Bill Pederson’s 40-year career in Wyoming’s mines ended abruptly last month, as Peabody Energy and Arch Coal announced more than 460 layoffs. His son lost his mining job the same day.

“It’s going to be interesting, but I guess we’ll figure out what we’ve got to do,” Pederson says. “I think the whole town is in a state of shock. … It’s kind of numb here, because everyone’s trying to figure out what to do, and there’s no jobs yet. Everyone’s trying to make plans, but there’s nothing to make plans with.”

In Wyoming, the largest coal-producing state in America, hundreds of families are now paying the painful price for Washington’s misguided environmental policies.

The Clean Power Plan, issued in August, requires states to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels over the next 15 years, establishing an artificial disincentive against coal-fired electricity generation. At a time when inexpensive natural gas had already lessened demand for coal, this onerous regulation was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For decades, the mines have been a stable source of employment, providing high-wage jobs to even workers with a high-school education or vocational training. Now, that work is gone, and many are left with hefty mortgages from homes bought in boom times and no source of income.

One family, already grieving after the recent death of their young daughter, responded to their breadwinner’s layoff by smiling into the camera on Facebook.

“Why is my family smiling?” David Williams wrote. “Because I asked them to. Because a man’s real job is to carry his family through the trials of life, not whatever he does for an occupation. I will not let them cry or worry. I will hunt for a new job. … I’m not above flipping burgers or sweeping floors to provide for my family. I’m not above stocking shelves or cleaning toilets. Because those things are my occupation; my job is taking care of the people in this picture and in that regard, I’m never without a job.”

But even those menial jobs may prove scarce, says Eric Winslow, who lost his job at North Antelope Rochelle after 10 years. The father of two lives in Douglas, population 6,500, and he says the whole town is cringing, waiting for the second- and third-degree affects of the layoffs.

“One coal miner job lost here affects five to seven people in one way or another,” he says. Whether it’s the convenience store or the movie theater or the bowling alley, that revenue right now is not going back to the community. And this is the first round.”

It’s hard to overstate how critical coal is to the Cowboy State. The Wyoming Infrastructure Authority called it “a cornerstone of the Wyoming economy,” noting that it has also been the most stable tax-revenue source since the 1970s.

Largely because of environmental policies targeting traditional energy, Wyoming has already found itself in a recession.

Last year, Wyoming, which has a population below 600,000, saw 6,400 jobs cut, concentrated in the energy sector. The coal layoffs in March were just the most recent in a series of dozens of job cutbacks at mines, and everyone’s bracing for more.

Gov. Matt Mead, responding to the March layoffs, said: “This isn’t a natural disaster, but it certainly is a disaster in terms of the personal lives of those miners — and beyond that, what it is going to do to those communities and businesses it is going to affect.”

Regardless of the astronomical impact on blue-collar families in Wyoming, the Clean Power Plan offers little environmental benefit. The Cato Institute, using the Environmental Protection Agency’s own modeling, estimated that the billions of dollars in economic cost from bought a temperature reduction of less than 2/100ths of 1 degree Celsius by 2100.

Many Wyoming residents fear that more draconian regulations will follow. They took special note last month, when Hillary Clinton bragged, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Winslow, the laid-off North Antelope Rochelle miner, says that comment “puts me in a dark place.”

“That’s horrible,” he adds. “How could one person who wants to be the leader of the free world want to devastate so many people?”

Wyoming’s mining families are asking that, and many other questions: How to feed their families and pay their rent, whether their beloved hometowns will soon become ghost towns. One question they’re not asking, though, is why. They know exactly who to blame.