Photo: Flickr/Centre for American Progress

On his Facebook page, Van Jones lists among his interests “Slaying dragons. Rescuing imperiled planets. Playing basketball with my four-year-old son.”

Jones is better known as a champion of green jobs, human rights and innovative economic solutions designed to lift up the next generation of workers.

LISTEN: click here to listen to the unabridged interview.

The Yale-educated attorney has spent the past 20 years working for social, economic, racial and environmental justice. Jones served as green jobs adviser to the Obama White House and has written two New York Times bestsellers: The Green Collar Economy and Rebuild the Dream.

Co-host of CNN’s Crossfire and president/co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, which says it “isn’t your grandparents’ think tank,” Jones is one of the keynote speakers at the Good Jobs Summit in Toronto Oct. 3-5. He’ll be speaking at 10:15 am on Saturday October 4.

rabble.ca’s Claudio D’Andrea spoke with Jones about some of his ideas as they apply to this weekend’s summit:

What did the recent People’s Climate March signify for you and the work that you do?

Well two things:

One, this wasn’t just the biggest climate march in world history. This was also the biggest march for any [time] period in the United States since the Second World War. There hasn’t been a march of even remotely comparable size in a decade. I think that gives you some sense of how important this issue remains to people in the United States, despite the big polluters’ backlash against any discussion about the peril that we are in.

Had you had 10,000 Tea Party characters marching along Wall Street, it would have been wall-to-wall coverage. [It] also shows the importance of the social media and all the great work the 350.org has done to go around the mainstream media blockade.

It is important to recognize that this is not the overwhelmingly white face of the environmental movement that you saw on the streets. You had labour, you had people of colour, Indigenous people and I think this newer generation 350.org represents is much more inclusive in its view and its practice than earlier generations of environmentalists. That’s also very encouraging.

What about the Climate Summit that was held?

From my point of view, the higher you climb, the harder the politics get so I didn’t have high expectations for that. You know, pricing carbon can be controversial in the left and the right as a way forward. But there is a price on carbon through a cap-and-trade program in California, the seventh largest economy in the world. Everyone said that if you had any sort of mechanism to price carbon or begin to address this as a market failure — to address the over-abundance of carbon in the atmosphere as a market failure — that you would have a disaster: Energy bills would spike, the poor would be hurt and you wouldn’t even have a reduction in carbon anyway.

It turns out that all that’s false, at least in the California experience. Energy bills are flat, about a quarter of every dollar generated through the cap and trade program goes directly to help poor communities, and carbon is coming down, at least on a per capita basis. Well, if that’s true, then perhaps the next step would be to spread that around, maybe go to Oregon, or Washington State, Colorado, other places.

You can imagine the situation where we just keep building on state, local, and tribal successes which then gives the federal government more reason and room to act, which then lets the U.N. act, but I’ve never been particularly hopeful with starting with the UN. I put my hopes more in the bottom-up approach here in the U.S. that will eventually move the federal government and then let the U.N. act.

What do you see as the role of the labour movement in environmental action?

Well, it’s work that created the present system and it’s work that will fix it.

Labour is essential to everything and even though organized labour is on the ropes, there has never been a greater need for labour to be organized. So I think there [is] more work, more wealth, better health in a green economy than in a pollution-based economy. And I think labour has an ongoing interest in moving through to a clean energy economy. 

You have been a tireless advocate for green jobs. Yet a lot of people despair over the so-called race to the bottom trend in wages and the seeming impossibility of meaningful change to reverse a lot of the damage of climate change. How do you encourage people to keep fighting the good fight?

It’s amazing; you know over time good ideas tend to prevail but never as quickly as the original champions want — but in due course. People forget. It’s very frustrating to me.

Global warming has been a topic of discussion for 30 years. It took Al Gore’s film in 2006 to really put it on the map; in 2008 both Democratic and Republican nominees were running as climate champions. John McCain and Barack Obama agreed that climate change was real; it was caused by humans. Now,  that was six years ago that the leaders of both political parties never debated about the topic because they both agreed. John McCain never ran an ad that said global warming is a hoax and cap-in-trade is socialism, because they both agreed. And it was only in 2007, seven years ago, that we even had the term green jobs codified at the federal level. Now I’ve never heard, frankly, of any movement that was given seven years to succeed and then written off. So to collapse into despair in such a short time frame, I don’t know what struggle they are comparing themselves to.

