The EPA tries (and fails) to clean up Pruitt’s falsehoods about fossil fuel jobs

Not once, not twice, but thrice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt went on three Sunday talk shows to tout a faulty claim that the United States has added “50,000 coal sector jobs” under the Trump administration. Fact-checkers pilloried Pruitt, and he earned the dreaded Four Pinocchios award from the Washington Post, reserved for the most wildly false statements. (This is not the first time Pruitt has been caught lying, by the way.) The real number of coal jobs added since the inauguration is 586. Pruitt’s spokespeople tried to clean up his mess, saying he merely “misspoke”—three times in one day—and meant to include all mining jobs, plus oil and gas jobs, added since October of last year. So the official line is that Pruitt wasn’t lying, he just didn’t know what he was talking about. Either way, the supposed “mining boom” under the Trump administration is beyond bad math—it’s a myth. And it doesn’t change the fact that clean energy jobs—the ones that actually are growing—already outnumber fossil fuel jobs by five to one.