Everyone these days is talking about the potential for new jobs in sectors that promise to help the environment.

The latest example is a new study commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which projects that investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency will create 4.2 million new "green" jobs over the next three decades, making it perhaps "the fastest growing segment of the economy."

But those jobs won't all just happen automatically. The city of Oakland is jump-starting the process by contracting with three organizations to inaugurate the Oakland Green Job Corps, described by the Oakland Tribune as "an ambitious plan to lift at-risk youths out of lives of poverty and violence and place them into jobs helping the environment."

The training will start with general job readiness skills and basic construction practices, followed by modules on topics like solar installation, hazardous waste recycling and energy efficiency practices. The program will train about 40 students the first year and then seek to place them as apprentices with various Bay Area employers.

The city plans to tap three non-profit institutions--Laney College and Cypress Mandela, Inc. of Oakland, and Growth Sector Inc. of San Francisco to design and operate the program for its first eight months.

Funding comes from a national green-job training program authorized by Congress after the idea was championed by Van Jones, founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland and chief executive of Green for All.

We Californians rightly take pride in our state's contribution to high tech, but sometimes it takes low tech to change the world for the better.

That's one of the great insights of a group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), who won widespread attention this week for their finding that simply by painting roofs white and making pavements more reflective, the world could become measurably cooler, healthier and more affordable--whether you live in Africa or Los Angeles.

In a summary released this week of a paper to be published in the journal Climate Change, Hashem Akbari and Surabi Menon, scientists at LBNL, and Arthur Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission who formerly worked at LBNL, report that lightening up on roofs and pavement would reflect enough sunlight to offset the heating effect of 44 billion tons of CO2, or more than the world's total annual emissions of that greenhouse gas by 2025. Cool!

If helping the globe isn't reason enough to take action, there's a powerful economic incentive: cooler buildings require less energy for air conditioning. Energy customers in the United States alone could save more than a billion dollars a year, according to Rosenfeld. And by cutting back on energy use, these measures would directly reduce power plant emissions of greenhouse gases, further slowing the pace of global warming.

Last but not least, we could all breathe easier as well. As urban areas heat up from the concentration of dark surfaces that absorb sunlight, chemical reactions speed up the cooking of various air pollutants into unhealthy smog. Worker productivity falls, hospital emissions rise, and people have to cut back on outdoor activities. Making surfaces lighter would slow that process.

Co-author Akbari says he's received about 200 calls and emails this week about the study. It's been reported in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, leading blogs like Green Wombat, and newsletters as far afield as Carbon News in New Zealand.

But his Urban Heat Island group at LBNL didn't just come up with the idea. They've been publishing pathbreaking research along very similar lines for twenty years. (I know because I started writing about it as an editorial writer at the Oakland Tribune in the 1980s.)

Akbari said scientists have long known that as cities grow, replacing vegetation with buildings and pavement, they get hotter. Vegetation cools the air by releasing water vapor; buildings and pavement warm the air by trapping solar radiation. The yearly high temperature in Los Angeles soared 8 degrees F from the mid-1930s to the 1990s primarily due to this effect and not global warming.

The LBL scientists reasoned that if human behavior could cause the problem, more enlightened behavior ought to be able to mitigate the problem, at least in part. Thus they began experimenting with lighter paints, reflective surfaces, and planting trees to shade buildings. They measured the effects both on individual buildings (greater comfort, lower energy bills) and on the broader urban environment (cooler climate, healthier air).

Demonstration projects in more than a dozen "Cool Communities" found that the use of light- and heat-reflective materials, and careful planting of trees, could reduce peak summer temperatures by as much as 5 degrees F, cut the need for air conditioning by 18 percent, and reduce air pollution.

"In a city like Los Angeles, the effect on peak electricity consumption would be huge," Akbari says. "And our simulations show that the effect on smog in that city under some conditions could be the same as converting all cars to electric vehicles."

Based on this research, the South Coast Air Quality Management District concluded a decade ago that the "Cool Communities" strategy was the single most cost-effective way of reducing smog.

