Van Jones, prominent sustainability activist and author of the timely The Green Collar Economy, just finished speaking here at GreenBuildExpo. He's a personable, engaging presenter with a powerful message. Not surprisingly, he's thrilled that Obama is President-elect. "It's not that he's black," Jones, who's black himself, said. "It's that he's green."

We are, he believes, in a period of dramatic transformation. "The economy that was built on consumerism, credit, and environmental destruction is dead. We've lost our floor, but with the election of Obama we've also lost our ceiling. We're free to fall or fly."

The next economy, Jones believes, will be driven by "production, thrift, and environmental restoration," essentially the flip side of the economy whose demise we've been wittnessing lately. This "green collar economy" will be driven by three separate initiatives, all of which, Jones hastens to point out, Obama supports.

First: cap carbon emissions. Jones puts it bluntly: "We stop paying the polluters and start making the polluters pay." He points out that Big Oil gets a triple subsidy—tax breaks; protected supply routes, courtesy of the U.S. military; and the right to pollute for free—while clean tech companies "have to beg to get their tax credit extended." Under Obama, the playing field will be leveled.

Second: retrofit buildings throughout America. " The high-tech tool that will define the first wave of the green economy is the caulk gun," says Jones. Two million jobs can be created this way, he says.

Third: build a clean, smart energy grid that connects people and enterprises throughout the U.S. and enables everyone to be an energy producer as well as consumer.

To achieve this, two technological breakthroughs—one in energy transmission, and the other in energy storage—will be required. Jones is confident this can be done, citing as evidence the fact that we've done similar things before. We did it in the 1950s with the interstate highway system, and again three decades later with the development of the Internet. In both cases, the motivator was national security, and the result was a huge boost to the economy. For Jones, national security is once again the driver, though in this case the enemy is carbon and our own capacity for denial.

"I'm not ashamed to say that America should be a world leader," Jones says. "But we should be the leader in solutions, not pollution."

Personable, charismatic and visionary, Jones is at the forefront of the up-and-coming generation of sustainability leaders. He's also fortunate—his vision of America's path to prosperity just happens to be shared by the man who'll soon be running the country.