"Im Bad! Im Slick!"

EnlargeSolar Skills: Jones, in Richmond, California, with newly trained solar-panel installers Kenyon Roy and Angela Greene | photograph by Chris Mcpherson

EnlargeOakland environmental activist Van Jones and his message of hope. | photograph by Chris Mcpherson

The cheering would begin soon enough. Dressed in a slim-cut gray suit and green tie, Van Jones ascended to the stage grinning and blowing kisses to the crowd. Jones, 39, a 6-foot-1-inch Yale Law grad, was appearing at a summit in San Francisco called "Advancing a New Energy Economy in California." The city's charismatic mayor, Gavin Newsom, was among the presenters, along with corporate bigwigs such as PG&E chief executive Peter Darbee. But no one would outshine Jones.

"What is considered green is usually for the eco-elite," he preached to the assembled solar entrepreneurs, environmental activists, and community leaders (including more than a dozen black clergymen). "But if we are actually going to meet the challenge of global warming, we are going to have to weatherize millions of homes and install millions of solar panels. That's millions of new jobs. We need to connect the people who most need the work with the work that most needs to be done." It's one of his favorite themes: the need to expand the green movement beyond "lifestyle environmentalists," with their hybrid cars and other eco-status symbols. The audience cheered. "Van Jones, he's a rock star," says Tim Rainey, director of economic development at the California Labor Federation.

But Jones is not just a performer. More than any other single figure, he has ushered the phrase "green-collar jobs" into the political lexicon -- and economic reality. Last year, Jones led a coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups that persuaded the Oakland City Council to provide $250,000 in seed money for the country's first green-collar-jobs corps, which will train low-income youth in the renewable-energy, organic-food, and green-construction industries. The organization he founded and heads, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, also helped draft the Pathways out of Poverty legislation for the federal Green Jobs Act of 2007, which pledged $125 million to train 35,000 people a year in green-collar jobs. And in February, Jones launched Green for All, a national advocacy organization whose goal is to procure $1 billion in federal funding by 2012 for green-collar programs, and lift as many as 250,000 Americans out of poverty. "We speak for the least empowered folks, the people who didn't finish high school, the people with criminal convictions, the victims of Hurricane Katrina," Jones says.

A self-described "bridge builder, catalyst, and evangelist," Jones is of the Martin Luther King oral tradition. "We dream of rust-belt cities blossoming as Silicon Valleys of green capital ... of dying blue-collar towns blooming as green-collar meccas," he said in remarks to the House Select Committee on Energy and Global Warming last year. Comparisons with Barack Obama are inevitable. But Jones says, "The person I'm really patterning my life after is Ralph Nader." Not Nader the election spoiler, but Nader the lifelong consumer advocate, whose policy triumphs include the creation of OSHA and the EPA. "Hey," Jones says, "Nader got more legislation passed than almost any president."

"TOTALLY LEFT OUT"