MANKATO — Among the biggest issues facing America — rising unemployment caused by a struggling economy, global climate change attributed to man-made pollution and an energy crisis that’s left the nation with soaring gas prices and increasing dependence on foreign oil — can be attacked all at once, according to an alliance between labor and environmentalists.

The BlueGreen Alliance is a collaboration between blue-collar unions and the environmentalists of the Sierra Club. And its executive director is Mankato native David Foster, who came to the job as a regional director for the United Steelworkers union.

“I like to think of southern Minnesota today as really being the ground-zero of the new economy,” Foster said at a meeting Saturday morning at the Local 49 Union Hall in Mankato.

Wind energy, which is abundant in southern Minnesota and has the potential to be greatly expanded, is one of six areas the alliance wants to fund through a $100 billion federal investment. The others are solar power, advanced biofuels, an improved electrical transmission grid, improved energy conservation in the nation’s buildings and investments in passenger and freight rail systems.

All of those areas would reduce pollution while making the nation less dependent on carbon-based energy, much of it purchased from nations in the Middle East and other oil-producing countries, Foster said. At the same time, it would provide needed jobs for unemployed Americans, many of them in construction and manufacturing.

“You invest $100 billion over the next two years and what comes out the other end? Two million new jobs,” Foster said.

The jobs would range from chemical engineers to truck drivers as workers design, produce, transport and install wind turbines, solar panels, power grid infrastructure and renewable fuels. More workers would serve in an expanded rail industry and others would be employed in retrofitting homes, businesses and commercial buildings with high-efficiency heating and cooling systems, insulation and insulated windows.

It won’t solve global warming or the nation’s energy problem, but it would be a start, according to Foster.

“It’s a down-payment, in a sense, for a much bigger journey we all have to be involved in,” he said.

But the immediate economic benefit would be meaningful in a slowing economy, including in the construction sector that is shedding jobs because of the housing downturn, according to the alliance. A recent study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington, D.C.-based research organization, estimated the benefits of the proposed investment for various states.

Minnesota, receiving an estimated $1.8 billion of the federal money, would see more than 37,000 jobs created and unemployment drop from 5.3 percent to 4 percent, according to the study. The study calculated that $712 million of the Minnesota funding would be used for increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, $356 million would be aimed at rail projects, $178 million would modernize the electrical grid and the remaining $534 million would boost wind, solar and biofuels projects.

Congressman Tim Walz, DFL-Mankato, attended the meeting and said the proposal makes so much sense that Democrats and Republicans in Congress should be able to rally around it.

“This type of alliance is just the sort of thing that’s going to break the partisan gridlock,” Walz said.