Behind the green door.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINEPRINT

Cree Inc., the Durham company that has spent most of the 22 years since its founding trying to get the world to appreciate the potential of its light-emitting-diode technology, had an enviable October. First, the company announced it is adding 275 jobs to its North Carolina payroll, which prompted the governor to gush her thanks and surely caused state economic-development officials to celebrate not being asked (or gouged) for financial incentives in return. A few days later, Cree made investors even happier when it announced quarterly profits more than triple those of a year ago, a performance that sent the stock price to highs not seen since the dawn of the 21st century.

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But I'm neither a Cree investor nor a state official, so for my money the company's most valuable service was to open a discussion about the nature of "green jobs," as Cree's 275 new positions were dubbed by headline writers, the governor and the company itself. Cree reaped undeniable benefits by coloring the new jobs so--for one, the governor showed up for the big announcement--but when I sought to figure out at what point a job turns green, things got complicated.

Frankly, I'm not sure how Cree's jobs qualify. They look suspiciously like old-school manufacturing. At Cree's Durham plant, where the new jobs will be, stuff gets built: People show up for work, assemble components into a finished product, then go home at quitting time. As best I can tell, the jobs are advertised as green because 1) Cree's LEDs, once put to use, require significantly less electricity from carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants; and 2) like "organic" and "diverse," "green" is a word that generates instant progressive street cred. (There could be another reason the jobs qualify as green. Maybe Cree employees have to sign a pledge to wear hemp clothing, for instance, or agree to fertilize their yards only with chicken droppings. I'd like to be able to tell you exactly why, but four efforts to elicit an explanation from Cree came to naught. No one ever called back.)

But if that's the case--that the jobs are green because they indirectly help improve the environment--then new vistas have opened for North Carolina. The state quickly could be awash with green jobs. For instance, once you acknowledge that a barrel of oil has a carbon footprint (as anything that must be shipped necessarily has), then the environmentally responsible thing to do would be to allow oil exploration...