Tennessee's number three ranking (link) is from the Pew Charitable Trusts, a conservative charity founded by Sun Oil heirs (link). The ranking was based on "clean energy economy" jobs, including some "energy generation" jobs in coal (link).

Pew has written a "coal initiative" (link) and has a "coal facts" page (link), both of which focus on making coal generation cleaner, especially through CO2 emission reduction, rather than on reducing coal dependence.

In a way, the Pew web site does stake out a "middle" ground. Despite all their talk of environmental concerns and clean energy, their search engine shows no mentions of either "clean coal" or "mountaintop removal." While pollution from the mining of gold and other metals is mentioned, I found no mentions in their mining pages about pollution from coal mining.

Here's the main state-by-state report link: link.
And here's the Pew page relating to Tennessee: link.

According to the report, over 80% of these Tennessee "clean energy economy" jobs are in "conservation and pollution mitigation." This category includes "hazardous waste remediation" services done for DoE and DoD (for example). We seem to be counted as having lots of clean energy economy jobs mostly because we have to clean up after very polluting places such as Oak Ridge and environs and also take in hazardous waste for processing from elsewhere.

According to Pew, fewer than 7% of Tennessee's "clean energy economy" jobs are actually in the "clean energy" category.

After looking at the whole report, it seems that Tennessee may not be particularly special, despite the news articles based on Pew's press release (link). Pew found something nice to say about every state in its report. You can find all the states' reports here in one document.

I'm not too sure this fine-sounding ranking isn't a feel-good puff of political smoke (link) from a conservative group who doesn't seem to mind coal playing a big part in our country's future energy production.

-- OneTahiti

[Originally posted in a comment elsewhere.]