Fortunately, their research hasn't gone unheeded, thanks in part to Art Rosenfeld's tremendous efforts to educate legislators and regulators. California's Title 24 already requires non-residential owners of flat roofs to paint them white, and sloped roofs will be required to use "cool" colors starting next year. The three scientists hope to interest 40 major cities around the world to adopt new building standards for white roofs and cool pavements.

It's almost enough to make me believe in a free lunch. Just by changing the color and type of roof and paving materials, we can increase our comfort, save money, and help the planet. As Akbari says, it's a win-win-win for everyone.

Rock 'n' roll legend Janis Joplin launched many outdoor concerts in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in the late '60s but her spirit may have felt a little lost this weekend at the three-day, 65-bands Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in GGP. Eco-Lands environmental exhibits? Solar and wind-powered cell phone charging? Carbon footprint calculator? Help! What gives?

Festivals are going green. Ditto for political conventions. The Democratic convention opening this morning in Denver is coloring itself green. The party aims to recycle or compost at least 85 percent of the convention waste and leave town with a carbon-neutral footprint. Republicans won't be outdone at their party next week. The GOP "is committed to making this year's nominating convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul the 'greenest' in party history." Eco-awareness is spreading.

Joel Selvin, senior pop music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, noted the movement in his review today of the Outside Lands Festival:

"The technology exhibits proved surprisingly popular and the crowd easily adopted the three-way recycle/compost/landfill refuse collections that should now be standard for public events. For the young crowd that was the event's target audience, this kind of techno-eco-consciousness helped strengthen the subtext." Festival producers said 150,000 people attended over the weekend.

Corporate sponsors included AT&T, Visa, Dell and PG&E, and non-profit organizations set up tents to provide information on issues ranging from water conservation to voter registration to environmental education.

PG&E provided a range of energy technologies, services and information for the festival, among them the Outside Lands Solar Stage in partnership with Sustainable Waves, the Pop Up Cafe made entirely of materials reclaimed from the San Francisco dump, Smart Energy information, Carbon Footprint Calculators and the utility's ClimateSmart program.

The Princeton Review's annual college guide is due out this week and will publish its first "green rating" for environmentally friendly schools. The Sunday New York Times carried a lengthy piece yesterday on green campuses in its Education Life section and got a peek at the top-ranked green schoools: Arizona State, Bates, Binghamton University, College of the Atlantic, Harvard, Emory, Georgia Institute of Technology, Yale, and the Universities of New Hampshire, Oregon and Washington.

Schools will get points for things like "environmentally prefereable food," renewable power sources and energy-efficient buildings, the Times says. A college's green image is important. A Princeton Review survey of 10,300 college applicants found that 63 percent said a school's commitment to the enviornment could affect their decision to go there.

Colleges are working to be carbon neutral, hiring sustainability coordinators and competing in buying clean power supplies. In an Environmental Protection Agency contest among athletic conferences, the Ivy League finished first with a combined 221.6 million kilowatt hours for the quarter ending in April.

Some skeptics, however, say schools are chasing headlines more than reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

"I don't think we really have the tools to quantifiably test who's doing the best and who's not," says David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College. "It becomes a publicity hype type of thing."

The next time Stanford University hosts a Silicon Valley "energy summit," it may want to find a larger space than the Arrillaga Alumni Center - like the football stadium across the street. Some 400 people - corporate leaders, mayors, regulators, state energy commissioners, economists, engineers, professors, consultants, venture capitalists and newly-minted graduates looking for jobs - jammed the center today to get a sense of where "The New Energy Economy" may be headed. Put a bet on Energy Efficiency.

Professor Jim Sweeney, director of Stanford's Precourt Insitute for Energy Efficiency, set the tone at the outset this morning: "The next 20 years will be dominated by energy efficiency."

Morning keynoter CPUC Commissioner Dian Grueneich echoed the message, noting that the CPUC's strategic draft plan for energy efficiency will be issued on Monday. The plan lays out four initiatives to reach "zero net energy" goals for new construction of commercial buildings in California by 2030 and a similar result for new home construction by 2020. The plan also sets goals for heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and measures to ensure low-income ratepayers get a piece of the energy efficiency pie. The next round of energy efficiency funding in California will run $3 billion in 2009-2011, she said.

