Globally Green Living

When you think of environmentalists, you often think of tree-huggers or of people with money and education and who can afford to think of the rights that the environment should have according to their views. Thus the environmental movement is, in essence, an elitist movement. After all, all the energy-efficient appliances and vehicles are usually priced above the non-efficient ones. And although in the long run, it may make more monetary sense to have energy efficient stuff, most low-income people make decisions based on what is best for them in the short run (no wonder then all this big fuss about the impending collapse of the mortgage industry, balloon mortgages, the real estate bubble, etc. but I digress…).

I was rather surprised then when I read in the New York Times Tom Friedman’s column about an African-American man, who wants to convert African-Americans to the green movement. The man, Van Jones, says:

“You can’t take a building you want to weatherize, put it on a ship to China and then have them do it and send it back,” said Mr. Jones. “So we are going to have to put people to work in this country — weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms. Those green-collar jobs can provide a pathway out of poverty for someone who has not gone to college.”

Jones views the environment as an opportunity for blue-collar workers to not just obtain employment but also to find a niche where they can specialize in and eventually move up the employment ladder. The premise of the success of this argument is that people will indeed see the opportunity and act on it. It all seems to make perfect sense.

But more often than not, the environment is viewed as a way of losing jobs (so much for Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” that Alan Greenspan so much loves). And I can’t wait for some people to start saying that houses that are retrofitted to be energy-efficient are more expensive and minorities cannot afford them and that is just another way of benefiting white people because they will be the ones saving on energy costs and so on and so forth…

And thus, I imagine that to prevent the white people from saving money on their electrical bills, we will prevent the minorities to climb the environmental and economic ladders, even if ever so slowly. Funny how humans are…