Clipper ship owners probably fulminated against steamboats. Capitalism, when not mired in government cronyism, weeds out losing technologies and those engaged in the old-fashioned work adapt or fade. Workers and management and stockholders are all at risk. They all see it as a threat, because it is.

To the general public, the change is a change for the better. But not on the same scale. So while more people stand to benefit from allowing the new technology, few of them have any personal economic reason to be intensely involved in the issue. So if it is possible to buy Congress, or some regulatory agency, that’s what those whose livelihoods or wealth depend on the old technology will do.

Hence the need for a government that either just won’t, or simply isn’t in a position to, hand out favors that ban progress. A government that just stands back and says sorry, they can build that wind farm off the coast if they like. Sorry, they can build those high tension power lines right through the Mojave Desert even if there is a threatened tortoise that lives there. Sorry, they can build Ivanpah even if it fries some birds, and they can build wind farms even if they kill a whole 1/1000th of one percent of the bird kills due to skyscraper windows.

The kind of government we need can be achieved by either party. The Democrats just need to put NIMBYists in their place and turn a cold shoulder to lobbyists for the past. The Republicans just need to remember their founding principles as the party of free enterprise. Both these things are not so easy. Right now, we don’t have the robust growth we should have in nuclear power because Harry Reid managed to block the Nevada nuclear waste repository. Political reasons. And then there’s Republicans, unfortunately a majority of them, who are riding the hobby horse of “the science is flaky”—-because—-campaign contributions.

Solar is the wave of the future. It can use some help from subsidies, especially subsidies that scale back as the market price of solar drops, but it can probably slog along without them, just so it has protection such as mandatory cooperation by utilities regarding hookup costs, feedback rules, etc.