Editor's Note: With this post we would like to welcome Alexandra Smith onto our writing team! Alexandra has recently graduated with honors and is excited to get involved with the Celsias project. Alexandra is currently based in Connecticut. Keep a watch for her regular contributions!

In the States, Van Jones, President of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California and a leading voice in the green movement, recently brought his model of “green collar jobs” before the US Congress. The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming welcomed Jones to a hearing entitled “Economic Impacts of Global Warming: Green Collar Jobs.”

David Anderson of Green Options sums up quite well Jones' understanding of how the movement to slow climate meltdown may lead to a growth in jobs for low-income Americans. The following is an attempt to boil David's post down to its base elements:

We've recycled David's high-tech napkin-presentation!

Jones envisions the green economy as a four quadrant model. The x-axis ranges from brown and grey shades (abstract environmental problems) to green shades (solutions to environmental problems) moving from left-to-right respectively. The y-axis ranges from the poor to the rich from bottom-to-top respectively (see David’s napkin at right!). Currently the wealthier classes across the range of the x-axis have a place in a green economy. Those in the upper-left quadrant work on those environmental problems that do not effect their daily lives directly, i.e. donating money to save endangered species. Those in the upper-right are those in society with the resources to buy hybrid cars and local organic food. For those in low-income brackets in the States, their only place in the green economy is in the lower-left quadrant, in which they experience abstract environmental problems at the local level in areas such as “industrial pollution and the health problems it causes… and rising energy prices.” (Green Options). While the low-income community has been left out of benefiting from our current inefficient and environmentally unfriendly energy systems, Jones sees the lower-right quadrant as the place in which these people can engage in environmental solutions while gaining the material returns of their “green collar” work.

Jones, as well as many others who testified before Congress, believe that going green will create the opportunities to train those in low-income brackets in the trade of, well, greening! He writes that, “a green collar job is a vocational job in an ecologically responsible trade, for instance: installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings, constructing and maintaining wind farms, materials re-use and recycling, doing organic agriculture, etc.” (Huffington Post).

Oakland, California has already begun work creating green collar jobs and it looks like there is the potential for many more to surface. In a recent analysis the Cleantech Venture Network estimated that as many as 500,000 green collar jobs could be created by 2010.