Again and again EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Energy Undersecretary Kristina Johnson pounded on the jobs issue at a pre-Copenhagen climate talks event designed to showcase how energy efficiency, the smart grid and renewable energy can boost employment rates.

“We’re hearing a whole host of reasons today to support American clean energy. There are national security reasons. There are environmental reasons, and there are public-health reasons,” Jackson said. “But perhaps the most compelling reason at this moment and in this place is the economy.”

The very setting of the clean energy forum fairly screamed “JOBS!” It was a nearly-finished “innovation center” that is leasing space for startups, built by McKinstry Co. beside the firm’s south Seattle offices. McKinstry is all about energy efficiency in buildings (which is where something like a third to two-fifths of our energy use occurs, depending on how you’re counting).

And, get this: Even as the recession roared ahead into high gear earlier this year, McKinstry announced plans to hire 500 people.

That can happen more, Jackson said. She ticked off the administration’s recent investments in new battery technology and cleaner diesel as well as solar projects in California and Florida and wind energy in Michigan. She said the president’s budget will provide for thousands more jobs in the green-energy sector.

And she boiled the message down this way: “Green energy jobs are up and clean energy costs are down.”

“Everywhere in America, people are doing the hard work of pulling our economy up and out of the most significant economic downturn since World War II,” Jackson said. “And we’re not only addressing immediate concerns, we’re laying a foundation for our economic future. And we all believe a cornerstone of that foundation is the clean energy economy.”

For her part, Johnson focused on her boss Steven Chu’s message that clean energy “is the industrial revolution of our time.” She praised Copenhagen-bound Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) and Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski (D) as “visionary leaders who recognized early on that energy efficiency and renewable energy are critical building blocks for the green economy.” (Jackson, too, is heading to Copenhagen next week.)

Johnson, too, had her handy-dandy list of Obama administration expenditures, including more than $100 million to weatherize Oregon and Washington homes and a $4 billion investment in smart-grid research.

And the Energy Dept. has retooled its criteria for awarding small-business innovative research grants so that job creation counts as half of the criteria, up from one-third.

“We know that in the last five years or so, most of the jobs generated in America came from small business,” Johnson said. “We’re very proud of that. And as a former small business owner and someone who helped build an incubator in North Carolina, I know we can do this – in facilities just like this.”

The meeting by two high-ranking administration officials with two of the country’s greenest governors came as President Obama upped his commitment to the international climate talks. Obama moved back his planned visit from what looked to be an incidental stopover early in the negotiations on his way to pick up his Nobel Prize in Oslo. Instead, the leader of the free world will be in Copenhagen as the talks end Dec. 18. That doesn’t necessarily mean the negotiations will deliver anything more than had been expected – which isn’t much – but it does add a bit of drama to the situation and suggests Obama believes the conference will produce a meaningful agreement.

The speeches by Jackson and Johnson to a room full of businesspeople in dark suits were calculated to counteract the stiff opposition Republicans are offering in D.C. to various versions of legislation to implement a cap-and-trade program.

Without mentioning the Republicans by name, Jackson recalled how they prevailed in passing an energy bill in George W. Bush’s first term.

“[W]e saw an energy plan for our country that was focused only on fossil fuels,” Jackson said.

“Supporters of the plan pledged that it would lower fuel costs for consumers and businesses and reduce our growing dependence on foreign oil. As we sit here today we know it didn’t work. It didn’t work for our security. It didn’t work for our environment and it certainly didn’t work for our businesses.”

Leading off was retired Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, who’s involved with a group of former generals and admirals known as the CNA Military Advisory Board: “What we’re saying very clearly and very directly is ‘This is a national security problem. … Make no mistake, this is going to affect everybody in the world.’”

He continued: “Climate change is going to be a threat multiplier in unstable regions across the world.”

Think about it: If you’re in, say, Bangladesh and the ocean’s rising and you can’t grow food, where will you go? You might well try to get into India. The Indians don’t want that, so you have a massive conflict there on the border.

It gets grimmer. Dennis Dimick, an erudite National Geographic editor who has steeped himself in the climate issue, noted that recent studies show it has been 15 million years since there was this much carbon in the atmosphere. And seas were 75 to 100 feet higher at that time. Carbon’s now at something like 380 parts per million in the atmosphere. Even if it were capped at 450 ppm, as we’d be lucky to do, you’re probably talking about an ice-free world.

