No Surprise, Trump's Coal Jobs are a Lie...

Trump has been saying that removing the US from the Paris Agreement is a way to produce more jobs in the energy sector of the US.  Really?

Let's think about that a second.

This article says that a coal mine is being reopened.  How many hundreds or even thousands of jobs will it bring back?  70.

The latest figures for employment (March 2017) have been reported.  The country's growth is "running out of steam" only producing 98,000 jobs.  We'd have to open 1400 mines across the country for our job growth to be called "running out of steam". 

Further, even though employment in coal mines has drastically tailed off...actual mining of coal reached an all-time high of 1.08 gigatons of coal produced in 2008 (40% on public lands)!  That means that increasing coal mining will not, in any sense, produce the jobs that Trump is talking about.

Solar energy alone has twice the number of employees than Coal.  From the same article, green energy has just under 1/3 of all energy jobs, and hydrocarbon or nuclear energy the other 2/3.

Not only that, but the coal jobs no longer exist for people to be hired for them.  The coal jobs have been declining significantly since 1923, and they continue to decline.

Incidentally, every dollar the government invests in green energy provides 3 times as many jobs as the same money invested in older energy generation methods.

On top of all that, burning coal for energy actually produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power.

​The bottom line here is that, of course, as always with Trump, it's about the bottom line.  Some billionaire somewhere stands to make a *huge* amount of money from increased access to public lands, declaring former protected lands as unprotected, and making it easier to mine coal without having to worry about pesky things like polluting streams and rivers.

We are watching the rape of the US landscape right here...and the poor, poor people that Trump says he's helping will be impacted the most.  No more jobs, lots more pollution.  

It's a very bad time to be a poor Trump supporter.