Elements of the oil and auto industries (and a much smaller share of utilities) are welcoming some of the president’s moves. But his whiplash-inducing reversal is exposing all of these industries to what their executives and investors fear most: uncertainty. In setting their long-term plans, all must now decide whether Trump’s direction represents a lasting shift away from concerns about climate or a final bump in the road toward a lower-carbon future.

Melissa Lavinson, chief sustainability officer at PG&E Corp, the huge Northern California utility, frames the industries’ choice—as well as the most responsible answer—when she says: “If you have to go to a board of directors and say, ‘I have to make a multibillion-dollar investment that is multi-year,’ are you going to base it on two or four years in the political cycle or … on long-term economic, technological, and consumer trends?”

The unifying thread through Trump’s environmental agenda is an attempt to resurrect an earlier energy order centered on maximizing fossil-fuel production and marginalizing considerations about the carbon emissions linked to climate change. His EPA has already started to reverse Obama-era regulations that required continued improvements in fuel efficiency from auto manufacturers after 2022 and reduced carbon emissions from power plants. The Interior Department is working to open more onshore and offshore public lands for oil, gas, and mineral extraction. And Perry has suggested the administration may try to preempt state mandates that require utilities to use more renewable power on the grounds that such rules undermine the dependability of the electrical grid. (He’s ordered an internal Energy Department study, due in mid-June, that’s expected to try to justify that argument.) Trump’s decision to quit the Paris accord culminated this crusade of restoration with a stunningly self-destructive act of diplomatic and environmental isolation.

It’s difficult to overstate how directly this revanchist agenda collides with both the marketplace and policy at all other levels. All of Trump’s key moves affecting electricity generation, for instance, are intended to bolster coal. But coal’s share of power generation has declined for years, first under pressure from lower-cost natural gas, and now from increasingly affordable solar and wind. Since 2002, federal data show, utilities have retired more than twice as much coal-generating capacity as they have added. In 2016 alone, the amount of new capacity utilities added in wind and solar—including small-scale decentralized resources like rooftop solar arrays—equaled the total amount of coal power brought online over the past 15 years. Privately, the utility industry has even urged Trump to uphold the Paris Agreement. “Trump is fighting the battle from 10 years ago when coal had a chance,” independent energy consultant Paul Bledsoe told me.