The coal mines are not going to reopen. The textile mills are not going to come back. Deindustrialization of the Midwest is not going to be reversed. At least not completely. While outsourcing gets most of the attention — and while Donald Trump and the Republicans blame immigration and outsourcing for the decimation of job prospects in once-thriving industries — it is the obsolescence of some industries, such as fossil fuel extraction, and the automation of others, such as manufacturing, which has been the biggest factor in unemployment and underemployment of the working class.

It is important for leaders, entrepreneurs and workers in areas hit hard by automation and obsolescence in legacy industries — places like Ohio — to stop looking to the past for economic prosperity. It is time for us to look toward the future. A huge part of the future will be — and must be — about energy. About increasing our energy independence and about making energy systems smarter, more economical, and more efficient. It’s also about grasping the economic potential of new, clean, modern energy sources.

This is not about environmentalism, even if clean energy will, obviously, provide environmental benefits. It’s about bringing Ohio fully and squarely into the advanced energy economy. It’s about creating good jobs with good benefits in an industrial sector that is large, still growing and diversified.

According to a recent study (via Vox) the advanced energy industry brought in $1.4 trillion in revenue last year, globally. That’s nearly twice the size of the airline industry, as large as the apparel industry, and close to global spending on media, including newspapers, movies and video games. It brought in $200 billion in the United States alone, which is nearly double that of beer sales, the same as domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing, and approaching revenues realized by wholesale consumer electronics.

While that may surprise you, know that we’re not just talking about some small business building solar panels in some office park. The advanced energy industry includes:

• HVAC and lighting businesses, both installing new systems and retrofitting old ones;
• Electricity transmission, distribution, and storage;
• Advanced vehicle design, freight, and logistics;
• Fuel production, such as biodiesel;
• Fuel delivery, fuel transportation, fuel infrastructure, fuel station construction and maintenance; and
• Electricity generation, including wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear. 

You can read the breakdowns of each of these sectors and the current trends here. 

The advanced energy industry is not just huge, but it’s growing. In fact, it’s growing much faster than the world economy overall (7 percent vs. 3.1 percent). In the United States advanced energy is up 28 percent since 2010 and the industry now supports 3.3 million jobs here at home. To give some perspective: the solar power industry alone accounts for 260,077 jobs. Coal mining, coal transportation, and coal-fired power plant combustion account for about 174,000 jobs combined.

Donald Trump and the Republican party don’t want to talk about the advanced energy industry and none of their proposals seem geared toward supporting it or incentivizing its growth. Quite the opposite, actually. They view it as a fad at best, a liberal conspiracy at worst, lumping it in with social issues and the greater culture war. Hippie stuff they only care about in Berkeley, Austin or Ann Arbor. Indeed, they seem to take as some sort of personal affront to American values. 

But it’s not personal, it’s strictly business. The business of energy generation, management, transportation and storage. The business of electric vehicles and electric vehicle fueling stations. The business of smart engineering and smart construction, from I-beams to HVAC units to security systems. It’s about all of the allied and support industries which create and support these technologies. It’s about tech workers, office workers, tradesmen and laborers. About white collar and blue collar, all working for a greener future, both environmentally and economically speaking.

Why would anyone say no to that? And why isn’t anyone in Columbus or in Washington saying yes to it?