideas. That gets him two stars. The ideas themselves are so poorly developed they deserve no stars at all.

"The Green-Collar Economy" muddles this important issue with too many irrelevant side discussions of racial, gender, and economic equality, suffers from poor timing (the current economic downturn and steep fall in energy costs), fails to document key assertions (eg. "cutting emissions to California's per capita level would allow the U.S. to surpass Kyoto targets;" lay out the amount of energy savings available through retro-fitting buildings), is biased against the role of coal (no consideration of the impact of clean coal and new experiments on pollution), and fails to address key underlying impacts of population growth, Free Trade (on our ability to fund new energy initiatives), pays little attention to fuel economy, and is oblivious to the sometimes idiotic transportation of urban garbage hundreds of miles in the name of ecology.

Some important points are raised - eg. the need for more electric transmission lines to take advantage of solar and wind sources, but even that discussion lacks depth. ("How much energy would be lost through transmission?" and its cost is simply referenced vs. the Iraq War - something undefined as well.)

Finally, the book lacks delineation of eg. how buildings would be retrofitted, thereby supposedly benefiting our economy. If, for example, the major benefit is obtained through more efficient electric motors, the bulk of the economic benefit of constructing them would probably end up in China - not the U.S.

This book is clearly not what many readers expected. It is not a data-driven how-to book to solve the energy, environmental, and economic ills of the U.S. It is a position piece on the role of environmental causes as a basis for adding basic skills jobs in the U.S. These jobs are generally non-exportable (though imported laborers will compete for these jobs), but the materials used are generally imported (wind generators come from China and other places, as do solar cells and panels, even his humble caulk-gun and caulk is likely from China). This is a significant error in Jones' analysis - the assumption that things currently made in the U.S. will continue to be made in the U.S. Since the writing of his book, we now import alternative energy production materials. These jobs have been exported as well.

This error should not detract too badly from Jones' basic message; there is a lot of work to be done in the U.S. to improve the energy efficiency of existing buildings, retrofitting buildings with solar, wind, and/or geothermal systems, assessing existing buildings for cost-effective improvements, and the list goes on.

Jones' does take up the mantle of the "new" environmental movement, one which focuses on the relationship between race and being green. In this movement it is no coincidence that the Katrina response was nearly nonexistent while flooding in Iowa and elsewhere along the Mississippi River a few years earlier immediately brought out thousands of state-funded and federally-funded efforts to "save" the unfortunate residents along the banks of the river. When the victims of catastrophe were shades of brown less effort was made than when the faces of the victims were white.

This "new" movement focuses on the role of employment and middle-class attainment by labor-intensive projects to retrofit and upgrade the U.S. energy system. Since the majority of these retrofits are in urban settings, this is an opportunity for the U.S. to lift tens of millions of urban poor into low-middle-income careers. Poor people cannot afford a Prius, solar panels, organic groceries or even post-consumer recycled content toilet paper if they cannot afford rent and food.

Jones makes several useful points. U.S. Policy regarding alternative energy sources has been temporary and haphazard (at best) which leaves decision-making for ten and twenty year payback projects virtually impossible. The current green movement pays more attention to idyllic pastoral themes than the reality that NYC residents produce radically small carbon footprints because they live without cars, in highly efficient apartments (nearly always more efficient than stand-alone houses), and pay exoribitant refuge and disposal fees so they tend to reduce, reuse and recycle at higher than average rates. This pastoral idealism has left millions of city dwellers, especially the poorest, without a voice in the green movement.

Three stars - the assumption that overlooks the possibility of outsourcing production cost this book one star, and the second deduction is for the overkill on faults of the green movement as it was when he started writing. The book jacket and description are accurate. This is a book about the modern green movement, the role of economic growth/development in solving environmental problems, and social justice (race included). Anyone pretending to be blind-sided by a discussion of race within the context of the green movement either did not read the book description, jacket, or reviews, or is being disingenuous.

The Green collar economy is very well thought out and easy to read. The Jones lays out a plan to reduce the use of fossil fuels, reduce the amount of Green house gasses, and create new jobs in the United States. The Green collar economy delves into the use of fossil fuels, what it takes to get it out of the ground and refine it, the cost to the atmosphere due to this process. Eventually the world will dry up of fossil fuels, were dealing with a limited supply at a time when much of the world is learning to drive. The Green collar economy talks about places like India and China the bicycle is being replaced with the automobile and the economic effect that has on the price of gas world wide. Consumer demand is now out stripping the supply of oil. Oil prices are rising due to world demand. Jones does a great job of covering the economic effect of this and what it will lead to if we don't start really developing alternative energy resources and making Green technology available and affordable. There are many untapped resources out there for creating Green jobs and a cleaner environment.

