Vice President Joe Biden is asking for our help:
Over the upcoming months, we will focus on answering those concerns that matter most to families. What can we do to make retirement more secure? How can we make child and elder care more affordable? How do we improve workplace safety? How are we going to get the cost of college within reach? What can we do to help weary parents juggle work and family? And, above all else, what are the jobs of the future? Here, we'll be looking at green jobs, better-paying jobs, better-quality jobs.
More, after the fold.
Now, of course you can click over right now and send in your suggestions and thoughts for the new Task Force. I did already, but found it was strangely unsatisfying.
I'm spoiled from being here.
One of the things I've come to love about being a Kossack is the Jeffersonian Marketplace of Ideas that happens in the comments. Not to kiss all yer respective arses, but this is a smart bunch of people. A community where the diversity of our individual life experiences really does lend itself to a creation greater than the sum of its parts. For obvious reasons, The White House website can't take the same format as Daily KOS, but they lose the richness of that open discussion, that creative synergy, when many different minds are all working together to create answers. The format of their website only allows people to post without reading other suggestions. It loses the benefit of the brainstorming process.
The first meeting is February 27th, in Philadelphia. The topic is
green jobs as a pathway to a strong middle class
which I find extremely interesting. I've been unemployed for over a year, ever since I had to close my small business, so anything about getting a job immediately earns my undivided attention. (I'm hoping to find a nonprofit job, and yes, I do have a CFRE and nonprofit experience, prior to my startup, if anyone out there is hiring ;) ) Anything about saving money also earns my undivided attention. Living green in my house has helped cut back the flow of green from my rapidly-evaporating home equity. I'm a recent new member of the Weaver's Way Co-op, and if I had oil heat, I would already be a member of its offshoot The Energy Cooperative. I don't know how anyone else feels about their power bill, (or billing departments), but around here, PECO is the big swinging Dick Cheney of utility companies. Even worse, they are about to be deregulated, and can now legally shut off people's heat in winter, and the rates are going to jump up to make up for "their losses" over the last several years... though they've had plenty of money to buy radio ad time to politely inform us of this.
The Grand Vision of a million former PECO customers, each with solar panels on every roof and a windmill in every backyard, sticking it to PECO for the next hundred years the way they've stuck it to us for the last hundred? Yeah, I could roll with that.
The other reason I love this idea, though, isn't about me-me-me. There are a lot of old, old buildings here in the City of Brotherly Love. Lotta people of the middle class or lower-than-middle-class, watching precious dollars fly out of their pockets too, through old single-pane windows, uninsulated walls and attics, inefficient old furnaces, warped old wooden windows, doors, and floors letting icy drafts blow through. There are a lot of other single moms out there, struggling far worse than I, to make it through this frigid winter we've been having. The cold is a scary thing right now. The heat this summer will also be a very scary thing for many people here.
When I went to college, the whole idea of Going Green was the private property of those who followed the Grateful Dead around every summer. Not that there's anything wrong with following the Grateful Dear around, God Bless Uncle Jerry in Heaven, but there were no Sustainable Energy classes, let alone Majors, back in my day. The more I think about it, the more excited I get that the ideas our new Administration is kicking around are truly going to be revolutionary, that 50 years from now, people will still get tingles that this was the turning point to a much better future.
So, I'd like to open the discussion, get ideas, hear experiences if anyone out there does have solar or wind power for their home... what's the barrier to entry in this new industry for a typical homeowner? What ideas can we as a community come up with to give to Joe Biden and the Task Force?