Van Jones talks Tea Party, progressive values and the oil spill

Depending on what side of the political fence you sit on, Van Jones is either a savior or a demon, a visionary or a left-wing radical tied to communism and bizarre conspiracy theories about the 9-11 terrorist attacks. What no one will say is that Jones, 41, is a shrinking violet or a wallflower.

He’s a high energy speaker, casting a spell on listeners and calling things the way he sees them. Glenn Beck may have forced his resignation from the White House in 2009, but Jones was freed by the experience.

In a wide ranging interview with Michigan Messenger before his Saturday appearance in East Lansing at the Michigan Policy Summit, Jones displayed the keen insights and cutting observations which landed him the designation as Time Magazine’s Hero of the Environment. And, as promised at the time of his resignation by Arianna Huffington, the proverbial sock of government employment had been removed, the silencing muzzle loosened and Jones was ready to talk.

With national news saturated with coverage of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Jones took aim at the company throughout the interview. When asked about suggestions by Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is also the House Minority Leader, and the national Chamber of Commerce that taxpayers should foot some of the bill for the clean up in the Gulf, Jones replied sarcastically, calling British Petroleum “a worthy candidate for us to jump in and help to bail them out.”

“Hell. No. It’s ridiculous. We should be going the other direction,” Jones said. “BP’s assets should be held in escrow until we figure out the full extent of not just the clean up of the beaches but fixing back up the local economy. Anybody who thinks a single taxpayer should put money on the table to clean up behind the mess of this foreign multinational corporation that came over here and corrupted our government, killed innocent workers, flagged up our coastline and destroyed a regional economy — I think needs to have their head examined.”

And Jones lashed out at those pushing for drilling in the Great Lakes.

“You can’t have ‘drill, baby, drill,’ without risking ‘spill, baby, spill,’” he said.

From there Jones launched into one of the major underlying themes of his environmental activism. The United States, he points out, has about five percent of the world’s population and controls only about two to four percent of the world’s oil reserves, yet uses about 25 percent of the world’s oil resources currently. He calls that a big problem for drilling advocates.

“We will never be able to drill and burn our way out of this problem. It’s literally mathematically impossible,” Jones said. “You can risk catastrophic impacts on other parts of your economy. You can risk catastrophic impacts on the health and safety of communities and America’s natural beauty etc to try to get those last few drops, but when you get done, you’ve risked things that should be enduring for a very fleeting, short-term, partial fraction of a solution. I just don’t think it makes sense.”

That, Jones says, is why changing the way America powers itself — both in form and function — is a national security issue, one which can also answer the country’s economic and environmental problems. And he thinks Michigan is the place to start.

“It’s a tragedy because there are the most highly skilled workers in the world in Michigan sitting idle, when certainly what we saw happen in the Gulf demonstrates that we need to have them working building wind turbines and solar panels and smart batteries and all the things that we need to begin to re-power America in a different way,” he said.

He noted that making a wind turbine uses as much steel as manufacturing a car does, and requires some 8,000 “finely machined” parts to operate properly. With Michigan’s auto industry struggling to rebound, and its workers idling, they have the skills necessary to bend the steel and run the machines. In order to shift to the new green energy system, however, Jones says a shift in American thinking is necessary. That means not just renewable energy, but energy efficiencies.

“It’s not just the solar panels but the caulking guns that need to be deployed,” he said.

America once had the lead on renewable energies, he said.

“What happened was Jimmy Carter put the solar panels up on the White House, and Ronald Reagan took them down and put them in the garbage can,” Jones said. “Asia and Europe reached into the garbage can and took those technologies that we developed and created world leading companies… The modern solar panel, the modern wind turbine, all that was created with American public taxpayer investment and yet we did not seize those technologies and distribute them because of a political change.”

But in order to move forward and grasp the opportunity for political change available, Jones said, progressives have to “stop being afraid to be progressive.”

He said he is confused by the Tea Party movement, which he says “has non-solutions” to the problems facing the nation.

“I don’t understand how it is that we have allowed a movement to call itself patriotic when its only obsession is with making American government weaker,” Jones said. “We need American government to be stronger to protect our economic interests in an increasingly difficult global environment, to invest in the things we need, to have food on the table and safe communities and to protect us from these predatory special interests like these banksters, and these military bilksters, and big oil out there destroying a huge chunk of American beauty.”

Jones paused.

“The reason that we get stuck in these quandries is because we have ourselves backed away from progressive values at the very moment they are most needed,” he said.

“You see bad corporate actors ruining America from coast to coast and we’re still afraid to stand up and say that we want the American government to be strong enough to deal with these people,” Jones said. “We want the priorities of local, state and federal government to reflect the urgent, desperate need of the people for relief and opportunity again.”