The Wall Street Journal recently published a remarkable editorial ti-tled “The Carnage in Coal Country,” which accused President Obama of destroying jobs by implementing terrible, horrible, no-good regula-tions on coal: “According to the National Mining Association, 40,000 coal jobs have been lost in the U.S. since 2008,” the editorial said.

That’s a bigger number than the figure from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but never mind. You might want to put that number in perspec-tive by remembering that the Ameri-can economy has added 14 million private sector jobs since 2010. You might also want to note that coal has been declining for a long time.

But what really struck me about the editorial were two things. First, The Journal sneers that we’re “still waiting for all those new green jobs Mr. Obama has been promising since he arrived in Washington.” Well, look at the chart.

Yes, the solar numbers are from the Solar Foundation, a private group, but The Journal’s figure on mining jobs also comes from a private group. And while you might want to quibble over specific data points, the boom in renewable energy in the United States is very real, as is the surging number of jobs in occupations like solar panel installation. I can’t imag-ine any calculation under which the number of green jobs added doesn’t exceed the loss of jobs in coal min-ing — an industry that was already a shadow of its former self before Mr. Obama took office.

The other striking thing about the editorial is that it takes as a given the notion that any regulation is bad, in-cluding regulations on mercury and coal ash (which itself is also loaded with mercury and other heavy met-als like lead). Let’s see: Mercury is a neurotoxin, which can impair intelligence, and other heavy metals can cause cancer and poison people in a variety of ways. In what moral or even economic universe is it obvi-ously wrong to limit emissions of neurotoxins?

I know that this article wasn’t

intended as any kind of rational argument — that it was just an Anti-Obama Two Minutes of Hate piece. But this sort of thing is still amazing to see in a paper that sometimes pre-tends to be a cut above the conserva-tive commentator Erick Erickson.

Die-Hard ConservativesOh my. Here’s Marco Rubio during

a recent interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation”: “I have a right to protect my family if someone were to come after us. In fact, if ISIS were to visit us or our communities at any moment, the last line of defense between ISIS and my family is the ability I have to protect my family from them or from

a criminal or anyone else who seeks to do us harm. Millions of Americans feel that way.”

Back when I was a new assistant professor at Yale, one of the univer-sity’s grad students got mugged — New Haven was a rough place at the time. Another student started boasting that he would have stood up to the muggers and was rightly greeted with jeers: “And strangled them with your eyeglasses.”

Adults are supposed to realize that they aren’t characters in a Bruce Wil-lis movie. But Republican presidential candidates not only have such fanta-sies, they are actively proud of them.

Awesome.

I recently retired from a power and water company.

Before I left, my former employer announced that solar is more eco-nomical than coal, so the company is building a solar farm.

Additionally, the company in-stalled a new system to capture mercury from its coal plants, and one of the coal-fire units is scheduled to be converted to use natural gas. The rest of the power is generated by combustion turbines, gas turbines and nuclear facilities.

The company has a long-term plan

to become a greener business. This is what customers want, and it’s the most economical path.

— STEPHEN, FLORIDA

I’m about as sad to see the coal industry decline as I am to see Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán get recaptured. Both the coal industry and El Chapo are in the business of poisoning Americans.

The air pollution that results from burning fossil fuels (not exclusively coal) is estimated to have caused hundreds of thousands of premature

deaths in the United States over the years. And if you want a reminder of what can happen when you don’t regulate coal, reflect on the death cloud of smog that hung over Beijing this past December.

I look forward to the day when the last coal job is lost.

— BILL, NEW YORK

I think it’s a safe bet that none of the people who write editorials for The Wall Street Journal would want to live so close to a coal mine that the quality of their air or wa-

ter suffered from the effects of the extraction process.

— JAMES LEE, TEXAS

In the 1980s, I watched my dad, uncle and other good men lose their jobs at steel mills around Pittsburgh. Most of them never re-covered financially, and their fami-lies suffered as a result.

I think most Americans under-stand that coal has to go. But I would like to see the Obama administration launch a massive jobs and retraining program, and I’d like to see our next president focus that program on coal miners and other people who work in the fossil fuel industries.

It is not the fault of these workers that they’re getting chewed up by the government’s efforts to reduce

global warming or by the market’s taking advantage of cheaper natural gas.

— DAVID APPELL, OREGON

Oh, Mr. Krugman, you should have learned long ago that for the editors of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — or for most conservatives, for that mat-ter — liberty means being able to sprinkle neurotoxins on one’s cereal. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t be morning in America!

— R. WILLIAMS, GEORGIA

BLEIBEL/CARTOON ARTS INTERNATIONAL/NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed page and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2008. Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 21 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His latest book is “End This Depression Now!”

When oil prices began their big plunge, it was widely assumed that the economic effects would be posi-tive. Some of us were a bit skeptical. But maybe not skeptical enough: Taking a global view, there’s a pretty good case to be made that the oil plunge is having a distinctly nega-tive impact. Why?

Well, think about why we used to believe that oil price declines were expansionary. They reduced infla-tion, freeing central banks to loosen monetary policy — but that’s not a relevant issue at a time when infla-tion is already below target almost everywhere.

Beyond that, however, the typical view was that falling oil prices tend-ed to redistribute income away from agents with low marginal propensi-ties to spend toward agents with high marginal propensities to spend. For instance, oil-rich Middle Eastern nations and Texas billionaires, the story went, were sitting on huge piles of wealth, were therefore unlikely to face liquidity constraints and could (and would) smooth out fluctuations in their income. Meanwhile, the benefits of lower oil prices would be spread widely, including to many consumers who were living pay-check to paycheck and who would

probably spend all that extra cash.Now, part of the reason this logic

doesn’t work the way it used to is that the rise of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, means that there’s a lot of investment spending that’s closely tied to oil prices — investment spend-ing that has relatively short lead times and will therefore fall quickly.

