Does the administrative assistant in the front office of a solar power company count? How about the vanpool driver? Using extremely generous assumptions, energy economist Roger Bezdek calculated that green jobs accounted for about 5 percent of the US workforce in 2006. That's not shabby, but it's a long way from a clean, green economy.

[2] We'll turn miners into solar installers.

Working-class Americans still feel burned by NAFTA, when they were told not to worry about lost manufacturing jobs because they'd be trained for new, high-skill jobs. Clean-energy advocates, promising that jobs sent offshore by future carbon taxes will quickly be replaced, are now pushing an uncomfortably similar line.

But things may be different this time. There is already a relatively high demand for green-collar labor in manufacturing and the power sector, and a shortage of trained workers. In a 2005 survey by the American Public Power Association, half of utility employers said that at least 20 percent of their workers would be eligible to retire within the next seven years. Most of those 20 percent were highly skilled. Those vacancies avoid the main problem with the old NAFTA strategy: A job training program that's not linked up to specific industries with documented demand for labor "never works," says Dan Kammen, director of the University of California-Berkeley's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory and a top environmental policy adviser for Obama. "But if you have a federal mandate for clean energy, and you have job training in association with industry, there is a big success route." It's worked in Germany, which added 57,000 jobs in the wind, solar, hydro, and biomass industries between 2004 and 2006. But in the US, where industrial and job training policy is still haphazard? That remains to be seen.

[3] Green jobs are primarily in wind and solar, i.e. the West and Southwest.

Consider wind turbines: Each consists of more than 8,000 parts, from ball bearings to fiberglass housing. A 2004 report from the national research firm Renewable Energy Policy Project found more than 16,000 US firms that could take part in that supply chain, most in the populous Southern and Midwestern states that have lost the bulk of the manufacturing jobs.

But renewable energy is only half the strategy. The other half, and the biggest job creator, is increasing efficiency--revamping buildings, cars,

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