For a post with a lower screed-content, I'll point you to Grist's interview with Oakland, CA, social justice advocate Van Jones. Jones notes that while the environmental movement is often seen as a self-righteous fixation of upper middle class white aging hippies and hippie wannabes (and that impression is too often correct), an environmentally-friendly economy can be and will need to be something that provides economic opportunities for the working class and poor. As I've noted before, a more environmentally sound economy will involve more "skilled service" jobs, and less focus on cheap energy and global flows of disposable goods.

Buying a new car will more and more mean importing a new car, the manufacturing of which is more and more automated (so that you're not even creating jobs on a global scale), while hiring a mechanic to keep your old car running well is always going to involve a local human. Building a new house involves distant extraction of natural resources and manufacturing of standardized parts, while rehabbing an old house is a job for local humans. Clear-cutting forests and trashing any tree too small to be useful is done with gigantic combine-like machines, while responsible forestry involves humans selectively harvesting mature trees and husbanding the forest as a whole to continuing life and productivity.

Jones agrees - an environmental economy will prioritize jobs for humans and prioritize specialized, skilled jobs performed locally. He calls these "green-collar jobs":

[R]ather than creating job-training pipelines that put these kids at the back of the line for the last century's pollution-based jobs, we need to be creating opportunities for them to be at the front of the line for the new clean and green jobs.

Another piece is to go a step beyond job training and begin to think about reviving the old Civilian Conservation Corps that [Franklin D. Roosevelt] created during the environmental challenges of his day. Now we have a new set of environmental challenges. The national Apollo Alliance and the Campus Climate Challenge have been talking with us about creating what we would call an Energy Corps. It would be like the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, but it would be focused on deploying people to begin retrofitting the U.S. economy, rebooting it based on clean energy.

Jones calls the people looking to make mad cash off of a transition to an environmental economy "eco-capitalists", and says that those people will need to involve, engage, and hire lots of people to successfully make that transition:

If you're trying to make money in the green economy, you need government on your side; in order to get government on your side, you need some sector of the electorate to support you. If you are an eco-capitalist, you're trying to create new jobs -- people who need new jobs could probably be good allies.

There's no way to get changes big enough to solve these problems without creating pathways out of poverty for millions of new green-collar workers.

These new jobs won't be subject to the same downward wage pressures as, say, auto manufacturing, because, as mentioned, a mechanic overseas doesn't do much good for your car that's broken down here.

Finally, a "green-growth" coalition requires a change in tactics - California's green energy ballot measure failed despite $40m in support because supporters couldn't communicate with working class and poor communities what opportunities it would bring them. The only message these communities heard was "gas will be more expensive".

[Proponents] wasted $40 million and we missed a huge opportunity. I don't know people well enough to say if it's racism or not, but apparently you have a lot of people in leadership who can't add, who just can't do basic math.
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The other thing to keep in mind is that people who have a lot of opportunity, the affluent, love to hear about this big crisis. Oh my god, global warming, we're all going to die. For people who have a lot of crisis already, they don't want to hear about another big crisis. They've got sick parents, no health care, all that kind of stuff -- they don't want to hear about it. The rhetoric has to change. For people with a bunch of opportunity, you tell them about the crisis. For people with a bunch of crisis, you tell about the opportunities.

When you start shutting down some of these dirty power plants and move to renewables, you reduce asthma by a certain percentage. That's important, because if you have one kid with asthma and you don't have health care, that's about $10,000 a year between inhalers, lost wages, and emergency room visits. So you're putting $10,000 per kid per year back into the pockets of poor people when you clean up the air. You save the polar bears and you save the black kids too.

This seems related to the idea that we can't advance environmentalism through asceticism alone. This statement is generally made with the affluent in mind - if people have plenty of choices, why would they choose the path of austerity? Similarly, if people are already living a life of austerity, asking them to choose further reduction in consumption is going to win you approximately zero support. For both the affluent and the eking-out, a message of opportunity and benefit is going to work better than asking for real hardship now in exchange for abstract hardship later.