The middle class. It used to be something you could expect to be a part of with a high school education. Maybe you’d gone to a trade school, or had an apprenticeship. You might even live in a small town. And you could get decent work, put your kids through college, or at least help them out.
Today, those kids are struggling to stay in the middle class even if they’ve been to college. Low-income families often despair of the class mobility available to previous generations. And as further opportunities have opened to minorities, it’s become harder and harder to get ahead. This has made it difficult to economically redress the fact that at the end of the Civil Rights era, the country was already starting out with disproportionate numbers of minorities living in poverty.
Add in the sort of greedy, feudalistic rightwing economics we’ve been putting up with since Reagan, and people are falling behind or just staying behind with a regularity masked by the occasional bubble in one sector or another. We’re fast becoming a nation of serfs with falling life expectancies.
Environmental skeptics play into our tenuous grasp on whatever lifestyle we manage. They tell us that fixing global warming will make us all poor, and that it will hurt those people who are even poorer than we are. They’ll tell us that zeroing out our carbon emissions would be an economic catastrophe of dire proportions. But that’s just as much of a lie as when those same people were telling us that global warming wasn’t happening.
Yet a carbon neutral economy is a job engine, first and foremost. Not like the dotcom bubble, where only a slice of the population with a certain level of education got better opportunities, either. The level of change we would need to see to cancel out our emissions and live cleanly would bring back the era of middle class jobs for people with high school and trade school educations.
To fix our infrastructure, to change over, we’re going to need a lot of things made and built that can’t be outsourced. We’ll have construction work doing building retrofitting, building distributed generation power facilities, or building mass transit and rail projects. When those mass transit and rail projects are finished, we’ll need people to run and repair them. We’ll have manufacturing jobs, building the solar panels, wind turbines, wave turbines, and biomass co-firing machinery necessary to tackle our energy problems a piece at a time. Our electric power delivery infrastructure will have to be completely overhauled so that it’s more efficient. Our recycling industry could be expanded universally, instead of existing as a piecemeal patchwork. We’d be buying more local food, with more of our food dollar going directly to the farmer, and so there could be more farm sector work that paid a decent wage.
We could have all this, and an environment that was slowly returning to health. Inner cities whose air stopped stunting children’s lungs and giving them asthma. Farming communities whose residents didn’t face higher rates of miscarriage, developmental disorders and degenerative disorders due to the poisons that they’re forced to spray on their fields. A transportation system whose main hallmark wasn’t hours of miserable gridlock.
Sound good? Why do you think our politicians won’t demand it for us?
