Joel Makower, co-founder and executive editor of Greener World Media, kicked off today's State of Green Business Forum. The forum coincided with a release of GreenBiz.com's second annual State of Green Business report. Nearly 500 attendees filled the PG&E Auditorium in downtown San Francisco to learn of the findings, representing 20 states, Fortune 500 companies, NGO's, government entities, consulting firms, the media and more. Attendees received copies of the 62 page report on thumb drives to save paper. Sponsors of the event include Autodesk, PG&E, HansonBridgett, Wells Fargo, and Ecos Consulting.

"This is not a drill," Makower declared at the start of the day. Makower reported impressive green business shifts announced seen since election day by large companies like Pepsi, Nike, Dell, Underwriters Laborator, P&G and Cisco.

The State of Green Business report cites 10 trends in green business, and ranks 20 indicators, which they call the GreenBiz Index. "Most of the data don't exist," Makower noted. Despite scarce data, the indicators were ranked on a swim (green), tread (yellow), or sink (red) basis.

Five indicators are "swimming" (cleantech investments, clean-energy patents, energy efficiency, paper use and recycling and water intensity); twelve are "treading water", neither here nor there (including green jobs, green office space, carbon transparency, corporate reporting and toxic emissions), and three are reported as "sinking" (carbon intensity, employee telecommuting, and e-waste). He highlighted the gains in energy efficiency. Water intensity also earned a swim ranking. "It's barely being measured, which is a challenge…. But there is some nice movement here. Water used per dollar of GDP has gone down about 25%." And paper use and recycling is another success story. On the other hand we've seen poor progress in carbon intensity, where absolute emissions increased 1.4% in 2007 over 2006, and a poor showing in e-waste where only 18% was captured for recycling and many companies face stores of old e-waste that is actually illegal to dispose of. But even where things look dismal as in this last case, there are bright spots, such as EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool). Green jobs is an interesting case. When the report went to press, this indicator scored the admirable "swim" rating, but since then, GreenBiz has changed its rating to "tread." Makower explained "we don't really know what a green job is…we wanted to see if all the rhetoric around this is heading to green jobs." According to the report, there are currently 9.1 million green jobs in the US.

So we are seeing a mixed bag – it is clear we have lots of work to do. But we are well poised to continue making advances in 2009. For example, a survey of companies by GreenBiz Intelligence found that 86% of companies claim they will invest more or equal amounts in green products in 2009.