But I believe there’s something else going on: an important nonlin-earity in the effects of oil fluctua-tions. A 10 or 20 percent decline in the price might work in the conven-tional way, but a 70 percent decline has really drastic effects on produc-ers — they become more likely, not

less, to be liquidity-constrained as compared to consumers. Saudi Ara-bia, for example, has been forced to institute severe austerity policies, and highly indebted fracking com-panies are finding themselves faced with balance sheet crises.

Or to put it differently: Small oil price declines may be expansionary through the usual channels, but re-ally big declines set in motion a pro-cess of forced deleveraging among producers that can be a significant drag on the world economy, especial-ly when the entire advanced world is still in or near a liquidity trap.

Oh, and a belated happy new year.

PAUL KRUGMAN

The Global Downside of the Oil Price Plunge

Canada has become overly de-pendent on oil exports in recent years. As a result, we have been hit especially hard by the fall in crude prices, especially in Alberta.

On the upside, low oil prices have led to a less valuable Canadian dol-lar, and this has made our exports more competitive abroad. A lower dollar also means that Canadians are more likely to plan vacations here at home, and they will likely en-gage in less cross-border shopping. So more money will stay here, and local businesses will benefit.

— G., CANADA

I would imagine that I’m not alone in celebrating any turn of events that forces a certain gov-ernment in the Arabian Peninsula

to tighten its belt. Those of us of a certain age have

vivid memories of the oil embargo in the early 1970s, and of our Saudi Ara-bian allies stepping on our throats, hoping that the United States would abandon its support for Israel.

Since then, the Paleolithic behav-ior of Saudi Arabia’s religious gov-ernment has harmed people around the world.

What I’m saying is: It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys.

— J.M., MAINE

As a budget-constrained senior citizen, I find that spending less on gasoline these days means that I have more to spend on my per-petually increasing rent.

— RICHARD, CALIFORNIA

Stock markets around the world are not dealing well with the plunge in oil prices, yet the real economy is doing fine. It’s no wonder why capitalists’ moods have soured.

Also, if there is a bubble in the fracking industry, it is the capitalists

who will be hurt, not the workers. That is, of course, if governments don’t rescue the banks after the bubble bursts.

— H.M., NEW YORK

I live in Singapore, which pro-duces a fairly large proportion of the world’s oil rigs, drilling ships and production platforms.

Years ago the drop in oil prices had little effect on industrial yards here because companies normally had a couple years’ worth of orders on the books. But prices continued

to fall, and the drilling industry stopped ordering anything new. So now many of Singapore’s yards are sitting nearly idle, and workers have been laid off.

Sure, Singapore is a city of about five million people, but when you consider that the oil industry has stopped making capital investments on a global scale, a lot of manufactur-ers could be in trouble.

— M.G., SINGAPORE

High oil prices in the past have created the current glut in supply. So it would be logical to assume that today’s low prices will mean that no new wells will be drilled until sup-ply and demand are balanced once again.

— CHRIS, AUSTRALIA

READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM

Crude’s Problems Leak Into Other Markets

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Rail cars outside a coal loading terminal in Wyoming. President Obama has made reducing emissions from coal a focus of his second term.

DEBATING POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND OTHER TIMELY TOPICS WITH PAUL KRUGMAN OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2016

ONLINE: COMMENTS Comments have been edited for clarity and length. For Paul Krugman’s latest thoughts and to join the debate online, visit his blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.

PAUL KRUGMAN

Irrational Arguments About the Coal Industry

In recent years, the American coal industry has been marked by bankruptcies and a significant drop in output, leading many an-alysts to suggest that it could be stuck in a terminal decline. And while these trends predate Pres-ident Obama’s tenure, many Re-publican politicians have placed responsibility for the coal indus-try’s losses squarely at his feet.

Mr. Obama has made reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal a central focus of his second term, and his administration has implemented regulations that im-pose new costs on the industry. Republicans have furiously op-posed these measures, often char-acterizing Mr. Obama’s actions as a “war on coal” that is responsible for massive job losses.

However, while some ana-lysts believe that the new regula-tions have played a role in coal’s downfall, others believe that the bulk of its decline is due to fall-ing international demand from countries like China, as well as a massive boom in domestic natu-ral gas production — which has quickly displaced coal as the United States’ largest energy source.

But while the coal industry is facing tough times, another en-ergy sector, the solar industry, is growing rapidly. According to a recent report from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, 209,000 Ameri-cans worked in solar-related jobs in 2015, about 35,000 more than in 2014.

Julian Spector, a commentator at The Atlantic’s CityLab, argued earlier this month that the grow-ing base of workers in solar could signal a sea change in the nation’s energy politics. “The population of workers with a direct econom-ic stake in the success of solar en-ergy has reached the hundreds of thousands, and that size carries with it great political potential,” Mr. Spector wrote. “Each of those new employees, not to mention their families and friends, now are more likely to vote for politi-cians who favor the expansion of renewable energy. The U.S. has steered clear of strong renewable energy policies for years thanks to the political influence of the fossil fuel industries; now there’s a new kid on the block to fight for pro-solar governance.”

BACKSTORY

A Long Demise

READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM

Consumers Want a Greener Future

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250U.S. Employment, Solar and Coal Mining

THE NEW YORK TIMESSources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Solar Foundation

Solar

Coal mining

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Jobs (in thousands)