All the big ideas for getting us onto a lower carbon trajectory involve a lot of people doing a lot of work, and that's been missing from the conversation. This is a great time to go to the next step and ask, well, who's going to do the work? Who's going to invest in the new technologies? What are ways to get communities wealth, improved health, and expanded job opportunities out of this improved transition?
Van JonesPeople in red states and blue states can agree that if we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, letting people work their way out of poverty without undermining community health, we have a moral obligation to do so.
Van JonesApparently, the fossil-fuel industry's strategy is to convince the American people that we should just burn all the way through the last of our oil and coal reserves.
Van JonesThat America is in the calamity is a result of a certain amount of elitism in the Democratic Party where they're tied to the sensibility of the college-educated, multicultural crowd, of which I'm a part, which has created a sense where it's OK to say, "All the red state voters are stupid, they're all dummies, they're all racist, they're all backwards mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging ..." all that stuff. And that kind of elitism, which is first of all not true, is also not fair. It's also dumb strategy.
Van Jones