The Economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Environment

2 September 2009 - Posted by Bert Aldridge - 0 Comments

There are plenty of pitfalls getting people to understand the possibilities of a sustainable future. Plenty of people understand the appeal (yes, I'm ignoring the naysayers for the moment) but still the skepticism kicks in around how you make it happen. A recent Newsweek article with Van Jones is a case in point. Jones is the author of The Green Collar Economy, founder of Green for All, a green jobs NonProfit, and the Obama administration's Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (must be a small font on the business card).

In the interview excerpts, Jones is required to respond to elementary questions, including the classic canard: 'what's good for the environment can't be good for economy'.  Fortunately, Mr Jones hits knocks it out of the park:

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There are plenty of skeptics that say you can't save the economy and the earth at the same time. You can have investment incentives and cut taxes to spur growth and you can enact blunt carbon-cutting measures, but when you do the two simultaneously, it dilutes both efforts.

[Coughs.]

Are you OK?

I was just chocking on that false choice [Laughs]. That's clearly a false choice. That's like saying, "Who do you love more, your kids or your grandkids?" You either care about your kids so you grow the economy but do it in a way that's polluting. Or you care about your grandkids so you're going to stop polluting and stall the economy and starve your kids. False choice! You can enhance your economic performance by enhancing your environmental performance. Certainly it's true in the energy sector. The wastefulness of the way we used to do things has to be taken into account.

True, but isn't it hard to convince people of that when nothing of this scale has ever been done before?

Look, every time we heard these arguments, they've been wrong. Back when we debated the first Clean Air Act, we heard that if we tried to do anything to clean the air up, it would destroy the economy. But in fact, the minute the rules were clear, U.S. business outperformed anyone in terms of driving costs down. The economy actually got better. At some point, history should matter. We always overshoot our expectation once the rules are clear and you unleash innovation.

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We understand journalistic skepticism. Mostly it's a good thing. We also understand 'devil's advocate' questions.  We may have even employed these techniques ourselves on occasion. But it's disappointing to see the global conversation stymied by sophmoric reporting. Raise the bar please.

Tags: Economy, Green Jobs, Van Jones,