Now, I wish things could go a little faster because I’ve got kids and I want them to live on a liveable planet.

So where we were ten years ago on this issue to where we are now, where you have 400,000 people marching for climate solutions, where you can actually debate the rise, fall, and rebirth of green jobs, that’s pretty impressive.

It can also go very quickly. If you look at where we are in the Lesbian and Gay struggle, 2,000 years of oppression and then just now even a Republican won’t take on that community. And by the way, I should underscore 80,000 coal miners in America, and they certainly are American heroes, they risk their lives every day. But there are more than 100,000 solar workers in America, and more than 100,000 wind energy workers in America. You have about 2.1 million green jobs right now compared to 80,000 coal mining jobs.

The only part of the economy that’s outside of pure tech that’s growing still [is] the green part, and that’s with the hostile and broken Congress. So you know, we’re not as well off as we should be but we’re far from needing to jump off bridges.

Racial equality is another central element in your work, and it’s something activists in Canada are also hoping to achieve. How can we create change that creates equality?

Part of it is we have to keep talking about these issues. The right wing, and increasingly now even some liberals, feel like the number one thing we can do about racial issues is to shut up talking about them. That in any discussion “playing the race card,” or somehow breaking up paths in ways that are not constructed — that attitude is really not helpful. We teach every other kind of history, labour history, the history of our respective country, religious history, but for some reason — surprise surprise — this is one thing we are not so upfront about which is actually a part of the problem.

We really do have a large number of people, of white people, who are sincerely (at least with a conscious mind) committed to racial equality, and who sincerely (in their conscious mind) do believe that no one race is inherently better compared to another race. So that’s really encouraging and the left is wrong to dismiss that too aggressively. The problem is if you look at the brain science, even though people are consciously egalitarian… most of your brain is subconscious and when you show someone a picture or do some kinds of tests, it turns out there is a lot of unconscious or subconscious bias.

The major problem is how do you get [at the] subconscious and unconscious bias people have and what do you do about it? And it turns out that discussing unconscious and subconscious bias, you can actually have a positive impact.

The other thing I would say, is that we just have to be more aggressive about making sure that people of colour do have access to whatever benefits that any of us have any control over. We have a big campaign right now called Yes We Code, trying to get more opportunity, more potential youth of colour involved in the computer technology industry. Now that’s incredible because that’s where many of the jobs of the future are going to be and the technology community has not really cared about African-American, Latino and Native American communities, but to be fair, those communities have not put a big focus on technology either… Velcro takes two sides to stick.

How do you see some of your ideas working in the Canadian labour environment? 

You know, our countries couldn’t be closer geographically, and couldn’t be quite different sometimes politically and culturally. But I am particularly enthusiastic about the ability of the labour movement in Canada to fuel relevant political change. We’re really, I think, we’re kind of blocked and blotched in the United States because of the Tea Party and Fox News and Koch brothers have really crippled our government. I don’t see the same kinds of impediments to social democracy in Canada for the Conservative government, I think.

This piece is excerpted from a longer conversation with Van Jones. You can follow rabble.ca‘s live coverage of the Good Jobs Summit on Saturday by clicking HERE.

You can attend the Good Jobs Summit in Toronto, October 3-5.  The Summit is free but participants must register. To register click here.

 The Good Jobs Summit is a three-day conference to create a national dialogue between workers, students, governments, employers and community organizations with the goal of finding solutions and new approaches to jobs and the economy. It is organized through a partnership between Unifor, the Canadian Federation of Students, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, CAW Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy and Centre for Labour Management Relations. 

Claudio D’Andrea has written for newspapers and magazines in Ontario and B.C. for almost 30 years and is a member of Unifor Local 240 in Windsor, Ontario. 

Transcription: Miriam Katawazi.

Photo: Flickr/Centre for American Progress