Scott Pruitt Lies to Chuck Todd

DangItIowa and I both endured the Meet the Press interview with the EPA Director:

Scott Pruitt was on Meet the Press today and claimed that 70,000 “coal sector” jobs have been added in the US since 4th quarter of 2016, with 7,000 created in May 2017 alone. I don’t know Scott Pruitt’s definition of the “coal sector” but his claim was in response to Chuck Todd asking if President Trump had made an empty promise to coal miners about bringing back the coal industry. Here are the facts, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about the gain in US coal mining jobs since 4th quarter of 2016. There were 49,300 coal mining jobs at the end of September 2016 and there were 51,000 coal mining jobs at the end of May 2017 — that’s 1,700 jobs added. And only 400 of those jobs were created during May 2017.

This was not even his worse spinning in my view. Pruitt kept telling Chuck Todd how the U.S. was lowering carbon emissions whereas the Chinese will not be required to do so for years. Chuck Todd as usual was completely unprepared and never noted the fact that per capita CO2 emissions in 2016 were 16.4 metric tons for the U.S. but only 7.6 metric tons for China.