That’s huge! The disruption of water supplies can have massive implications. In the American West and across much of Asia, people count on annual snow fall and glaciers to melt to give them water to drink.

(Whew! See what I mean? Makes you feel like going on a search for razor blades and sleeping pills. Just shoot me now! There’s hope, though: Check out this report, “The Economics of 350” (PDF), which I learned about in a different panel. It says we can control greenhouse gases without breaking the bank. In fact, it should only cost about 1 to 3 percent of the global GDP. But now … back to disaster …)

Even before seas rise, it’s likely that wet places will get wetter, and dry places will get drier. So, in the Western United States, for example, how will we raise food if it gets even drier?

Said Dimick: “That’s a national security issue. The water is tied into food. … The systems you need are no longer viable. You get a slow, insidious decline in legitimacy” of governments as people get hungrier and hungrier.

Consider also that one of the supposed fixes for global warming — carbon-free nuclear — is predicated on having enough water around to boil to move the turbines to produce the juice. Is that going to be possible in places like the American West? Probably not.

Geoffrey Dabelko of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars posited that the world’s poorest and richest nations are the ones that stand to lose the most — the poor because they’re already on the edge, the rich because their whole lifestyle is so carbon-intensive.

He foresees a world in which climate refugees — there’s that term again — are created en masse. But he cautioned that it may not be obvious that they are in fact climate refugees. Did they leave because they were starving, or because they thought they’d get a better job in another country?

Said Dabelko: “Be suspicious of anyone who gives you a number of climate refugees” to expect. No way to do that for now.

If you’re strong enough to keep delving in the climate forecasts, here’s a pretty good report by McGinn’s group that just came out. Me? I’m headed for the SEJ membership meeting. Thank God there’s a cash bar.

I wish I could say something different, but that’s the sense I got as these key administration officials appeared here at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Former vice president Al Gore also tried to say a deal is possible at the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen. But read between the lines, and it’s clear that the administration is already focused on what happens after that.

Just listen to Nancy Sutley, head of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality: “I’m optimistic we’ll know what we need to do when we leave Copenhagen.”

Jim Rogers, head of Duke Energy (I guess they’re the “good guys” on climate now? Because they’re working for a climate bill…) even came out and said it: “Copenhagen has the capability to (continue) all next year.”

If there was a bright side, it was Gore’s speculation that Obama will in fact attend the Copenhagen talks. The former veepster said “I feel certain he will,” this coming on the same day Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. (The prize will be presented in Oslo on December 10, making it very easy for the president to zip down to Copenhagen.)

For the record, from Gore as keynoter and all the members of the opening plenary panel, the order of the day was cheerleading for U.S. climate-change legislation and a successful meeting in Copenhagen. (Well, there was one exception: climate change denier and GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner said anything coming out of the COP15 meetings would be no better than “a blank piece of paper.”)

In fact, Duke Energy’s Rogers claimed that his firm is making decisions as if the climate-change legislation already had been passed.

Gore went so far as to predict relatively fast passage of climate legislation in the Senate, saying, “There is much more bipartisan dialogue behind the scenes in the U.S. Senate than is publicly known.” He called Senate passage by December “more likely than not.” OK, if you say so, Al … but realistically, aren’t senators going to be tied up with health care at least until December? Sure seems that way.

Gore went on to say he didn’t expect a perfect treaty to come out of Copenhagen, but he looks at it the way he did the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which was drawn up to save the ozone layer: It was far short of what was thought was needed; but the very fact that so many nations signed on and got to work made it much easier to reach a more realistic and effective treaty three years later.

Jane Lubchenco, the ocean scientist Obama tapped to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was among those predicting a political tipping point on climate, just as happened previously with smoking, drunk driving, civil rights and women’s suffrage.

“We are approaching the end game, I think,” she told the conference.

But later I caught up with Lubchenco, and she didn’t challenge my interpretation that administration officials aren’t too hopeful about the climate talks. She allowed that every day that passes without climate legislation in the U.S. “makes it that much harder to get agreement in Copenhagen.”

So, I asked, what’s the road map beyond Copenhagen if there is no treaty?

“We’ve been working so hard on Copenhagen that we have not really thought beyond that,” she answered.

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