The fact is, few if any coal jobs are ever coming back. That’s something Pruitt never cops to but energy investors and even dinosaurs like coal baron Robert Murray know is true. Most of the coal jobs lost in the past three decades have not been eliminated because of environmental protections. They have been lost to automation, to a switch from underground mining to surface mining of low-sulfur coal in the West, to cheap natural gas and, increasingly, to renewables.

The false choice Pruitt complains about began decades before becoming president even occurred to Barack Obama. Rightists back in the 1980s claimed that environmental advocates were intent on making over our energy system into one in which we all “freeze to death in the dark.” Then and now, their propaganda implicitly or explicitly describes the economy and the environment as separate entities. But they aren’t. They are inextricably intertwined.

What Pruitt failed to mention to his friends at Fox is that the ever-expanding industries behind the generation of electricity by wind and sun now employ four times as many people in the United States as the coal industry does. Last year, solar jobs increased by 25 percent over 2015, with 260,000 such jobs now tallied. Meanwhile, by the end of 2016, there were 88,000 Americans working in wind jobs. In both cases, that’s more than three times as many people who were employed in those fields in 2010. Some analysts say these numbers could triple by 2030.

As with any large-scale transition, it’s impossible to predict all the impacts more than a few years in advance. But one thing is clear: as the nation and the planet undergo the transformation of our energy system from one based on fossil fuels and nukes to one based on renewables, whole other industries, such as transportation, are going to be transformed or developed from scratch.

This will provide even more jobs. And those jobs will not include the malignant side effects for workers and everybody else caused by the coal industry that once provided the majority of our electricity. Then, of course, there will also be the ameliorative benefits from ceasing to add still more carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere.

Pruitt is right. We can have good jobs and a good environment. But there’s no evidence in the policies and palaver that he and other members of the Trump regime have issued that any of them truly understand this, at least not beyond its efficacy as a talking point. And nothing indicates that anything they do in this regard will give us either good jobs or a good environment. Rather, it’s quite the opposite.