THE WORKPLACE

Van Jones says he knows how to bring jobs back to American soil, put millions of people into good-paying careers and save the planet as well.

As head of the nonprofit Green For All (www.green forall.org) and author of the best-selling “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems,” Jones says that a $350 billion stimulus could help jump-start the economy by putting people to work immediately “retrofitting” and weatherizing America’s outdated and energy-inefficient buildings. In addition, thousands would be employed to manufacture and install wind turbines and solar panels for clean energy.

President-elect Obama has called for the government to help create 5 million jobs by investing $150 billion over 10 years “to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.”

“We could have construction workers, who now are not working, rebuilding millions of inefficient buildings, and we’d be using 30 percent less energy just using current, off-the-shelf products for it,” Jones says. “It would pay for itself in two to four years with the energy saved,” he says.

“In order to jump-start the economy, we’ve got to produce some stuff, and energy is one thing we can produce. It can be the big locomotive for the U.S. economy to get going.”

Jones says wind turbines require 8,000 manufactured parts and 20 tons of steel each. And because of their size, they need to be assembled close to their final destination. All that adds up to jobs that could boost local economies and provide real income for laid-off employees such as auto and steel workers, in addition to engineers, technicians and other laborers.

Jones, an award-winning activist who has the ear of many prominent national leaders, says we need to look at investing billions of dollars for energy production much as we did for the national highway system and the Internet, both of which, he says, greatly revived a struggling economy.

Gannett News Service