This photo shows my street in 1910, about 15 years after our house (right) was built. The horse and cart waiting at the bottom of the hill aren’t there by chance. According to a neighbour of mine who researched this picture, the guy who then lived opposite our house had a very niche job – he owned a horse which, for a fee, he would hitch to each cart to help its horse haul the load up the hill. If you peer up the road, you’ll see a cart in the process of being helped up the incline. Numerous present day gasping joggers and cyclists are testament to exactly why this job was then vital to the local economy.

But it’s gone. No-one on our street owns a horse and no-one uses a horse and cart to move goods. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Most of us would say this is just a thing. It is what it is.

Here in the UK and we’re in the second week of a general election campaign. Climate Change and Net Zero haven’t featured too much so far, but it was notable that Labour’s proposals for a state-owned renewable energy company were criticised by both left (the SNP, Unions) and right (Tories) for the impact on the North Sea oil and gas industry and the jobs therein. Labour responded by saying they weren’t turning off the taps any time soon.

But, hold on, haven’t all those groups signed up to Net Zero? How can you get close to Net Zero while still pumping and burning hydrocarbons? The stock answer is gas in particular will be part of ‘the transition’ to Net Zero. I would just like to point out that “transition” means change – it certainly doesn’t mean do nothing for the foreseeable. We have to start turning off those taps as soon as is practicable.

I was just about to type that employment is always an emotive issue when I realised that that isn’t always the case. The digital revolution over the last 15-20 years has made many jobs practically redundant – video library staff, photograph developers, DVD manufacturers/sales people etc, while others are in decline eg local journalists, newspaper printers, CD stores etc. They’ve all gone or are going the way of Extra Horse Guy on my street, but without a whimper. And when PM Rishi Sunak announced his proposal to phase out smoking, no-one mentioned jobs in that supply chain. But some jobs are clearly venerated higher than others and many of those seem to be in high carbon industries.

Change means creation of the new and destruction of the old. New industries mean new jobs – wind turbines, heat pumps and solar panels don’t build, install and maintain themselves. When I was at the Nissan plant near Sunderland recently, they were busy restructuring the production lines to build EVs and putting the final touches to plans for a couple of new battery gigafactories to supply that production. Jobs will be lost manufacturing internal combustion engines, jobs will be created in manufacturing batteries and electric motors.

The low carbon transition is a transition like any other and we’d better face up to it.