Renew, Re-energize And Revive

Representatives of the Blue-Green Alliance were in Columbus Wednesday preaching the gospel of good jobs, a clean environment and a safer world. The Alliance is a partnership between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club. As they say, “Historic times demand historic responses.” The Alliance offers “visionary solutions” understanding that the new jobs must come, not from the race to the bottom to be the filthiest society, but from embracing new clean technology that creates jobs for the 21^st century.

The reality is that creating a green environment and curbing greenhouse gases will create a generation of new high-tech domestic manufacturing jobs. Synergetically, these jobs will make our planet more sustainable and healthy by reducing global warming and cleaning our air. There’s at least a generation of work for steelworkers and other laborers by rebuilding our public transportation system and creating new solar and wind powered energy systems. The Alliance estimates that a commitment to green technology would create more than 1.4 million new well-paying jobs.

Currently, Bush, Blackwell and the Republican Party aided by their junior partners the New Democrats, embrace reactionary free trade policy that promotes environmental destruction and worker degradation. The trade policy not only produces toxics, but is poison to the vast majority of people on this planet.

The debate in this year’s Ohio gubernatorial election should be how we can both create a greener Ohio and produce new high-tech jobs. The Blue-Green Alliance understands that and they understand the need to create renewable energies, re-energized “cool cities,” and revive the American Dream.