“Employment in this field has been hard to measure because there’s been no consensus on what constitutes a green job.”
The Washington Post reports:
“Green” jobs accounted for 2.4 percent of the nation’s total employment in 2010, the Labor Department reported Thursday in its first-ever survey of green goods and services jobs.
According to the report, which gave a snapshot of the role that environmental consciousness plays in the U.S. economy, the United States had 3.1 million green jobs in 2010, the vast majority of them in the private sector. The public sector listed 860,000 green jobs, the report said…
2.4% seems a tad high. They’re no doubt using a very broad definition of “green job”.
This would include small business run by individuals who comb the ditches for discarded aluminum beverage containers.