Getty The Tesla Powerwall energy-storage system.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues its mean-spirited ruse about saving the coal industry, which currently employs fewer people in the US than does the "We Have the Meats" fast-food chain and only slightly more than the bowling industry. Whether you believe the premise that the decline of the industry has less to do with overly-restrictive legislation and more to do with shifts toward cleaner natural gas, even reigning coal baron Robert Murray—a climate-change denier who wants the government to stop classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant and opposes Obama-era regulations prohibiting the dumping of mining detritus in streams—says Trump should stop making promises because the jobs are not coming back. There's no joy in that fact that when an industry dissolves, the people who served as that industry's backbone are left bleaching in the sun (a theme upon which journalists meditate daily), but Trump's bit of theater is a crass excuse to roll back environmental regulations to boost business. Trump, and everyone who supports that thinking (which is not the same as climate-change denial, that idiotic refusal to believe scientific consensus by the actual smartest people on the subject) should just say that, instead. Make the argument that's there to be made: "I value the economic opportunities that come with deregulation more than I value the long-term health of the environment."* That's a defensible position, if a mercenary one.

Getty Trump's EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, is at best apathetic if not openly hostile toward renewable fuel standards.