There's Too Much Focus on Energy Jobs Right Now

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt made a striking claim Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." The "coal sector," he said, has added almost 50,000 jobs since the fourth quarter of last year, and almost 7,000 just in May. Party poopers in the news media immediately pointed out that this couldn't possibly be true, given that total employment in coal mining was just 51,000 in May. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that's up 1,700 from October (the beginning of last year's fourth quarter) and up 400 in the month of May. These numbers are, just to be clear, a lot smaller than 50,000 and 7,000.

When I asked the EPA about this today, the response was that overall employment in mining (which includes drilling for oil and gas) had increased by 47,000 since last October. This is true (and mining employment was up 6,600 in May)! That's not the same as coal-sector jobs, of course, but to his credit Pruitt had kinda-sorta corrected himself by the time he went on ABC's "This Week" later on Sunday morning:

That's still a bit misleading, given that coal was responsible for only a small fraction of those gains,1496678977072 and that the rise of another mining sector -- natural gas, which is displacing coal as the main fuel used in electricity generation in the U.S. -- was surely responsible for a large share of the nearly 40,000 coal-mining jobs lost since early 2012. But Pruitt was making his point in the context of a discussion about his boss's decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, and given that more than two-thirds of U.S. mining-sector jobs involve extracting things that are burned for fuel and throw off carbon dioxide in the process, it wasn't irrelevant to that discussion.