Progress Happens, Always Has

I find it so interesting that Anyone is fighting the Green New Deal. Green energy is progress. It is an evolution from dirty energy. Use to be that Republicans loved new commerce. It was a chance to make money. Why would anyone want to fight to keep coal. For years the people who mined coal fought about the terrible working conditions and black lung disease they got from doing that work.

New energy production requires new workers to make it. New energy does not happen without workers. It is just different work. People have always had to change the type of work they did as progress happened.

When we stopped driving horse and buggy’s and went to cars we no longer needed people to pick up horse shit in the streets. It was a terrible job. Instead they might have gone to working at a filling station and pumping gas. Remember the old days when a gas attendant pumped your gas for you, now that only happens in New Jersey. We also did not need as many farriers to shoe horses, or black smith to make those horse shoes. Those people might have learned how to make or fix cars.

When we got electric street lights in cities we no longer needed lamp lighters to go around and light the gas street lamps. When we got refrigerators we no longer needed people to cut ice out of frozen ponds in the winter and store it. There was no need for ice men to come to your house and put a block of ice in your icebox.

Before computers offices used to have rooms of women who were they typing pool. They would type all the letters and invoices that companies sent out. Now companies don’t have typing pools as well as having far few secretaries. Everyone knows how to types and does their own correspondence.

Change is going to happen. With that change comes new opportunities. Why fight about keeping carbon emitting, ozone killing energy systems? The new technologies will still require workers to make and run them and the jobs might be cleaner and safer too. Don’t fight about keeping people under ground digging coal or on oil platforms in the ocean drilling for oil. It’s time to change like they did from the horse shit picker upper. Who would fight to still have that?