In San Francisco, state leaders joined builders, educators, labor advocates and green technology experts at the “Advancing the New Energy Economy Summit” in January, to discuss how green jobs and investment can turn climate action into economic prosperity.

Van Jones of Green for All; Marc Drummond, Chancellor of the LA Community Colleges; Peter Darbee, CEO and President of PG&E; and Jay Hansen of the state Builder's Council, discuss the relationships between Green Jobs, improving the dropout rate, and true cost of housing a quarter of the world's prisoners.

After introductions by California Public Utilities Commissioner Timothy Simon,  former Mayor Willie Brown, and Mayor Gavin Newsom, Phil Angelides hosted a discussion about “how we make California the epicenter of a new clean and green global economy.”

Angelides spoke as National Chair of Apollo Alliance , a coalition committed to converting the challenge of global warming into a “catalytic opportunity to create a sustainable economy.” Speaking of the billions of people moving to cities where they’ll need clean air and water, inevitable carbon emission caps and regulations across the globe, and “because the next generation is the most environmentally attuned in history,” Angelides concluded, “When you add it all up, it means there’s going to be a phenomenal opportunity for marketplace solutions to our environmental challenges, and we should seize it and take the lead.”

But with the economy in a downturn, experts fear that uncertain markets could prompt governments and companies to neglect less immediate risks such as climate change and food security.

Nevertheless, with billions of dollars in green investment pouring in, and new developments in technology and energy efficiency being developed as a result, the challenge, said Angelides, will be in making the transformation to a clean economy “in a way that imparts opportunity broadly across all races and classes to ensure this is not just an economic bubble that benefits the few, while millions are left behind.”

Few doubt that the opportunities are real. As Fabian Nunez told the summit via video link from Sacramento, "Gold built the California economy, Green will sustain it." The global solar market will grow from $3 billion in 2002 to $27 billion in 2012, according to Clean Edge research. The Renewable Energy Policy Project calculates that for every megawatt of solar power produced, 35 jobs are created in manufacturing, installation, servicing, sales and marketing. Altogether, according to a press release from the Rainforest Action Network, serious investment in renewable energy could generate trillions of dollars and millions of jobs over the next 25 years.

Millions of Jobs
Nobody is more at the forefront of the green jobs movement than Van Jones, co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights , and founder of the Green for All program. A powerful and persuasive speaker, Jones’ testimony before Congress was instrumental in getting the Green Jobs Act of 2007 included in the Senate’s energy bill. The Act provides $120 million to train workers in Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

“If we’re going to meet this challenge, we’re going to have to weatherize millions of buildings, we’re going to have to put up millions of solar panels, we’re going to have to build thousands of wind farms. That’s millions of jobs,” Jones told the panel.

“How can we have all this work that needs to be done, and all these people who don’t have work? If we’re going to build a Green Economy, it has to be an equal opportunity economy, it’s got to be an economy that includes everybody from the beginning."

As Jones has said repeatedly, “If there’s going to be a green wave it’s got to be a wave that floats all boats, and includes everybody.”

Half Our Students Drop Out
Jay Hansen, Legislative Director for the State Building and Construction Trades Council agreed. “The younger generation gets it. They want to be part of the process, they want to be part of something that helps solve this. We need to make those things available.” Stressing the need for career technical education in high schools, Hansen said educational opportunities are what ensure a level playing field for everybody.

But California’s education system is in a shambles, and the state currently ranks 48th among the 50 states in the number of people who go directly from high school to college.

Says Hansen, “We have a dropout rate in CA of 150,000 students each year. That means in 4 years you could fill up the city of San Francisco with high school dropouts. We’re not going to be able to build anything, or do any kind of green retrofit until we have a workforce that’s prepared to do that.”

In Los Angeles, according to Marc Drummond, Chancellor of  LA’s Community Colleges, virtually half of all students who begin high school never finish. And it’s not because of their grades. The Gates Foundation found that 88% of dropouts had passing grades, and 70% could have graduated if they wanted to. But fifty percent said the classes were boring, while over eighty-percent said they wanted more real-world learning.

“There’s a tremendous number of people left by the wayside, and every year that goes by we’re leaving behind 46-47% of the young people in Los Angeles county without the skills they need to get a job.”

