A new Pew report on the clean energy economy shows that these "green jobs" everyone's talking about were stealthily surging way before Van Jones appeared on the Colbert Report. Since 1998, jobs in areas like environmentally sensible production, clean energy, and pollution mitigation have grown at 9.1 percent, while total job growth was only 3.7 percent.The map above shows where these jobs are. The dark green states-Oregon, Colorado, and Tennessee-have lots of green jobs and are adding more quickly. The brown states have comparatively few green jobs but, again, high green-job growth. And the pale green and pale beige states are actually losing green jobs.This is about what I'd expect to see. There's a larger, more established clean energy economy along the Pacific coast and high growth of green jobs in the middle of the country where there's land and sun and wind resources. Overall what this shows though is that clean energy is a substantial and growing part of the economy in almost every corner of the nation, and states would be wise to court companies doing this work.
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