The Efficiency ball kept on rolling through the morning. Bob Hines, vice president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a summit sponsor, retraced the group's steps in partnership with PG&E to develop and complete energy efficiency projects with the likes of companies like IBM, Yahoo and Cisco.

A separate panel walked us through the technical ins and outs of commercial building retrofits for high-efficiency chillers, cooling towers, exhaust relief fans, and high-efficiency transformers and flywheels. My head was spinning. But it stopped when panelist Mukesh Khatter, energy director at Oracle, said something very clear: Through energy efficiency programs, his company saved enough electricity to light up 1,700 homes.

Energy efficiency also headed PG&E CEO Peter Darbee's priorities. Energy efficiency "is our single most important opportunity...the 'first fuel' and among our most cost-effective solutions," he told the conference. "Our plan is to meet half of PG&E's aggregate demand growth in the next 10 years through efficiency savings."

Incentives are essential to promote energy efficiencies, Darbee said. "If we get the incentives right, utility energy efficiency programs can be a big part of the solution for California and the country."

Darbee also called for utilities to revitalize basic infrastructure and equip the power grid with smart technologies and smart meters; reduce the carbon intensity of power generation with the expansion of renewable power supplies; and set up a workable, market-based framework for greenhouse gas regulation. PG&E supports a cap-and-trade approach.

Bad news: Expect higher utility rates due mainly to rising fuel costs, hot demand in China and India for construction materials, more expensive renewable supplies, and big capital needs to fund infrastructure, Darbee said. Good news: Utility rates in California over the long term have risen less than the total increase in the consumer price index. And expected rate hikes in the state will be substantially below 20-30 percent increases forecast in other states. PG&E rates have been helped by lower prices for nuclear and hydro generation, hedging long-term power contracts, and efforts to reduce business costs.

How do you turn a mission into a movement? I'm not sure, but it includes a lot of meetings. And that's exactly what we've seen this week.

Beginning with the G8 Summit in Japan, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announced at today's press conference that the G8 set a goal to slash global GHG emissions in half by 2050. Recognizing that cutting emissions globally will require a robust global market, G8 leaders indicated that they will remain committed to responsible macroeconomic management and structural reforms:

• expanding oil production
• further promoting energy conservation and alternative energy development, and
• improving market transparency through increased scrutiny by international institutions.

There's a start.

Back on the ranch, the UPI reports that a group of US Senators came together to turn the number one issue on the minds of Americans (i.e. $4.60/gal) into an energy plan that will be palatable for both sides of the aisle. Sick and tired of being blamed for gas pump pains felt across the country, the bipartisan group of Senators succomb to voter pressure and seek out a legislative solution.

Oil and renewables, Democrats and Republicans. Who knows? Maybe climate change will be the driving force behind the next generation of togetherness. Kumbaya.

Here's a giggle for your day. The Onion, aka America's Finest News Source, is on the stands featuring its "Obligatory Green Issue" covering a wide range of news breaks somehow overlooked by our hometown San Francisco Chronicle and most other media outlets.

"Entertainment Scientists Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted By 2013. Unless Americans turn to alternative sources of entertainment, the 'Hannah Montana' star will soon be completely tapped out."

And this Onion exclusive just in from Berkeley: "Use of Organic Peanut Butter Adds Two Minutes To Local Man's Life." The Onion is a must-read.

This week has unexpectedly been dominated by the topic of Green Buildings. 

On Monday, I attended a presentation at PG&E by UC Davis Professor Deb Niemeier on energy use in the context of neighborhood design.  She presented research on a comparison of energy use by two distinct communities in Davis, Village Homes and Mace Ranch.  Created by Mike Corbett 25 years ago, Village Homes is a seventy acre subdivision designed to focus on the conservation of energy use and natural resources.  Mace Ranch, on the other hand, is a typical 1990's style subdivision, with little conservation design philosophy.  It makes for an interesting comparison as household income and size do not very much by each community. 

