Take Back America: Green Jobs for a Stronger Economy

by Seth Michaels, Mar 19, 2008

The climate crisis isn’t a reason for despair—it’s an opportunity to strengthen our economy as we’re improving our environment, say the panelists of “A New Green Deal,” a session held at Take Back America 2008.

As the AFL-CIO Executive Council noted earlier this month, the new frontier of green technology could provide thousands, even millions, of jobs in building renovation, alternative energy, public transit and upgrading industry and cities to be more environmentally friendly.

The panel moderator, Phil Angelides, is chairman of the Apollo Alliance, an organization of labor, civil rights, environmental and business organizations that has come together to promote solutions to the challenge of global warming that also rebuild the economy and create good new jobs and broadly-shared prosperity. Angelides says while cooperation among all those stakeholders is necessary to move to a green economy, a true transition also will require significant public investment and political leadership.

Majora Carter, an environmental justice activist and founder of Sustainable South Bronx, points to successes in her neighborhood as an example of how a new green approach to the economy could work in the real world.

The South Bronx has absorbed the brunt of the city’s waste, sewage, emissions and power generation, and the community has suffered social and health consequences. Carter was involved in a major effort to bring public investment to her neighborhood, turning a blighted area into a riverfront park and bringing other improvements. Just as important, Carter says, is a job training program she founded to get people in the neighborhood involved in doing the work of making the neighborhood more environmentally healthy. The benefits of this don’t just center on the environment; there are economic, social and public health benefits, too.

You’re providing living wage jobs. These are the kinds of things that cannot be outsourced anywhere else. Those environmental services pay us back. This is the way to build—the green economy can be the great equalizer.

Joel Rogers, a professor who directs the Center for State Innovation at the University of Wisconsin, says we need cooperation between labor groups and environmental groups, at the center of a broad movement pushing hard on the political system. There are a lot of policy options and a lot of work to do on creating a strong new green economy, but there must be substantial public pressure on governments so that they can make the investments needed to create good jobs.

Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, says that the political moment is right to rebuild our economy with environmentally friendly jobs.

The investments required to retool America for energy independence and stop global warming can, if we do it right, create the next generation of jobs here in America.

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