Selling Americans on a 'Green-Collar' Economy

Van Jones may have one of the hottest assignments in the Obama administration — selling the notion of a new “green-collar” economy — but in a country burdened with a 9.4 percent unemployment rate, it’s not easy.

How do you tell an unemployed construction worker that it’s time to start thinking about installing solar panels instead of aluminum siding? “I think some of these ideas are complicated for people when they first hear them,” said Jones, senior green jobs adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Most people “don’t know what retrofitting a building means, or they haven’t heard of . . . a smart biofuel. And so a lot of times, people just sort of go yes, yes, but they aren’t really following you.”

Jones, 40, has been a leader in a growing movement that aims to hit two major social and policy challenges — the struggling economy and environmental quality — with one boulder. It’s a vision that has been embraced by various industries and advocacy groups intrigued by the promise of thousands of new green jobs as the country invests in energy efficiency and confronts climate change.

But skeptics say the reality of creating a “green economy” is more complex. As with any new business, start-up costs are high — and money is tight these days. And although the administration has allocated as much as $80 billion through the stimulus package to create more than 6 million green jobs, it is impossible at this point to quantify success. For one, there is no official federal definition of a green job — though the president’s budget includes money for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to work with other agencies to define the green economy and produce data on green-collar jobs by 2011.

Washington Post