None. There is no argument that will convince these people.
You have to remember who we’re talking about. These are people who:
- Actually believed Trump would build a wall all along the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it.
- Actually believed Trump would bring back coal. (Seriously. They sincerely thought this would happen. For real. They actually thought coal would come back because the President said so.)
- Actually believed that Trump had the biggest inauguration ever, bigger than Obama’s, no matter how many photographs they saw.
- Actually believed that Trump had a plan that would replace Obamacare and would be cheaper and better. (“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”)
These are people who live in a world of alternative facts, a place where the truth is whatever you want to be true and anything that says otherwise—like, for example, photographs of the inauguration—are a lie.
And I mean, Trump has said this before. Every election he loses is “rigged.” Rigged, rigged, rigged, rigged. It’s the only thing he can say.
They believed him when he said this before, why wouldn’t they believe him now?
No argument can change these people’s minds. They don’t live in the real world.
(Hey, guys, how are those coal jobs doing? Coming back, are they?)
Annual Coal Report
The Annual Coal Report (ACR) provides annual data on U.S. coal production, number of mines, productive capacity, recoverable reserves, employment, productivity, consumption, stocks, and prices. All data for 2017 and previous years are final.
Donald Trump and the Myth of the COal Revival
To put the miners “back to work,” the President announced, he was lifting the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands. He was also ordering a review of his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, that “crushing attack on American industry.”
.. his order seems designed to cleanse the E.P.A. of what Senator James Inhofe, Republican, of Oklahoma, recently described as “all the stuff” on the agency’s Web site “that is brainwashing our kids.”
.. The irony of the executive order, as many analysts have already pointed out, is that it denies economic realities, too. The C.P.P., Reilly said, largely locked in “what was going to happen anyway”—namely, a steady decline in the demand for coal caused by Trump’s beloved free market.
.. Repealing the C.P.P., Reilly predicted, “will do little or nothing to help out-of-work coal miners.” Even Robert Murray, the C.E.O. of Murray Energy, the country’s largest private coal company, recently said that coal jobs weren’t going to come back in the multitudes that Trump has promised.
.. Indeed, economists have projected that the cost of implementing the C.P.P. would be recovered in public-health benefits alone, since it would reduce soot-and-smog-forming emissions. This is especially true for communities downwind of coal plants, which have been suffering for decades.
According to the E.P.A.’s own estimates, the C.P.P. would help prevent as many as thirty-six hundred premature deaths, seventeen hundred heart attacks, ninety thousand asthma attacks among children, and three hundred thousand missed workdays and school days every year.
.. Trump’s proposed cuts to the E.P.A. budget would result in the elimination of approximately thirty-two hundred jobs.