Live from GreenBuild with Van Jones

(Editor's note: Michael Prager, a Boston-area writer who blogs on the environment here, is helping us cover the giant GreenBuild conference this week in Boston).

By Michael Prager

The effervescent, humorous, inspirational Van Jones took questions this afternoon at GreenBuild in front of several hundred people, after having completed a 45-minute address on the green econony. He had a lot to say that's worth repeating.

One thought I particularly liked was, "It's not that, for the first time, we have a black president. It's that for the first time we have a green president." I am, of course, partial to that thought because I expressed it the day after the election, though certainly, he did it better.

He diagnosed the economic problem pretty easily, in three fallacies:

1) You can sustain an economy on consumption rather than production.
2) An economy can grow forever underpinned by credit.
3) We can run the economy on environmental devastation instead of environmental regeneration.

He diagnosed the economic solution just as easily:

1) "We need to stop paying the polluters, and start making the polluters pay." He said individuals can't pollute for free, but corporations are allowed to. He cited two other huge advantages old-energy corporations get: Tax breaks and subsidies, and hundreds of billions spent to have the defense department police oil shipping lanes.
2) "We need to retrofit America." The first weapon in the retrofitting fight is "the caulk gun," he said. Such an effort would "power us through the recession," providing jobs, reducing energy use, and curbing global warming.
3) Foster a smart electrical grid in the next 10 years. He said we have "the Saudi Arabia of wind" in the Plains states, and a "Saudi Arabia of solar power" in the Sun Belt, but that so far, we have no way to get that power to our population centers. He said we need breakthroughs in transmission — the wires we use now lose too much along the way — and in storage. He called for an Apollo-style research effort to get us there.

This was my first chance to see Mr. Jones in person, though if I may say so, we're longtime friends. (As in Facebook "friends.") He does indeed have a great message, and he is indeed the sort of guy who one can follow, will want to follow. By now, of course, this states the obvious and conventional.