Alex Steffen has a provocative piece on the fate of green jobs over at Worldchanging.org. I'll let you read it yourself, but it led me to review where the green jobs concept has gone in New Mexico.
I would be reluctant to lose the name or concept of 'green jobs' even though the vagueness of the phrase played significantly in the collapse of momentum his post chronicles.
In Santa Fe, we managed to create a few youth training programs while the concept was hot, and they've mostly survived. Green jobs are actually not all that glamorous when the dust settles -- most are old-fashioned skilled manual labor jobs like your grandfather had and they can't really support the kind of sustained publicity that was demanded of them in building a national movement.
'Green Jobs' carried a double meaning, and the idea broke down here on both counts: When "green" meant sustainability, the conversation bottomed out in debate locally as to what is or is not a green job -- would an accountant for a solar company be green? And the jobs themselves just simply slowed with the fate of the construction industry. When "green" meant, in a highly coded fashion, that under-privileged youth, or populations generally, i.e. minorities, would be the focus of the programs, the conversation broke down in more complex ways.