Discussion on:

Disappearing act: Amid a drilling boom, this fossil fuels job is at risk

Instead of more petroleum engineers working to extract more costly carbon to pump into the atmosphere use the schooling to develop renewable engineering degrees.

Let me see - the trend is away from untrained, bootstrap learning you pick up in the field and towards a general education with specialized training to be an effective contributor in a 21st century economy.

I heard that same message from a young black fellow last night during some sort of acceptance speech - not sure I was paying much attention - but it sounds like the market has already decided he is right.

Not sure anyone has figured out yet that if we can have a robot navigate its way to Mars then land on the planet by itself - or have a car drive itself in traffic - we can probably get more robots to handle day to day of pump operations and have one of these eddycated engineers supervise 10 or more of these devices. Least wise that's what the boys at Bain Capital tell me.

usually cant' fix a light switch or a faucet much less a pump.

Interesting stat but some explanation is called for. Are the number of pump system operators declining because there's fewer domestic wells? Or refineries? Or is technology replacing people with machines?