The recent announcement by Cecil Roberts, the president of the United Mine Workers, that his union understands that market forces and public concern for the planet have combined to imperil what little is left of the coal mining industry, and that his union seeks "just transition" employment or retirement for its members, may enable advocates of a Green New Deal (and I count myself one) to rethink just what they’re advocating.

The shift to "Green" is well under way. Oil and other fossil fuel companies are investing in alternative energy development, electric cars are coming, and the chief resistance to the change is coming from Trumpified Republicans who’ve characterized the transformation as one more element in the liberal elite’s cultural war on American tradition.

For these fact-resistant Trumpites, no arguments, no matter how grounded in science and economics, will suffice. But for the workers who’ll be displaced by the change and will face a future of low-paying jobs (which mining and oil refinery and pipeline work are not—they pay well), the "New Deal" part of the transformation is the key to winning their support.

Historically, workers in sectors that are going out of business have been left to the mercies of indifferent markets. The agricultural workers forced to work in Manchester’s dark, satanic mills; the unionized rail workers cast adrift when cars and planes supplanted trains; the factory workers of the Midwest who faced employment at Walmart when the factories moved to Mexico and China—there was no New Deal for them.

Which means the message for those of us who support the Green New Deal is that the workers who’ll be cast adrift will either face those same indifferent markets or get a lifeline from a New Deal that offers them comparable if not better-paying employment.

I’m not suggesting that creating such policies and such jobs is easy. It will require massive public investment to create jobs with pay and benefits that don’t lead to downward mobility for displaced workers. For which reason we need more economists doing the kind of work that Bob Pollin at the University of Massachusetts has been doing for years—conceptualizing and pricing out the new jobs that could be created as part of the transformation, as part of a new New Deal. We need a government that will help employers provide those jobs and will provide those jobs itself as well.

The Biden administration seems to understand that it needs to do just that; the hope for such a New Deal suffuses its proposals now before Congress. But displaced workers also will need the kind of specific commitments that the administration isn’t able to make until those proposals become law, and need to hear even now from Biden and various Cabinet secretaries what those jobs could offer.

More broadly, though, proponents of the GND need to reformulate the terms of debate. It’s not whether or not we’ll go green. It’s whether we’ll do it with the kind of economic casualties that have accompanied all such previous transitions, or whether we’ll do it with a conscious job creation and job standards policy that would enable workers to benefit from the transition. Green is coming. The only question is whether or not it will come with a New Deal.