You can say one thing about Donald Trump: America’s 45th president is the King of the Easy Answer.

Job woes? Made in China. Crime? Imported from Mexico, via Chicago. (Not true, but whatever.) Women want him, his inaugural crowd was yuuge (period!), and he spends weekends at golf clubs, with the Golf Channel on while skipping the Russian dressing. He’s working! Honest.

Which makes Trump’s move this week to roll back the Clean Power Plan (CPP) all the more mystifying, because the economic case for letting President Barack Obama’s signature move to fight climate change take effect as planned is as easy as the environmental argument. So easy, you might say, even Trump can get it. And it makes his order that the Environmental Protection Agency review the plan maybe less important than critics think — because a smart idea like shifting to renewable electricity sources from carbon-rich coal, when backed by manageable economics, has a momentum of its own.

“ Coal provided 60% of U.S. electricity in 2005, but only 30% today. ”

The CPP is the Obama-era carbon-reduction plan that directed states to find ways to reduce emissions from electricity plants by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030. In practice, the first thing this is likely to mean is phasing out older coal-fired plants, because coal has about twice as much carbon as natural gas, and, of course, wind and solar plants don’t emit any carbon.

With the same analytical rigor Republicans showed in the health-care debate, they declared this plan was sure to crush job creation (it didn’t), make utility rates surge (they’ve risen more slowly than general inflation for years as coal lost market share to natural gas and renewables), kill the coal industry (which has been shrinking for decades, thanks to strip mining and falling gas prices), and bankrupt us in general.

As Trump’s executive order to roll back his predecessor’s executive order sets off on its journey through the courts, it’s well to remember that the revolution in energy the president seeks to thwart started without him, and doesn’t depend crucially on what he does about the Clean Power Plan. Here are only some of the reasons why.

States go their own way

First, states, and especially California, will ignore him and keep shifting their electricity needs to renewables. Five states now get 20% of their electricity from wind power (and they’re conservative ones: Iowa, both Dakotas, Kansas and Oklahoma). Texas, which of course is larger, produces the most wind power of all. These states have not a tree-hugging governor among them; wind is just common sense, tax-advantaged and now cheap enough to compete, and sure to be cheaper once new wind plants are paid off. Notably, most of these states also are petroleum producers, and Iowa corn is integral to ethanol production. They’re doing wind anyway.

Coal is shrinking

Second, coal is a smaller industry than you think, and renewables are a bigger one than you realize. Only about 70,000 people work in coal mining, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and more than half have non-industry-specific skills like finance and truck driving. If someone has a finance job at a Kentucky coal company, Louisville beckons. If you’re a secretary at a coal company in West Virginia, Pittsburgh may be the future.

The U.S. economy replaces that many jobs in a good week. Specifically, the blue-collar part of the industry could go to work in oil drilling — the largest coal-producing state, Wyoming, also has the eighth-most oil of any state. And Wyoming has big, windy plains, ripe for wind farms, a potential obvious enough that conservatives see it clearly when the subject is business rather than politics.

Wind power rises up

Meanwhile, wind power now accounts for about 100,000 jobs, according to the American Wind Energy Association. This is only going to grow, because the falling cost of technology means experts think wind-production costs will fall by about a quarter within 15 years, and some think it’s more like half.

Nothing like this is happening in coal, where plant-construction costs are stagnant and coal prices fluctuate. That’s why even traditionally coal-focused utilities like Southern Co. SO, +0.52% are looking elsewhere.

Trump’s big idea about climate change — other than his shtick about it being made up by China so it could pulverize the U.S. economy with cheap coal, when China is actually planning to move rapidly to renewables — has been that it’s simply too expensive to change. But the change is already happening, and electric rates are stable: Coal provided 60% of U.S. electricity in 2005, but only 30% today. And that is a big reason we are already about halfway to the emission-reduction goals contemplated in the 2016 Paris accords.

We already know how to make the transition Trump is resisting. We know it’s cheap and getting cheaper, we know it is already creating more jobs than it is displacing, and we know that about 62% of new electricity-making capacity getting built in the U.S. now uses renewable energy like sun and wind.

That happened mostly because renewable-energy and gas-drilling technology improved, and markets spoke. The Clean Power Plan was intended to drive the point home through force of law, and it still might, given Trump’s shaky early record on seeing his executive orders upheld in court. But even if Obama’s signature environmental policy goes by the boards, the historic clean-energy movement he began presiding over is likely to continue without him.

Tim Mullaney covers economics and politics for MarketWatch.