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Green-Collar Jobs: Framing the Environment for Disadvantaged Communities

By jjacquet on October 17, 2007.

What if you live in a neighborhood where you've got a lot better chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than a melting glacier? Then you're going to get nowhere with the alarmist messaging commonly adopted by many environmental groups. "And without bringing America's underclass into the green movement, it's going to get nowhere, too," as Thomas Friedman explains in his excellent Op-Ed/profile of social activist Van Jones in today's New York Times article The Green Collar Solution.

Using his little center in Oakland, Mr. Jones has been on a crusade to help underprivileged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities understand why they would be the biggest beneficiaries of a greener America. It's about jobs. The more government requires buildings to be more energy efficient, the more work there will be retrofitting buildings all across America with solar panels, insulation and other weatherizing materials. Those are manual-labor jobs that can't be outsourced.

Read the full article here.

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You can not outsource those jobs, but you sure can import illegal immigrants to make the wages for those jobs much lower.