“Clean Power Plan or not, there will be something in the future on carbon control. So there’s no question that the industry is moving forward with cleaner energy,” he said. “We will not be building large coal facilities. We’re not stopping what we’re doing based on the new administration. We need to make long-term capital decisions. I don’t think the course will change.”

But company-driven shifts alone will still not be enough to create the steep drop-off in carbon pollution that scientists say is necessary. The use of wind power grew by more than 100 percent between 2010 and the end of 2015, while the use of large-scale solar grew by more than 20 times in that same period, according to the Energy Information Administration. But renewable sources, excluding hydroelectric power, still only represent a small fraction of the American energy economy, providing just a little more than 7 percent of the country’s electricity.

Carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 at six billion metric tons, declining slightly to 5.4 billion metric tons by 2014. But they would need to decline to about 4.8 billion metric tons annually by 2025 and 1.2 billion metric tons annually by 2050 if the United States is to meet its pledges under the Paris accord.

“To get there would require reducing emissions about 5 percent per year over the next decades. In order to reduce that fast, we would need to be avoiding new fossil fuel infrastructure and actively shutting down old fossil fuel infrastructure before the end of its natural life,” said Andrew Jones, the director of Climate Interactive, a research firm. “That’s not possible without aggressive federal policy.”

At the same time, analysts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s efforts to roll back the climate change rules would bring back the tens of thousands of mining jobs that have been lost in the market shift away from coal, let alone create large numbers of new jobs. Electric utilities like American Electric Power turned away from investing in coal largely because of the glut of cheap natural gas, thanks to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

“The market defines the opportunities for coal,” said Kevin Book, an analyst with ClearView Energy Partners, a nonpartisan research firm. “Electric utilities that have shut down coal plants are not going to reopen them. Mines that have been mothballed because they are not economic are not going to be taken out of mothballs.”