Experience simply doesn’t justify that fear. As Mark Muro, policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, calculated in an important recent analysis, since 2000 the United States increased its economic output by 30 percent while reducing carbon emissions by 10 percent. Over that period, he reported, fully 33 states grew their economies while reducing their emissions.

Yet despite these reductions, the states most bound to the fossil-fuel economy, like Oklahoma and Texas, still emit vastly more carbon per person than greener states do. And that energy divide now almost perfectly tracks the current political divide.

Comparing the latest federal figures on states’ per capita carbon emissions with the 2016 election results produces a clear pattern. Trump carried all of the 22 states with the most per capita carbon emissions, except for New Mexico, and 27 of the top 32 in all. (Colorado, Illinois, Delaware, and Minnesota were the Clinton-voting exceptions.) The Democratic nominee won 15 of the 18 states with the lowest per capita emissions—with the exception of Florida, North Carolina, and Idaho.

The Carbon Connection

This divergence sharpened the pattern already evident under President Obama. Among the 18 lowest-emitting states, Clinton lost only one—Florida—that Obama carried in 2012. But among the top 32 emitters, five Rustbelt states that Obama won last time flipped to Trump: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Energy policy wasn’t the principal reason those states switched. But carbon emissions illuminate a state’s broader economic structure. The high-emitting states, as Muro noted, are either “producers of oil, gas, and coal or big consumers of it, with a heavy manufacturing base across the Midwest.” By contrast, “the bluer, lower-carbon states are much further along in the transition to a post-industrial economy,” he added. “They are dominated by digital and related technology and business services, they are more urban and therefore more [energy] efficient.”

With only a few exceptions, cultural dynamics reinforce these economic contrasts. The high-carbon states—centered on the Plains, the Mountain West, and portions of the South—also tend to be more rural, more religiously traditional, and often less racially diverse than the low-carbon states. Following that trail, American politics seems destined to increasingly align the Democratic Party with voters most comfortable with the nation’s hurtling economic, demographic, and cultural change—and the Republican party with voters most resistant to it.

That resistance can’t reverse the change—on any front. Kids of color will comprise a majority of the under-18 population soon after 2020. Though Clinton won less than one-sixth of America’s counties, Muro’s research found her counties account for nearly two-thirds of the nation’s total economic output. And even Trump’s greatest exertions aren’t likely to reverse the long-term shift from high- to lower-carbon alternatives in both energy sources—from coal to natural gas and renewables—and economic activities—from manufacturing to services and digital innovation.