Red, white, blue, and green

ALTHOUGH HIS poll rankings are perpetually low, it's easy to spot Dennis Kucinich in the crowd of Democrats running for president: He's the bright green man, the one pushing for an almost utopian recommitment to the environment.

Kucinich proposes a WGA - Works Green Administration - after Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era Works Progress Administration, which enlisted millions of unemployed people to work on public projects such as building bridges, roads, schools, and parks.

Kucinich's WGA would spend federal funds on a sweeping environmental makeover. The WGA would work with NASA to develop new wind and solar energy devices. It could "put millions to work," Kucinich recently told the Globe, because workers could be hired to manufacture these devices and install them in homes. And America could share the new technology with the rest of the world.

It would make government dollars do three jobs at once: protect the environment, pump-prime the economy, and retrain the workforce.

It's an idea that sounds too good to be possible, a vision of an America where every city is an Emerald City. And it's easy for Kucinich to talk big since his chances of becoming president are so small.

But take Kucinich's grand idea and scale it down, and it becomes quite plausible.

That's where the Green Jobs Act comes in. Cosponsored in the US House by Massachusetts Democrat John Tierney, the bill would train a citizens army of "green-collar workers," employed in the fields of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

"Green-collar jobs can provide living wages and upward mobility," Tierney said in Congress in August. "For some, they will create a way out of poverty, even as they help improve our environment and buttress our national security by lessoning reliance on foreign oil."

In an interview, Tierney praised EBSCO Publishing, an Ipswich company that revived an old mill building and installed solar panels. EBSCO was able to go green and boost the local economy by contracting with four other Massachusetts companies to supply the materials and do the job. It's these companies, Tierney said, that need more skilled workers.

The bill would help by investing $125 million a year for five years to guide 35,000 workers toward promising, environmentally sound careers. Programs would update the skills of current workers, and train returning veterans, the unemployed, disadvantaged youths, nonviolent ex-offenders, and workers affected by changes in national energy policy.

If this bill becomes law, it will be a step toward Kucinich's ideal world, where it's a lot easier to be green.