When it comes to global warming legislation, few places are more important than Sacramento – this is where California’s laws and regulations are written.

This gives the region a major boost in its effort to become a hub of the developing green economy. Local business leaders are looking to green / clean tech as a way to strengthen and diversify Sacramento’s job base.

In many ways, though, Sacramento seems an unlikely candidate to emerge a winner among the many regions trying to build a green-tech industry. Sacramento lags far behind the Bay Area when it comes to raising money for new companies, and its previous efforts to establish itself in the high-tech and biotechnology industries faltered.

Despite the economy, though, business development officials say green tech companies are showing renewed interest in Sacramento.

“It’s a wave of activity like we’ve never seen,” said Bob Burris, deputy director of the Sacramento Area Trade and Commerce Organization, the region’s nonprofit business recruiter.

Although there’s no official way to count green jobs, one leading advocacy group says that Sacramento is doing exceptionally well on that front. Palo Alto-based nonprofit Next 10 recently released a study concluding that Sacramento led all California regions in percentage growth of green jobs from 1995 to 2008, with an 87 percent jump from 7,019 to 13,102. By Next 10’s count, Sacramento has more green jobs per capita than the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

It is my hope that clean tech companies will want to be located in Sacramento in the future, so they can be closer to California’s regulatory process.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about clean technology