May 30--President Obama's "green jobs czar," Van Jones, told a group of Vermont business leaders last week that the Green Mountain State is in a unique position to show the rest of the nation how to create a strategy to both lift the nation out of recession and help fight the growing threat of climate change.

Jones, who was the keynote speaker at the Vermont Business and Industry EXPO in South Burlington, said the rest of America needs Vermont to maintain its "pace-car" reputation for merging entrepreneurial, environmental and social-justice strategies into a forward-looking green economy.

"Pound-for-pound, this state is leading the country," Jones said.

Jones' official title is special adviser of Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He has been busy over the past few years pushing a simple idea: labor, social justice activists, environmentalists, students and faith-based organizations should come together to promote a political, economic and social agenda that boosts the interests of green capital and green technology in a way that spreads the benefits as widely as possible. If they can do this, our nation and our world will be much better off.

"For decades, we somehow let our political system give us a false choice: to be concerned about the economic health of our children -- or the physical health of our grandchildren," Jones said. "This administration

has changed the terms of that debate."

Vermont has been an early adopter of that idea. Well before President Obama took office, the state joined a regional group doing carbon cap-and-trade. Vermont is part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a market-based emissions trading system where electric power generators in 10 Northeast states purchase allowances for their CO2 emissions through auctions. The states then invest the proceeds in consumer benefits: energy efficiency, renewable energy and other clean energy technologies.

Obama has proposed something similar on a national scale, with the goal of gradually decreasing total allowable carbon emissions and providing an incentive to reduce the use of fossil fuels. "The clean forms of energy should be the profitable ones," Jones said.

Efficiency Vermont, a program that Jones got a quick look at during his Vermont visit, is another model for the nation -- an electric utility whose job it is to encourage residential and business customers to use less energy.

And the many profitable alternative-energy businesses --such as Hinesburg's NRG Systems and Williston's Earth Turbines -- that have sprung up in Vermont are another sign that green jobs are where the growth is. Both low- and high-tech industries around the country will ultimately benefit when, instead of importing components from Europe or Asia for wind turbines and solar arrays, we are building them in America.

This what Jones calls "The Green Collar Economy," which is also the title of his best-selling book on the subject. It is possible to do right by the environment and make the economy grow. But we need to shift our massive government subsidies for coal, petroleum and nuclear power and put some of that money toward wind, solar, hydro and biomass energy.

Through a mix of government spending and regulation, we can speed the development of green technology both here and around the world. To do this requires taking on some of the most powerful lobbies and corporations in the country. It would take nothing short of a revolution in how Washington works. If the Obama administration has the political will, Vermont already has the blueprint in place for how to take the first steps toward a greener future.

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