We have the chance to build this new energy economy in ways that reflect our deepest values of inclusion, diversity, and equal opportunity for everyone.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of creating an energy economy that embodies values of inclusion and equality.
Van Jones highlights the opportunity we have to shape a new energy economy that not only addresses environmental concerns but also prioritizes social values like inclusion, diversity, and equal opportunity. It calls for a collective effort to ensure that the transition to sustainable energy benefits all members of society, promoting equity in economic growth and opportunities.
In practice
In a speech on renewable energy policy, one might quote Van Jones to emphasize the need for equitable practices.
The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities is not more police and prisons, but ecologically sounds economic development. And that same path can lift us to a new, green economy - one with the power to lift people out of poverty while respecting and repairing the environment.
Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.
Will the new environmental leaders fight for eco-equity in this new "green economy" they are birthing?
Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.
We pull out of the ground death, we burn death in our power plants, and then we act shocked when we get death in the form of oil spills and global warming.
When you take the people who most need work and connect them with the work that most needs doing, you save. You save that young personβs life, you save a whole bunch of money, and you save the soul of this country when you invest and give people a chance, give people hope, give people opportunity.
Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change.
That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.
If you don't have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old - even if it is about efficiency - I don't think is a long-term game.
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day?
Many abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights.
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