The following article was posted on the TrumpAccountable.org website August 26, 2017:
Data from the U.S. Department of Energy indicates that 3.3 million Americans were employed in the clean energy industry in 2016. By contrast, during the same time period the fossil fuel industry employed 2.9 million Americans. The economic importance of clean energy jobs – fueled by a marketplace that increasingly demands the U.S. play a role in green technology – is an undeniable element of the U.S. economic landscape.
Despite those in the Trump administration who contend that climate change is a hoax, interest in clean energy technology and jobs continues to grow in the U.S. and abroad. Meanwhile President Trump continues to be an advocate for coal. “We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” Trump claimed at a rally in Phoenix earlier this week. “And it’s just been announced that a second, brand-new coal mine, where they’re going to take out clean coal — meaning, they’re taking out coal, they’re going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania.”
Trump clearly lacks a fundamental understanding of what “clean coal” is and the fact that the term refers not to the coal that comes from the ground but technologies used to capture carbon emissions associated with coal power plants. But aside from his flawed understanding, here are two important points about how the Obama and Trump administrations supported jobs in the energy sector:
- Trump is trying to provide government support for jobs that are bad for the environment and that are economically unsustainable.
- Obama helped provide support for emerging green technologies that are in high demand in the U.S. and around the world.
President Obama capitalized on a strong global economic movement driven by science while Trump is determined to support big coal industry donors and coal workers (who supported him in 2016) despite science or a grasp of the free market forces driving energy consumption in the U.S.
The free market has done more to undermine the coal industry and jobs dependent on coal than any environmental policies implemented by the Obama administration.
View the post here.