Colorado, a clean energy hotbed, is creating thousands of new green jobs despite the climate cold war in Washington.

Two dozen business leaders held a Race for American Jobs event in Denver a couple of weeks ago (the campaign hits Manchester, N.H., today and ends in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday), and the stories I heard there took my breath away.

I met war veterans who once crawled through attics in Iraq searching for terrorists who are now tracking down air leaks that need insulation in Colorado residents' attics. Denver-based Veterans Green Jobs has landed more than 100 green jobs for local veterans in the past year alone — and it's looking to triple that number in 2010.

Boulder County's new ClimateSmart program, which provides energy efficiency and renewable energy loans for homeowners and businesses, has supported nearly $10 million of projects in just its first six months.

If Hawaii's largest utility gets its way, the islands' abundant sunshine may be wasted.

In February, the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) proposed a ban on a booming industry of rooftop solar installations, claiming that too much distributed power generation could destabilize the islands’ isolated power grids. It was forced to back off by the public backlash, but environmental groups and the solar industry say the utility is trying other tactics that will stifle the growth of renewable energy in the state.

“Although HECO is backing away from doomsday for the local renewable industry at this point, all they did was defer the problem,” said Isaac Moriwake, an attorney for Earthjustice who is representing the Hawaii Solar Energy Association.

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• Dave Levitan's blog
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The real action on climate change isn’t in Congress or UN meetings.

It’s in places like Chula Vista, Calif., where the city’s offer to provide free energy evaluations identified over 5 million kWh in savings in municipal and private buildings over two years — and saw about 3.8 million kWh of savings implemented.

And Denver, where a decision to replace more than 48,000 traffic light bulbs and pedestrian signals with LEDs is saving more than $800,000 per year in energy, labor and material costs.

And Boston, the first major U.S. city to change its zoning code to require all construction of large private buildings to meet high LEED standards for energy efficiency. By one projection, the first 48 building projects under review could eventually see $4 billion a year in energy savings.

The key selling point in all of these cities — for the mayors and residents alike — is just how much money they can save with innovative energy and resource efficiency steps that limit their impact on climate change at the same time.

If you think IT and sustainability are two totally different worlds, think again.

Most of what is referred to as “smart” these days — smart transportation, the smart grid and smart cities, for example — is made intelligent by processors, sensors and analytical software, and of course the servers that make it all possible. So it’s not surprising to see tech giants like IBM wanting to create a smarter planet, Cisco wanting to craft smart tech solutions for utilities and companies, and plenty of other, smaller companies wanting a piece of the action.

But while the money and hoopla surrounding all things smart can cloud the issue a bit, the point is that infrastructure in this country is sorely in need of an overhaul. In its Smarter Cities Virtual Leader Forum today, IBM recapped what it’s doing to make education, transportation, government, energy and healthcare smarter. It sees cities as systems of systems.

On Capitol Hill, momentum appears to be shifting toward federal regulation of a drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing. Last week, the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to eight oil and gas companies asking for information on the chemicals they use.

Oil and gas companies, including Exxon, have been vocal in their opposition to federal involvement, maintaining that the hodgepodge of state regulations is sufficient. In fact, Exxon is so opposed to federal regulation, it wrote into its recent $41 billion merger deal with XTO that if Congress makes “hydraulic fracturing or similar processes … illegal or commercially impracticable,” the deal is off.

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told a Congressional committee last month that the states have the knowledge of local geology to do the best job of regulation. However, a look at the state regulations now in place shows just how limited and inconsistent the oversight is of a practice that some people fear could contaminate water supplies.