Trump is swimming against the tide. There is little chance of a reprieve for old king coal in the US, which is being outcompeted by renewables and shale gas. Even a US coal mining CEO has downplayed the prospect of coal production ever returning to pre-Obama levels.

In 2016, for the first time ever, renewables globally contributed more new power generation capacity than fossil fuels. Businesses are putting their money behind renewables, which last year attracted almost double the investment of fossil fuel power.

Far from costing jobs, as Trump claims, clean energy is increasingly good business. Innovation and scale are leading to dramatic cost reductions: the global cost of wind and solar are estimated to have plummeted by 71 per cent and 83 per cent respectively since 2008. Even without supportive government regulation in the US, the fundamentals favour renewables.

These lower technology costs, together with new low-carbon industrial opportunities and domestic political pressure relating to air pollution, are causing two of the world’s biggest emitters, China and India, to abandon coal in favour of renewables.

China peaked its coal use in 2013. Since then, they have become the world’s biggest solar market and have been poised to adopt America’s climate leadership role in the event of them pulling out of Paris.