Saving the earth: What does that do to the employment picture?

Start with part one here.

Everyone talks a good game about retraining coal miners to manufacture wind turbines, for example.

But has anyone actually set up training programs for workers displaced by "clean energy," and even if they have, has anyone figured out how organize and pay for such retraining on a massive scale?

Not only are we talking about hundreds of thousands of workers being displaced, but we have to be clear about who they are.

They're not all truck drivers hauling pipes for natural-gas pipelines.

And they're not all young.

How, exactly, is the 57-year-old  with a Ph.D. in geology who's spent an entire career helping figure out where to drill for oil going to get a new job in a completely different field at that age?

Repeat the old saying after me:  "It's the economy, stupid."

And that's another reason why Hillary Clinton lost--Donald Trump promised to do even more fossil-fuel drilling and exporting, and didn't say he'd close the coal mines, because jobs were at the heart of his campaign, such as it was.

Unless we can figure out how to transition to "clean" energy without leaving a large swath of the country unemployed and possibly unemployable, it's never going to happen.  :(


See also "Humans Need Not Apply" here.