Over 11,000 energy workers were laid off in light of Joe Biden’s executive order terminating the Keystone pipeline, leaving climate czar John Kerry with the question of what becomes of these workers whose livelihoods became fatalities in the inexorable march of “progress”.

Thankfully, Kerry has an answer. After all, for a person whose plans involve a radical transformation of society to not have a carefully-laid-out and considerate plan would be irresponsible.

Here is what Kerry had to say:

“What President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels,”

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry (source)

Over 10,000 people were laid off? They should undergo career changes, likely involving a few more years of college education in a skilled trade, doing whatever it is they’re supposed to do to keep their families fed in the time it takes for that to happen, in the hopes of becoming inexperienced applicants in fields that will likely already be fully-populated in the time it takes to get their degrees! Isn’t it obvious?

Just how naïve can a person possibly be?

I wasn’t really expecting a career politician to have any idea what it’s like to have participated in the job market in the last decade, but certainly he could have given a better answer than the equivalent of “Just undergo a career change”, as if these thousands of workers weren’t already being made to compete with the millions of Americans sent to the unemployment lines during the lockdowns last year, on top of the millions of people who were already unemployed, to try to undergo a career change at a time when things are desperate.

Why does it seem as though John Kerry legitimately believes that the theory behind energy jobs carry neatly over from one energy field to another? There are many reasons why Petroleum Engineers and Electrical Engineers are not interchangeable, some of which involving that the type of energy is dissimilar, and the theory behind them is different.

Even strongly similar fields have a difficult time passing for one another. An Electronics Technician can pass for an Industrial Electrician without much trouble, while an Industrial Electrician would have difficulties attempting the same thing in reverse.

(Which, by the way, says something about how much more comprehensive the theory behind Electronics Technology happens to be, and what a tragedy it is that Electronics Technicians get paid significantly less. More on why Electronics Technology is a bad major, here.)

Whether you like it or not, our society is run by people who can terminate thousands of jobs at a time, not having any idea what the people who were employed actually did, and they are so out of touch that it seems valid to them to tell them, “just get another job”.