As Trump has charged, E.P.A. regulations have contributed to the coal industry’s woes. But the biggest reason for the decline is that natural gas is now much cheaper than coal. When utilities replace their old plants, they want to build new ones with the cheapest fuel. Increasing the supply of natural gas, which Trump wants to do, would only lower its price further, increasing its competitive advantage over coal. To all those coal miners who voted for Trump, the new president is effectively saying “Tough luck!,” even if he does not necessarily know it.

As for the threat of global warming, which he does not acknowledge, Trump has vowed that he will soon be “canceling billions in climate change spending for the United Nations” and redirecting the money to infrastructure in the United States. He seems not to know that the “billions” per year are actually only $500 million and that these payments were likely going to vanish anyway, because of obscure 1990 and 1994 laws that block the U.S. from supporting U.N. programs that include “any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood”—a code word for Palestine. These laws explain why Washington no longer contributes to UNESCO. Elimination of funds for U.N. climate programs would also have happened under a President Hillary Clinton. It has little to do with Trump.

Trump has also sworn, rather famously, to “cancel” the Paris climate deal, by which one assumes he means to withdraw the participation of the United States. The backbone of the Paris deal is the bilateral agreement that Obama signed with China, the world’s biggest source of carbon emissions. Beijing is going to—and already has—put pressure on Trump to honor that bilateral agreement. It will be difficult for Trump to unravel this deal without risking an out-and-out trade war, as China has made abundantly clear. Corporate America has no wish to bring on a trade war and understands that reneging on the climate deal would be like firing on Fort Sumter. So if this is really what Trump intends to do, he will face the opposition of big business and green activists—maybe not the way he hoped to “bring us together,” but not a bad start.

More important than this eye-poking and middle-finger-gesturing is what actually is happening to U.S. carbon emissions. Almost no matter what Trump does, the stage is set for continued decline. Not only is our coal fleet approaching the end of its useful life; not only is natural gas abundant; but the costs of both solar power and solar-power storage are falling in ways that have everything to do with technological progress and little to do with public policy. Moreover, there are major state initiatives on climate change in New England, the West Coast, and even Texas (a wind-power giant). All of these will continue no matter what Trump does.

Even the “intrusive” Clean Power Plan, an occasional Trump target, is less vulnerable than it might seem. Many state, local, and private initiatives devoted to compliance with it are already under way. Pulling these back involves a bureacratic process called “notification and review.” The courts will play a big role in this, and Obama’s appointees fill the appellate level. Trump could ask Congress to cut subsidies for solar and wind power. But because Congress just renewed those subsidies last December, history suggests that legislators will have little appetite for revisiting that particular field of battle anytime soon.

Trump can indeed throw some sand in the works by rejecting funding for research (Washington picks up some of the costs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example). Insofar as rhetoric can be destructive, he can be destructively rhetorical. He can fail to advance progress as fast as progress could be advanced. But it would require an immense and sustained effort—a pitched, long-term battle, in which many of Trump’s supposed allies would in fact turn into his enemies—to halt progress, much less roll it back.

None of this is to say that environmentalists should cheer Trump’s election. But it is important to note that Trump is not Sauron in Mordor. Not only did Sauron have limitless persistence and an ability to sweat the details, but in Mordor he was taking over a wasteland with no existing institutional structure. Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he can focus on topics for only a few minutes at a time. And he would be moving into a realm where even the smallest actions require planning worthy of D-Day, and can have immense consequences contrary to whatever is intended. The constraints of actual governance infuriated and hobbled Obama often enough—and Obama was a man with boundless patience and a willingness to engage with complexity. His successor is the opposite—and shows no sign of understanding what he faces.