jobs and the environmentally friendly world

I'm really getting tired of the excuse that 'we can't go green because it will destroy thousands of jobs', or 'it will change our way of life'. If your car stalls on the train tracks with a train coming toward you, do you stay in it because you can't bear to leave your car? Of course not.

So, first things first. Yes, it will change our way of life. It has to. If our way of life didn't change, then nothing would have changed and we will keep marching down the road to oblivion. But that's actually irrelevant because...life is constantly changing! Many people somehow seem unable to see this. I personally blame religion (especially the Abrahamic ones) because living your life around one ancient book tends to give people the idea that things shouldn't change. Buddhists. on the other hand, see everything as constant change. So do biochemists. Without change there is very literally no life. The biochemistry that gives us life requires flux, change. If the system is at equilibrium (i.e. no net change) the organism is dead. So on a fundamental level change is always happening and is crucially necessary. But so too on a larger scale. Is the world the same as it was last year? five years ago? ten years ago? Was our way of living the same a hundred years ago as it is now. The people who use this argument are intending to imply (without actually saying it) that our way of life will somehow be worse if we live better and more harmoniously with our environment. I suppose, for them, it might since most of the people starting such ideas make their money from destroying the environment.

Now onto my real pet peeve (yes the last argument was just a warm up). Will we lose jobs if we go green. Yes. And no. Once again, this comment is said with the suggestion that we will all be destitute when we stop building gas-guzzlers or stop running coal-fired power plants. That simply isn't true. You know and I know that just because we don't make gas-guzzling cars doesn't mean there won't be cars, they'll just be more fuel efficient--and who is going to build those fuel efficient cars? New technologies, in energy generation, transportation, and others, will require factories and plants of their own. It will mean retraining, at least for some. Although I'm sure in many cases the retraining wouldn't have to be that significant. But if fear of retraining is the only real argument you have against this then I say go live in a cave or get with the age of technology because things are only going to move faster from here on. So going green, in and of itself, will not necessarily cause any net loss of jobs and will open up many more new jobs and industries.

Thus, the only real arguments against shifting to a green society real boil down to laziness or fear of not being in first class on the big business money train. But, if we don't go green either through habits or technology, then we'll be forced to change in ways we never wanted to.