Green jobs: trust in Sam Walton, not uncle Sam: Wal-Mart not to be taken lightly in sustainability push.

• Author: Lewis, David

Back in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama said he would spend $150 billion to create 5 million "green collar" jobs. More recently, President Obama spoke at the White House jobs forum's "Green Jobs of the Future" session, and said, "I would be surprised if we don't end up moving forward on ... an aggressive agenda for energy efficiency and weatherization."

Such highly publicized efforts have meant that, "There's this notion out there that somehow or other the economy is going to revive itself and we're going to have these millions of green jobs," says Graham Russell, executive director of Denver-based CORE, the Connected Organizations for a Responsible Economy.

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Yet, "You can look at reports where the projections of green jobs will vary by a factor of five or even 10. Part of the problem is that there is no sensible definition of a green job so all of these reports come at it from a different standpoint."

Russell argues that most government subsidies amount to "a fairly political exercise and a fairly futile one."

The fact is, "You've got to create a market. That's what is so powerful about what Wal-Mart and some other big companies are doing--they're creating real, genuine, hardcore business-driven markets for new stuff which is energy-efficient, water-efficient or otherwise minimizes waste," Russell says.

Wal-Mart, the discount super-store behemoth? Indeed. Russell reached these conclusions in mid-November at the Wal-Mart Green Jobs Council in Denver.

"This was a seminal moment in my thinking," Russell recalls. "We went through an hour's worth of excruciating debate about what a green job was and how many there would be and how many there wouldn't be and what was going to drive them and who was going to train people for them and so on and so forth."

"Then Wal-Mart spokesman Nate Hurst said, 'We believe that it doesn't matter how much yakking you do about green jobs and how many reports you write about it--the only way you ever get a green job is to create market demand, and we are doing that in Wal-Mart right now through our sustainability initiatives,' which are incredibly impressive," Russell adds.

Russell observes that Wal-Mart and businesses big and small--from Denver-based warehousing giant Prologis to the Boulder Outlook Hotel--are creating "genuinely economically bottom-line, dollar-driven new jobs. Whether it's a green job, a purple job, or whatever you call it, it is obviously eco-related in the sense...