Van Jones Quotes
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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.
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If you just say that, look at all the good stuff and you don't acknowledge the toxic stuff, you're wrong. If you're only looking at toxic stuff and don't recognize there's going to be some good stuff if you're for infrastructure or whatever, you're wrong.
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We've have to heed our Biblical obligation to be good stewards of the Earth after leaving the Garden of Eden.
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Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.
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In the fourth quadrant (lower right), working-class people are motivated to take on green-collar jobs and start green businesses.
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Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength - and win a better future for generations to come.
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The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence - and eventually falling through that hole ourselves.
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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.
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If someone like myself, who is married to a white woman, who has spent my entire life building bridges, can't point out the alt-right whitelash reaction without being accused of being a racial polemecist, we're going to have a big problem.
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I think there's going to be a tug of war in this country over who are the real patriots because at a time of national crisis, economic collapse and calamity, ecological peril and social dislocation, the American people deserve to be a partner to the American government.
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Ninth generation American, ma'am, and I'm the first one in my family born with all my rights. I'm a ninth generation American. And so we have not escaped because I went to Yale all the problems of this country.
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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.
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God chooses community sometimes to bear an unfair burden to force us to rise to the next level of consciousness and understanding.
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In other words: we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, with the same method. We can beat global warming and the global recession at the same time, with the same method. We can do this by putting people to work re-powering America with clean energy.
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What I saw during the Hillary Clinton campaign [2016] with data dummies who were more concerned with polls than people, they were more concerned with donors than voters. And it wasn't a lot of heart felt on that campaign and I think it left us vulnerable.
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I think the most important thing is discovering an idea that moves you, and then letting people who are moved by that idea find each other, and work together. A lot of times people focus on the technical side-"oh, I've got to take a class on non-profit development." Too few people allow themselves to think outside the box with regard to their issue areas.
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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.
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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.
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People can tell if you don't like 'em. African Americans can tell we're not welcome in the Republican Party no matter how many times they say we are. All the signals that it's a party that tolerates anti-black racism is very clear.
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Progressives are overreacting .Underreacting, though, to the - what the real threats are, and the real opportunities.
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Any successful long-term strategy will require that the green wave fully and passionately embrace the principles of eco-equity.
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Fighting for and defending the values from the pulpit is critical. You can't love the Creator, and disrespect the creation.
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People in red states and blue states can agree that if we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, letting people work their way out of poverty without undermining community health, we have a moral obligation to do so.
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That we could live in a country with no rules for the rich, no rights for the poor, and no middle class to speak of, is wrong; it's a crime against the next generation and we've got to do something about it.