President Trump, in his desperate bid to save a few jobs in the moribund coal industry, has just presided over the decimation of the labour-intensive solar panel installation sector.
After a bumper year in 2016, the solar energy industry was responsible for almost double the employment in the electricity power sector (43%) than the whole fossil fuel industry (22%). But then Donald Trump came along, promising jobs for the boys in the mining backwoods of Pennsylvania and West Virginia (in return for votes), and taking every opportunity to diss the solar and wind power industries, to play down its contributions, and to generally discourage investment in what was a burgeoning sector. One of Trump's first actions in his trade war with China was to slap a 30% tariff on imported solar panels in early 2018.
All of this has had the the very real, and almost immediate effect of pulling the whole solar industry up short, and it shed 10,000 jobs in 2017 and another 8,000 in 2018. Industry spokespeople are currently predicting a small turnaround in 2019, although that is what they said at the beginning of 2018 too! And, of course, a few choice words from Donald Trump could make any industry predictions completely moot.
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