The book also talks about some other types of energy resources and the pros and cons of them like converting corn to fuel. Should we be burning corn as fuel when children are starving? Nuclear power again this is a limited resource since there is a limited supply of uranium. Clean coal, just an oxymoron. The process for clean coal doesn't exist; it's still the dirtiest of all fuels when you take into account the process for mining and burning coal. There is also a limited supply of coal.

We are spiraling downward towards an energy nightmare; the book proposes some interesting and plausible ways to avoid this. The concept is great it the process of helping these ideas come to fruition that will require a lot of work. People will need to change their thought process when it comes to producing energy. Making these ideas happen will require a lot more detail with in the then what this book goes into but it plants the seed to get the process started. The book lays out the mechanics of what it will take to make the Green collar idea turn into a Green collar reality. It's up to us as citizens of the planet to make it happen. The back of Jones has a resource list of containing Green energy businesses and coalitions.

There are many types of Green collar jobs that could be created not only in the Green industry but within the normal work place. Jobs will be created in research, development and implementation of these technologies.

A great read for anyone but especially for those Green collar and want to be Green collar workers. Very enlightening.

This book really leaves much to be desired. This book attempts to apply ideology to science. The author seems to be consumed with race, race, race and only gives short high-level overviews of the real environmental problems. After reading the book, I'm really not sure how race and the environment are inter-related. To me, the authors suggested approach seemed more focused on shifting power in the country than solving any problems. The author made mention that money should be funneled to green jobs for criminals, whom will be trusted to build this green economy (apparently, while those law-abiding hard working individuals in non-green industries languish).

I purchased this book to learn more about how we could move our Country to greater energy efficiency, environmental improvements, and the prospects of a new era in job creation. Captivating at first making us relive the horrors of Katrina, but the dialogue soon becomes an indictment of all Americans and the values we hold dear by not "delivering" more opportunities to those in need. The Essence of establishing a Green Economy is tied directly to providing a means for low achieving individuals to obtain employment opportunities regardless of efforts on their part to attain the "American Dream"...which Mr. Jones disparages since he is staunchly against Capitalism or a society's right of rewarding individual efforts for stellar performance. Instead, he wants "social justice" OR to continue to "dumb-down" American Society in order to establish greater dependencies and power into the hands of a few who he feels are capable of expanding his theories into a Global Open Society (of unthinking idiots). He does not think Americans or citizens of any other country have the intelligence to rule themselves or that they should be given the right to do so. To promote his message he has used the fear Al Gore planted about Global Warning (which has since been revealed as an orchestrated hoax)...has changed the tune to climate change (due to the unexplainable instances on snow storms, etc. over the past year) even though there are huge benefits in pursuing energy efficiencies and continued enviornmental responsibility...unfortunately, he is not dedicated to the environment but is using this concern as a very designed agenda for attention...look for yourself,showing himself as he really is in promoting communism and uprisings to force the redisbribution of wealth from hard working Americans to those who only want entitlements with pure "sloth" as their reason for non-attainment. Even with the current unemployment rates, opportunities still exist in America more than any other country until people like Mr. Jones find the means to take them away. Read with your eyes open, this book is mild in comparison to the statements and uprisings he is promoting today.

Needless to say the facts Mr. Jones cites are exceedingly weak in terms of actual knowledge of renewable energy and environmental concerns...check out the lower-rated reviews in terms of others' disappointments and mine...what a fraud is this man's presentation of being a "knowledgeable" author in terms of The Green Collar Economy...this is only a platform for him to espouse his socialists agenda...the President's "Green Czar"? Nasty stuff here...take out the word green and the title would be quite appropriate. I sincerely hate that this creep has exploited a meaningful means for Americans to continue to advance the cause of retaining a beautiful earth. It's disgusting!!

I should have read up on this before I delved into this book. I did not expect so much preaching on Hurricane Katrina and I did not expect the author to be engaging in poverty pimping in a book on how greening the economy is supposed to help create jobs.

This book does not address the trade-offs of completely switching to unproven technologies that are only in their infancy or not yet developed. The book does not address whether or not we can increase economic output and remain viable in the global economy by switching to green technology. The book leaves out the costs and it does not address companies moving their operations overseas to avoid draconian environmental rules and regulations.

Bottom line: this book misses the mark both in its effectiveness and its cohesiveness.