Baseline:

“The fossil fuel sector, from coal mines to gas power plants, employed around 900,000 people in the US in 2015-16, government figures show”.

Whereas, over the same period,

“…this was vastly outweighed by the green economy, which provided nearly 9.5 million jobs, or 4 per cent of the working age population”.

Note that the authors of the study, Lucien Georgeson and Mark Maslin at University College London, defined the “green economy” as anything from renewable energy jobs right through to environmental consulting.

This data comes from just before Trump took over, but despite his surreal insistence on the future of coal (hint: there is no future for coal), the difference between the two sectors is probably even wider by now.

Yesterday for instance, Murray Energy, the largest privately-owned coal mining company in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

As reported by Sky News, It is the 8th US coal mining company to do so in the past year.

The words they used to describe this phenomenon were: death spiral.

Good choice of words.

[Photo credit: Sky News]