WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump’s environmental chief has been trying to clear the air about why his boss is pulling out of the Paris climate accord, but some of the claims he’s making are as solid as smoke. A look at a some of the statements Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt made over the weekend:
PRUITT, pushing back on whether the president is overstating his ability to bring back long lost coal-mining jobs, credited Trump with creating almost 50,000 jobs “in the coal sector” since the fourth quarter of last year. “In the month of May alone, almost 7,000 jobs,” Pruitt told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
THE FACTS: He’s wildly off base. Instead of adding almost 50,000 jobs in the last few months, coal mining accounted for a total of only 51,000 jobs nationally at the end of May. That’s only up about 400 jobs from the prior month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Asked about Pruitt’s claim of 50,000 new coal jobs, his staff on Monday pointed to statistics encompassing seven months of job gains across the far broader “mining” sector. That includes not just coal but also oil and gas extraction, metal ore mining, stone quarrying and other unrelated jobs. Three of the months Pruitt’s staff is counting were while Barack Obama was still president.
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