And so, we have a lot to grieve and deal with and part of that are the inevitable economic consequences for the tourism industry there, the shrimpers, the fisher folk. We’ve got to make sure BP steps up and takes care of those problems for those workers who are a part of the energy sector in that part of the country. They too need to be taken care of by BP. The idea that either they should have no income or continue doing what just went bad, those are false choices. They should be allowed to be taken care of by BP. BP should write the checks, make sure they are held harmless, but we’ve got to make sure this doesn’t happen again and the moratorium is appropriate.

"It’s appropriate because what went wrong is not clear and we’ve got a long time to run this country and there’s no rush at this point, from a national point of view to put ourselves back in jeopardy. I’ve said many times, people think I’m joking, I’m not joking, this is like cockroaches, there’s not just one rickety rig out there. You go home today and you see a cockroach in yourself, you can lie to yourself, you can say they just came in on the pizza box. I don’t have a problem, it’s just one thing. No. You got one roach, you got a thousand roaches. You got one rickety rig out there, you got hundreds of them. We need to take our time, figure out where the peril is and make sure that before we get back into the business of drilling up our coastlines and risking America’s beauty for the last little drops of oil that it makes sense for the whole country. The workers in particular should not be used as an excuse for us to do things that actually have failed the whole country as well as the workers of that area."

When asked how he’d be advising President Obama if he were still in the White House, Jones replied,

“Pretty much everybody at this point has the same basic point of view on this stuff, people in the White House, not in the White House, we’ve got to go from managing a crisis to leading a country. When something this bad happens, your natural instinct is to put all the resources to managing that crisis, to make sure what needs to happen, actually happens. At some point you have to pivot back up to the whole country, reassure people and then say what do we learn from this and move in a new direction. So I think what you’re going to see with the President is, he’s going to be more boots on the ground in the area, he’s also going to, I would predict, connect the dots for Americans, we learn the right lessons.”

Jones said the worst thing that can happen is to have a crisis like this and not learn the right lessons.

Van Jones Interview at Michigan Summit

Jones also believes we have an artificially low price for oil and what that means is that we’ve got to pass an energy and climate bill that will consider the true cost of oil on the front end as opposed to paying a catastrophic cost on the back end because we haven’t priced oil appropriately. Jones hopes that the President can pivot from the spill to the bill, which would hopefully prevent us from having problems in the future.

Jones’ comments to those gathered followed the same theme,

“You can’t pollute for free. If you throw a gum wrapper on the ground, you will quickly find you can’t pollute for free. If you have a small business, you can’t pollute for free. You can’t throw you garbage on the freeway and not pay a fine. If you can’t pollute for free, you tell me why the people who are spewing megatons of carbon into the atmosphere can do it for free. They’ve paid less than you would pay to throw a gum wrapper on the ground. There’s something morally wrong with that.”

Referring to the situation that President Obama stepped into when his administration took over, Jones said,

“We have a President that volunteered to be captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.”

Jones also reminded the crowd that it wasn’t President Obama that inspired the movement that helped elect President Obama,

“You inspired him first. That’s how inspiring the work is you do every day. It’s our turn again to believe in who we are to stand up for what we know is right. Referring to the Tea Party, they used to have a name, ‘cranks.’ They didn’t get bigger, they just got louder. “

Concluding, Jones admonished those gathered, saying,

“Change is hard. We went from despair to hope in 2008. Hope is a lot easier than change. Anybody try to lose any weight? Losing those 15 pounds is change. If you don’t give up hope you eventually get to the change. “