VJ: (con't.) But the other thing I think is important is to recognize that there's a lot of information out there about what people can do individually.  A lot of books are out there. "Here's how you can cut your carbon footprint," and it's very important that we keep that going - the individual actions, but we also have to recognize that this is a very large problem, and we have to also act in community. Not just individual consumers, but collective citizen action is now required to get the laws on the side of the change. Right now, the government  unfortunately is still on the side of the problem makers in the U.S. economy. The old polluters still get the big subsidies, then the Pentagon gets money to protect the oil lines all around the world - that's even another subsidy - and they get to pollute for free.  Carbon has no charge, there's no taxes, no cap in trade system - that's an other subsidy. So the polluters get all the support; meanwhile, the solar industry and the wind industry had to beg and cry just to get a little extension on tax credits, and the organic food industries struggle sometimes with them trying to pull the rug out from under the standards.

What we've got to do is get the government not to be on the side of the problem makers, but on the side of the problem solvers, so that the right market signals can be sent with a price on carbon, with support for things that are healthy and good, and that is not an individual consumer action. That is a collective, community citizenship action, and we need to be able to now expand into that kind of activity as well, and the book is really about that. It points out policies that we can pass at the local level, the national level, ideas for the next president, as well as local success stories that show how unlikely faces in unlikely places are already - in places like Chicago, Newark and others - beginning to green this country from the bottom up, bringing some of the greenest solutions to the poorest people. I think that's the way forward.

LG: What's your advice to readers and prospective readers of your book?  What thoughts do you want to keep top-of-mind in order to more toward the green collar economy you foresee?

VJ: Well, I think the think that people should keep top-of-mind moving forward to a green collar economy is that the green collar economy is really an answer to a lot of the trouble we're seeing right now in our financial system and our in our economy.  This book is really kind of a green cure or a green fix for a lot of what's gone wrong.  The challenge that we have in the economy right now is that we have been sold in some ways a bill of goods over the past 20, even 30 years.  Both parties really believed that we could have a U.S. economy that could go on forever based on consumption rather than production, based on borrowing rather than building, and based on environmental destruction rather than environmental restoration.

And so now we're seeing the result, which is that - you know, not just ecologically, but economically unsustainable - to have the entire world economy powered not by U.S. production but by U.S. consumption and credit.  We built the U.S. economy individually and collectively on a credit card, and now those credit cards are tumbling down.