Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.
Interpretation
Ethanol from corn, supported by the government, is seen as a costly and misguided attempt at solving environmental issues.
Van Jones critiques the government’s support for corn-based ethanol as an environmental solution, comparing it to the Iraq War in terms of being poorly conceived and ultimately harmful. He suggests that this approach, although well-intentioned, has turned out to be expensive and ineffective, illustrating how certain environmental policies may fail to deliver real benefits and instead create new problems.
In practice
Mention this quote in a debate about renewable energy sources and their impacts.
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.
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.
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 person’s 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.
We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people.
Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.
You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet.
I think history shows that countries have to have some kind of a threshold level of economic success before they begin to have the means and the will to focus on the environment.
The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.
We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms — from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.
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