There you go, EPA. No need to keep trying to break the industry that made this nation great. Move along. Nothing to see here.

The figures are contained in research launched yesterday in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change.

Better yet, that research mounts a case for doing away with cap and trade schemes altogether.

Its research found that imports to the US were shown to contain, on average, 770 grams of CO2 per dollar whereas for exports the number is 490g.

For China the opposite is true.

See, EPA. It was not the US coal industry at all. Those carbon emissions are being brought it.

The sad truth in all of this is that the imbalance is more a reflection of the US trade figures than it is the relative greenness of the two economies.

However, the study, by Michael Jakob and Robert Marcschinski, has real value for coal producers in its backing of efforts to stop cap and trade measures.

“To really justify trade-policy interventions like the much discussed CO2 tariffs, further analysis would be needed – the observed CO2 transfers alone are not enough as a basis,” the authors say.

External scientific support for an argument the industry has been running for some time.