Anyone wanting a steer on where the political and regulatory herds will thunder next should keep a close eye on Van Jones, who on present trends will soon be right up there with his Indiana namesake. It's wildly unusual for a first-time author to get Al Gore on to his front cover alongside Robert F Kennedy Jr, but it's unique to then see Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, lead off the back cover by commenting that Jones "has a unique ability to inspire people of all classes to uplift vulnerable people, while protecting our vulnerable planet".

So what sort of pixie dust is this civil rights campaigner and environmental activist scattering around the economic landscape? The answer: green-collar jobs. If you can't yet define the term, watch out. Anyone wanting a government bail-out—or, over time, public-sector contracts—will need to be able to do more than parrot the term.

According to Jones, a green-collar job is blue-collar employment that has been upgraded to better respect the environment. More precisely, the work will involve "family-supporting, career-track, vocational, or trade-level employment in environmentally friendly fields". You have been warned. At a time when governments have to bail out a seemingly endless list of ailing industries, they are likely to try to cover their flanks with social and environmental conditions, something we have already seen in relation to the partial bail-out of Detroit.

In The Green Collar Economy, Jones urges readers to ask their local mayors to sign a Local Government Green Jobs Pledge. Unless President Obama becomes inescapably mired in the Augean task of cleaning out George W Bush's stable block, such notions will go viral.

Interestingly, The Economist has already warned that the assumption of green New Deals is dangerous, the political equivalent of having one's cake and eating it, too—and therefore a logical impossibility.

But the fact that the magazine's not-infrequently-wrong editors saw red offers at least circumstantial evidence that this idea has both the political legs and the potential to break into a canter as, almost inevitably, economic conditions worsen.

John Elkington's latest book, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, is published by Harvard Business School Press