When President Donald Trump signed the executive order to gut the previous administration's climate change and clean energy initiatives, he was flanked mostly by coal miners. The profession that Trump mentioned throughout the election, Trump promised to increase production and use of coal in the United States and bring back coal jobs in the regions around the country that once boomed from mining, refining, and burning it.

But jumpstarting the coal industry back to where it was decades ago is not a simple as repealing some industry specific regulations or removing carbon emission limitations. The government is not really the reason coal is not flourishing anymore, it's market forces. Over the last decade, coal has been on its way out and natural gas has been leading the charge alongside renewables to take over the majority share of the US's energy market.

In addition, some nations that the US exports coal to are shifting further from coal power each year. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Trump's removal of the Clean Power plan will only keep the current number of coal jobs with little fluctuation over the next 20 years, as opposed to the reinvigoration of the industry Trump has promised.

Putting miners back to work is a nice sentiment on the surface and saying so is surely an easy way to win the votes of those affected by a drop in coal mining, but is it really a possibility when the demand for coal is not expected to grow? Does Trump intend to subsidize the coal industry or use other policy tools to move the nation to a higher coal dependency? If that were to happen, would that be picking winners and losers? Or is it the same principle as subsidizing firms researching and developing renewable energy sources?

It is all a matter of perspective. The response to a heightening demand for coal may be as simple as companies rehiring people or as complex as updating decades-closed infrastructure for mining, refining, and burning.

But what Trump isn't mentioning is that these energy sector jobs are not just disappearing and going unreplaced. The solar energy job market has been booming over the last half decade and is expected to continue to do so moving forward. So why not talk about this?

Well, a couple of maps can answer that.

So for Trump, it was clearly the better strategy of the two. And he did not have to rescind his claim that climate change a Chinese hoax, which is as ironic as it is false.

As for we the people? Well, our preference for coal or renewables should be directly correlated to our enjoyment of breathing in smog.