Daily Score Blog

“It’s hard to define what a green job actually is.”

That’s Michael Myers, an analyst for the Oregon employment department, speaking recently in Florence, on the Oregon Coast, to an audience of anxious members of the local chamber of commerce. He was answering questions about where new employment opportunities will arise and explaining the challenge of counting new, green jobs.

Across Oregon and Cascadia, many are hoping for, and working towards, a new, clean-energy economy that will usher in a healthy, lasting prosperity. There’s abundant reason for hope—even on the Oregon Coast, which has some of the highest unemployment rates in the region.

But green jobs aren’t always easy for employment analysts like Michael Myers to recognize, because they are scattered across most occupations and industries. In fact, every job can be more or less green.

This post lays out several approaches used in recent studies. If you're not interested in job counting, I suggest you you move along.

There are reasonable ways to define green jobs, and given those definitions, authorities can count them. A decade ago, in Green Collar Jobs, I divided all of Cascadia’s jobs into three categories based on the relative environmental impacts of the industries in which they were found: “green-collar jobs” is what I called those jobs in the lowest impact sectors of the economy such as services and information technology. By this method, most jobs--more than 60 percent of the total--are green-collar jobs.

In recent years, thanks to the leadership of green-economy evangelist and now White House adviser Van Jones, “green-collar jobs” has come to refer to employment directly related to environmental protection and energy security, particularly mid-skill manual labor jobs in those fields. Counting these positions is harder.

Today brings mixed news on the employment front: green businesses are sprouting across the Northwest, but workers across the country are still having trouble finding satisfying work.

But those aren't the only green businesses fueling the regional economy.