In Angelides’ words, “Our country has gone from one that a generation ago was 2nd in the world in graduating young people with engineering and natural science degrees. We’re now 20th. And in California last year, we graduated just short of 7000 engineers, while Korea, only about a 3rd larger than the us, graduated 56,000 engineers.”

Creating a "Pipeline into PG&E"
Peter Darbee, CEO and President of PG&E, announced that his company was beginning a Power Pathway program this year, working with local community colleges “to find the right people and train them to come into our company. Create a pipeline into PGE for people with those skills.” Several Bay Area community colleges are participating, with most course tuition to be covered by grants.

According to Hansen, the Building Trades has an active apprentice program training 40,000 people in building and construction, but that half of the applicants who apply for the program don’t meet the basic qualifications. “The average age of our apprentices used to be 19. Now it’s 29. What are people doing for those ten years before they get into a career with us?”

Prisoner’s Dilemma
Chancellor Drummond has an idea. “We have 500,000 people locked up in prisons.” A program he ran training inmates dropped recidivism rates from 75% to under 20%. “That’s a huge savings for the state. We have to look at this in a holistic way.” The question, says Drummond, is not just about releasing prisoners, “But what about getting them some rehabilitation, and making them part of the economy?”

Van Jones couldn’t agree more. “What he said,” he laughed, before turning serious again, and saying the question is at “the moral center of the opportunity.”

“To build a Green Economy it’s not just about reclaiming thrown away stuff, it’s also about reclaiming thrown away folks. We only have 4% of the world’s population, but we produce a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases. We also have a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

“One out of every four people locked up anywhere in the world are locked up right here in the United States. We are the world leader in incarceration and pollution. Most of the people locked up are nonviolent, acts of economic desperation and addiction, could be retrained, could be reclaimed.”

Jones told the audience that after he addressed the Senate, he was approached by political staffers. They liked his ideas, but told him that for ten-thousand dollars they could retrain three or four job-ready people as green-collar workers, or just one person coming home from prison. It costs too much, they told him.

“I’m sorry sir, but you just don’t get it,” Jones replied. “You’re trying to save $8000, but if that young person gets in trouble, if they do something desperate, you’re then going to spend forty to fifty thousand dollars a year on the same person, and then you have to take care of their children, and other social policies. So to save $8000 you’re going to spend half a million dollars.”

“Why don’t we invest now, and give the extra attention, make sure the people who most need the help, who most need the opportunity are at the center of our agenda, that should be the center of our moral agenda, our political agenda, and our environmental agenda.”

Keeping it Local
California is an expensive place to do business, and it’s not merely a question of creating jobs and training people to do them, but making sure those jobs are good ones, and keeping them in California. All the panelists spoke of the need for consistent political policies, with committed finances, and government incentives to continue developing new technologies and training workers to build and install them. But in a global economy, it’s difficult to keep jobs in California in the face of cheaper workforces and production facilities abroad. California was once a leader in wind and solar manufacturing, but with inconsistent policies and lack of investment, those jobs moved elsewhere.

As Angelides noted, “California’s history in many respects is one of invention and innovation and the first wave of jobs taking place domestically. Then, as other countries are educating their workforces, and as costs are cheaper overseas, jobs migrate overseas.

“If our goal is not only to clean up the environment, but to become energy independent, why would we pursue an economic policy that allows the component parts overseas so we’re now dependent on the geopolitics of India and China as opposed to the Middle East?”

An Inclusive Solution.
Only by including everybody can we produce the critical mass required for a green economy to really take shape and hold. If we outsource it, and get it done more cheaply elsewhere, said Commissioner Simon, “this labor will literally be bused past the very communities, the very constituents we’re here to serve.”

For Van Jones, that means getting the communities who were locked out of the last centuries’ pollution based economy, “locked in to the center of this new clean, green economy.” Only by doing that will we “actually build a green economy big enough to get the job done,” he said.

“If it remains an eco-niche, an eco-chic, something only for people who can afford to put a solar panel on their second home we are not going to move the needle on this problem.

"But when people who are struggling right now for bus fare can be a part of this green economy, we will be able to meet both the social and ecological challenges of the new century."

Image of Van Jones courtesy of UC Santa Cruz .