Not surprisingly, Dr. Niemeier's research based on PG&E energy use data, found that Village Homes used considerably less energy annually than the homes in Mace Ranch.  The smallest design considerations - such as which direction a home faces, how it heats its water, the use of trees for shading, and the types of construction products - can have a significant impact.  More surprisingly, Village Homes had considerably older appliances than those in Mace Ranch.  With updated appliances in Village Homes, the energy use variances would have been even greater, according to Dr. Niemeier. 

On Tuesday, I attended a panel on green buildings called "Going Green" and hosted by iReuse, Studley, and Skyline Construction.  The panelists included David Hayes, CEO of Skyline Constructionn; Lynelle Cameron, director of sustainability for Autodesk; Steven Wolmark, vice president of SKS Investments; and Eunice Barnett, a business manager for PG&E.

Two points from this panel really stuck out:

1.  David Hayes said that, if done correctly, there is now only a one-two percent marginal difference on building a LEED Certified building and a traditional building. In the last couple of years he's really seen the price of LEED inputs decrease.  David also made the point that buildings account for 50% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, so there's a huge opportunity and responsibility for

2.  Lynelle Cameron made a very compelling case for why Autodesk's CAD technology is at the center of the green building industry and alluded to some very cool new technology that will help planners and builders account for sustainability when beginning the design process.

Small restaurants are taking steps to install energy-saving equipment to reduce operating costs, yet another sign that green business is expanding into more sectors. The San Francisco Chronicle today looks at mom-and-pop eateries in the Bay Area that may not be able to put a full organic menu on the table but can do some other things to put out an  environmentally friendly welcome mat.

Tin's Tea House Lounge in Walnut Creek, for example, replaced Styrofoam takeout containers with biodegradable ones made of cornstarch, installed low-flow nozzles and faucets in the kitchen, and got utility rebates to switch to energy-efficient chandeliers for just $200. The lowered energy bill and other measures will save about $4,500 each year.

"The steps that are the most financially viable are lighting, changing the gaskets in refrigerators, and installing strip curtains (to save energy) in walk-in refrigerators," says Suparna Vashisht of Thimmakka, a Berkeley nonprofit that has helped more than 125 restaurants including Tin's Tea House figure out how to be greener, the Chronicle says.

Bianco's Deli in El Sobrante places empty pickle barrels at workstations for compostable food waste, reducing trash sent to a landfill from four large bins each week to less than two.

Food-to-compost is growing in the Bay Area. Sunset Scavenger Co. and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Co. launched the first urban collection of food waste in the nation in 1996 and is now collecting 300 tons of scraps a day from 2,100 restaurants in San Francisco, Robert Reed, a spokesman for the companies, told NEXT100. They also collect food waste from 80,000 homes in the city. The waste is processed into fertilizer and marketed to some 200 vineyards in northern California. 

Seattle, Portland, Denver, and St. Paul, Minn., are collecting food scraps and New York City and Dallas also are looking at the program, Reed said.

Here at PG&E, our Food Service Technology Center offers a range of services including test reports on kitchen equipment, advice on cutting energy use and costs, commercial kitchen seminars, and design consultation.

In the great game of green, perhaps least noticed is the work done at the community level. Such is the work of the Sacramento River Cats and Raley Field -- not only in following the lead of many major league stadiums by going green, but also in raising community awareness.

Having lived in Sacramento for a time myself, I write this as a tried and true River Cats fan. I have seen firsthand the great influence of this ball club in its community -- from the loveable Dinger, to the $7 lawn seats on Home Run Hill, to the rally of the games.

So, when "yooouur Sacramentooo River Caaats" host a Green Awareness Weekend, the community listens. At a time when green means so many things to so many people, this level of community engagement is perhaps the home run the movement needs.

Recognizing this, PG&E helped the River Cats host a weekend focused soundly on education and awareness. By packaging the fan-favorite games with green education such as a pre-game ceremony on Saturday and a solar seminar on Sunday, the River Cats and PG&E were able to reach out to the community in way simply not possible on a larger stage. 

Hopefully, other ball clubs and community icons will follow suit. Their role in translating an increasingly global dialogue to local action will be crucial. In the meantime, GO CATS!