Could this be a good thing?

Increase poverty, and you reduce the amount of green retooling. This includes a poorer population keeping old inefficient cars, purchasing even older ones, and deferring maintenance. I know from bitter personal experience that burning of wood and kerosene for heat will increase as incomes drop and unemployment increases.
The recession, though, will kill off (we hope) moneywaster and dustcatcher businesses, and force the more solvent of the populace to eschew Hummer-style conspicuous consumption in order to keep what they have. Additionally, reuse/repurpose/recycling/repair will increase. And home gardening will make a comeback, whether permanently or otherwise.
Our challenge is to find ways to keep manufacturing jobs at home in America, instead of wasting fuel to send jobs out of the country and bring finished goods back. We need to, now more than ever, hold American business accountable to the American electorate for their role in creating this recession by discarding America and her citizens, starting the recessionary spiral with the first wave of foreclosures brought on by exporting American jobs and importing illegal labor, and put economic pressure on the corporate infrastructure to assure that America never again subsidizes dividends by backstabbing her workers.