The Temperature Transcends Race
(Page 2 of 3)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
interview by Hannah Lobel
RELATED CONTENT
Noun, singular: A pejorative term lobbed at new buildings, both residential and commercial, that ar...
Singer Al Green and poet Rainer Maria Rilke share a sense of the sublime...
In nearly two years of volunteering and working at an urban nature preserve, I have never seen anot...
Message on bumper stickers two environmentalists in Corte Madera, California, have slapped on sever...
Global Warming May Trigger an Ice Age Soon February 5, 2004 Erica Wetter Utne.com The Big C...
There’s a new breed of environmental activists—Van Jones in Oakland and Majora Carter in the Bronx, for example—who are focusing on more comprehensive approaches, like training low-income people for green jobs, and creating safer green spaces. Will they succeed where you think their predecessors failed?
What is exciting about it is that they are taking a more expansive view, in which economic development is at the center of the agenda. The challenge that they and all of us face is creating a politics that is comprehensive enough to deal with the many factors driving concentrated poverty.
In the book we point to the excellent work of Geoffrey Canada, who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone. He’s taken a truly ecological approach in that when he deals with a problem like childhood asthma, he attacks all of the causes: everything from lack of health care to dilapidated housing to cigarette smoking to diesel bus pollution.
The same thing has to be the case in creating prosperity and security for poor communities of color. It’s not enough to, for example, just do job training. There also has to be significant government investment to make sure that there are actually jobs for the people who get the training.
The new energy act allocates $125 million toward green job training. Is that enough?
It might be enough for job training; it’s certainly not enough to create a new clean-energy economy. We’re going to need to secure much larger investments to do things like buy down the price of solar power, so that there is a viable economics for installing solar on homes and businesses.
You’ve called for a massive government investment on the scale of the space program in the 1950s.
The thing to remember about the U.S. government is that it’s the biggest buyer. In the late 1950s microchips cost about $1,000 each. The federal government decided that it needed microchips for the space race with the Soviet Union, and it literally bought so many microchips over less than 10 years that the price came down to just $20 a microchip.
There’s a very similar situation today with another silicon-based product, and that’s solar panels. Every time you double the production of solar, the price comes down 20 percent. We ought to spend what experts suggest will be between $50 billion and $200 billion to buy down the price of solar so that it’s cheaper than coal.
Is that realistic, economically and politically?
Absolutely. When you do focus groups and polls around global warming, energy independence, and economic development, the support for government investment into new technologies and infrastructure is far higher than public support for raising the cost of energy, which is effectively what a regulation-centered approach to global warming would do.