Van Jones
You've never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, 'We can't believe it happened here. We can't believe it's these suburban white kids.' It's only them!
I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.
Let me say what I actually believe. I believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, by Al Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden, and no one else trying to hurt America.
Now is not the time to shrink from the challenge of saving our only home in the universe. Now is not the time to pull into ourselves, retreating into either survivalist or escapist mode. To the contrary, this is the time for titans, not turtles. Now is the time to open our arms, expand our horizons, and dream big. Big problems require big solutions.Collection: Dream
It's in that convergence of spiritual people becoming active and active people becoming spiritual that the hope of humanity now rests.Collection: Spiritual
The message is going to be the same. It's very simple. We're either going to turn to each other or on each other.Collection: Simple
In a democracy, you won't always get to have your way. But you should always get to have your say.Collection: Democracy
Dr. King didn't get famous giving a speech that said,"I have a complaint."Collection: Determination
We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Houses don't retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don't plant themselves. Community gardens don't tend themselves. Farmers' markets don't run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity.Collection: Running
Stop using your phones and laptops as toys and use them to start a revolution.Collection: Phones
All humans have fear, and those of us who are fortunate have faith.Collection: Have Faith
The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not just be about recycling things to give them a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance.Collection: Second Chance
If we stand for change, we can spark a popular movement with power, influence, magic and genius.Collection: Magic
When it gets harder to love, love harder.Collection: Harder
The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures.Collection: Moon
If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will NEVER be built.Collection: Mistake
Each and every one of us should stop playing small and license ourselves to become one of the giants of the new century. We will need champions by the truckload.Collection: Champion
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.Collection: People
If you think love is weak, that's a personal problem because real love is the strongest thing in the universe.Collection: Real
Environmental justice is the movement to ensure that no community suffers disproportionate environmental burdens or goes without enjoying fair environmental benefits.Collection: Justice
I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.Collection: Satisfaction
America should be leading the world in green and clean solutions, and human rights. We shouldn't be leading the world in wars and incarceration rates and pollution. We can be a better country. I think we're going to be a better country.Collection: Country
Well, we in America are about to break up with oil. Why not break up with poverty and discrimination too?Collection: Oil
You know it's not "you have to see it to believe it" - sometimes you have to believe it to see it. You have to know what you're looking for when you're seeing signs of an authoritarian takeover of your country.Collection: Country
Now we stand at our own crossroads, looking out upon two futures: one with rising temperatures, rising oceans, and rising violence on a hot and strip-mined planet and another with expanding organic harvests, growing solar arrays, and deepening global partnerships on a green and thriving Earth.Collection: Ocean
Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength - and win a better future for generations to come.Collection: Winning
Ordinary Americans can't pollute for free. You can't dump your trash on the sidewalk or throw all your refuse into your neighbor's yard. I don't understand why corporate polluters should be allowed to dump megatons of carbon, the most dangerous pollution in the history of the world, into our thin shell of an atmosphere, and not pay a penny to do it.Collection: Atmosphere
Listen, here's reality. It is completely unfair and absolutely necessary that people who have been oppressed and marginalized have to lead everybody. That is MLK, that is Dolores Huerta, that is Fannie Lou Hamer, that is Ella Jo Baker, that is Nelson Mandela. You walk down the line.Collection: Reality
Donald Trump's promised the moon. Now he has power. He's going to fail to deliver. He's not going to be able to bring a bunch of coal jobs back and a bunch of factory jobs back in this global economy. Period. Because you can't. It's not going to happen.Collection: Jobs
The question is: do we pay a little bit more now? Or do we pay a whole lot later? For the equivalent of a postage stamp a day for each American, we can put a price on carbon today that will send a signal to private capital to invest in the clean technologies of tomorrow. Taking a vast portfolio of new energy solutions to scale will ultimately drive down costs through competition.Collection: Technology
Keith Ellison is the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the progressive movement.Collection: Party
We need a national renewable energy goal. Such a goal, sometimes called a renewable energy standard (RES), would spell out what percentage of our power America plans to get from renewable sources.Collection: America
We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future - things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.Collection: Work
The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City.Collection: New York
We're going to bake this planet, and be a curse to all species, including our own, if we don't find an alternative to carbon-based fuel. That's the #1 problem.Collection: Alternatives
Clean energy is hippy power. But its also cowboy power, it's rancher power, it's Appalachian power.Collection: Cowboy
People forget: solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Businesses don't retrofit themselves to waste less energy and water, nor do homes weatherize themselves.Collection: Home
There are only two ways to have a middle class in your country: either you have highly skilled manufacturing jobs, or you have a highly skilled, well trained, knowledge-based workforce. In other words, college.Collection: Country
All the big ideas for getting us onto a lower carbon trajectory involve a lot of people doing a lot of work, and that's been missing from the conversation. This is a great time to go to the next step and ask, well, who's going to do the work? Who's going to invest in the new technologies? What are ways to get communities wealth, improved health, and expanded job opportunities out of this improved transition?Collection: Jobs
Most green-collar jobs are middle-skill jobs. That means they require more education that a high-school diploma, but less than a four-year degree.Collection: Jobs
Asia is rising economically - and is thirsty for oil. The price pressures on oil and oil price shocks, due to Asia's economic rise, mean that all steps made now to reduce oil dependence will protect us from pain and volatility later.Collection: Pain
Too often we think about the green economy as an elite market niche, one in which affluent people spend more money to consume greener and cleaner products.Collection: Thinking
Little kids sing a song called "America the Beautiful." They sing a song called "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land." To me, those songs are not just nice little ditties. They are marching orders. They are commandments that we must protect America's beauty from the clear-cutters, the strip-miners, the oil spillers. They are pledges we have made. They are promises to keep.Collection: Beautiful
I think we were naive during the first two years of the [Barack] Obama Administration because the Republicans didn't fight us on this point during the 2008 Presidential Election. Obama and McCain both ran on a clean energy platform. But now, uncontested lies have eroded hard-won public understanding. So, we have to go back and make the case again.Collection: Lying
I have many sources of inspiration. I'd have to point to Dr. Martin Luther King, first and foremost. But my parents were good, hardworking folks who kept us in the church and the public schools, and out of trouble, for the most part.Collection: Kings
The government built the grid to favor one industry over others. But I don't hear any conservatives screaming about that. Folks don't understand that the elite economic interests that are holding them down are also feeding them a bunch of lies.Collection: Lying
Nobody wants a nanny state, where the government is stamping out initiative and telling us what to do, but the idea that the only alternative to that is to throw the American people overboard into a global economy with no protections to cushion us from some of these blows is absurd on its face. That's why I think there's been a concerted effort to distort my message. When you hear me speak beyond the sound bites taken out of context, I think I make a lot of sense to people, even those in Red States like the one where I grew up.Collection: Taken
I hope everybody's getting smarter.Collection: Smarter
The problem isn't that the green jobs aren't sexy enough. It's that they're not plentiful enough. A young person looking for a job isn't looking just for a sexy job, they're looking for any job.Collection: Sexy
Unfortunately, we have a 50% unemployment rate among our urban youth of color. It's not about making green jobs more attractive. It's about making them more available. And that requires Congress passing legislation that will give a real break to the people who want to introduce new technologies to the American marketplace.Collection: Jobs