Green jobs growth outpaced other-colored job classifications by nearly 250 percent over the last decade, growing 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007, versus 3.7 percent for the overall job market.

There are now 770,000 green jobs spread out among 68,200 businesses, according to the new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. While that's a tiny slice of the overall American jobs pie, it is already approaching the same scale as the traditional energy sector — coal mining, utilities, big oil — which employs 1.27 million people. As a job creator, it stacks up even better against biotechnology, which (despite a longer history and greater investment) employs only 200,000 people.

The report differs from government projections or most industry association estimates in that it counts individual jobs, not entire industries. In other words, only the electricians who actually install solar panels were counted as green electricians.

"Although our numbers are conservative, our report provides the most precise depiction to date of the clean energy economy in the United States," the Pew researchers wrote.

Green jobs are a major part President Obama's plan for economic recovery and energy transformation. Manufacturing jobs have declined a few percent a year over the last decade, and in the bullet-point language of Whitehouse.gov, his administration wants to "Drive the development of new, green jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced." The report shows that environmentally friendly jobs already exist, but most of the "green" jobs aren't in clean energy at all. A full 65 percent of the jobs fell into the "conservation and pollution mitigation" category, which includes recycling.

That leaves a lot of room for growth in clean energy, even if some jobs are lost in traditional energy companies. Right now, there's a small base. There were only 89,000 "clean energy" jobs in 2007. Current research indicates that for renewable energy sources to really make an impact on greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel dependence, we're going to need a lot of manpower.

University of California Berkeley researchers found the renewable energy industry was more labor intensive than traditional fossil-fuel businesses (pdf).

"Across a broad range of scenarios, the renewable energy sector generates more jobs than the fossil fuel-based energy sector per unit of energy delivered (i.e., per average megawatt)," wrote a team from the Goldman School of Public Policy.

To deliver megawatts and jobs, the Pew researchers recommended a "comprehensive, economy-wide energy plan" and implicitly endorsed the President's stated desire to sign a climate and energy bill like the Waxman-Markey bill wending its way through Congress.

"President Obama has expressed his support for a federal market-based system that would substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and national standards that would help America draw more of its energy supply from clean, renewable sources and achieve greater energy efficiency," the Pew report concluded. "Those federal and state policies, together with continued private-sector support, will position the United States as a leader in the global clean energy economy."

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Image: A man who loves his job at the Oregon DOT. flickr/OregonDOT

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