Gov. John Hickenlooper’s stated goal of attaining “the cleanest air possible” took a severe blow this month after the election of Donald Trump as president.

Hickenlooper is a supporter of some version of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which would require tighter restrictions on power plant emissions.

Trump’s new resources as president could easily allow him to fulfill his pledge to abolish the Clean Power Plan.

“A Trump presidency could well be devastating to Colorado’s lands, waters, and the environment,” said Pete Maysmith, executive director of the Denver-based environmental group Conservation Colorado. “Someone who has called climate science a hoax and wants to put an oil executive in charge of our public lands does not inspire confidence in ensuring our country is a leader in the effort to address the climate crisis.”

Conservation Colorado, which supports the Clean Power Plan, says coal-fired power plants create special dangers for the state.

“Carbon pollution and climate change are extremely dangerous, threatening Colorado with prolonged droughts, decreased snowpack and bigger and more dangerous wildfires,” Maysmith said.

Trump has said he wanted the United States to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which sets an international course to limit global warming to no more than 1.5-degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

A key part of the plan is reducing carbon emissions produced by coal-fired power plants, similar to the goal of the Clean Power Plan.

Trump said during his election campaign he would end President Obama’s “war on coal.”

Less than a week after the election, he appointed Myron Ebell, an executive from the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, to lead the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell has argued for years against what he called the “myths of global warming.”

The Clean Power Plan has created the same kind of deep divisions in Colorado state government.

Cynthia Coffman, Colorado’s Republican attorney general, joined 26 states in filing a lawsuit to block the EPA from enforcing it.

Hickenlooper, a Democrat, appealed unsuccessfully to the Colorado Supreme Court for a judgment saying the attorney general lacked authority to participate in the lawsuit without his approval.

Despite his loss in court and Trump’s election to the presidency, Hickenlooper remains steadfast in his environmental goals, even if it means Colorado goes it own way.

“The governor does not believe the outcome of the presidential election changes Colorado’s priority to have the cleanest air possible,” Kathy Green, a spokeswoman for Hickenlooper, told The Colorado Statesman. “He has been abundantly clear that Colorado must always move forward to meet our clean air goals to protect public health, our economy and our environment.”

He described his plans for clean power in a proposed executive order in August.

It would require power plants to cut their carbon emissions by more than one-third over the next 14 years.

Hickenlooper’s proposal is a more aggressive version of the Clean Power Plan, which would require Colorado power plants to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels.

The Nov. 8 election shows Hickenlooper might speak for a wide swath of Colorado’s environmentalist voters.

Among the nine states most dependent on coal-fired power plants, a majority of voters for president in only one of them preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump: Colorado.

Most of Colorado’s neighbors in coal-dependent Kansas and Wyoming went for Trump.

Coffman has shown no signs of backing down from her participation in the lawsuit pending in the U.S. Circuit of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The plaintiffs say the EPA exceeded its constitutional authority with the Clean Power Plan. The Supreme Court put the plan on hold after the lawsuit was filed to await the lower court’s ruling.

The ruling is expected in early 2017. Oral arguments were held in September.

Less than two weeks after the Obama administration finalized the plan last year, 27 industrialized states, several corporations and other business groups sued to halt enforcement by the EPA.

They also said the plan relies on unproven technologies to reduce emissions and would be cost-prohibitive.

Attorneys on both sides of the dispute say an appeal to the Supreme Court is likely, regardless of how the Circuit Court of Appeals rules.

Coffman’s supporters in Colorado include Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Inc., an electric power supplier operating in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.

“Tri-State has argued since the Clean Power Plan rule was proposed that it was unlawful, unworkable and should be abandoned by the EPA,” said Lee Boughey, spokesman for the association. “The election does create an opportunity to review and address regulations which we have recently opposed like the Clean Power Plan, which we feel needs to be significantly revised or withdrawn altogether.”

Supporters of the Clean Power Plan and other environmental measures discussed how to move toward move more renewable energy this week during a Renewable Energy Summit at the state Capitol.

The panel of experts brought together by Environment Colorado, an environmental advocacy group, generally said Americans will become more environmentally-friendly when they can see how it benefits them financially.

Emma Spett, the campaign organizer for Environment Colorado, said “that in order to prevent the worst impacts of global warming, the U.S. needs to cut global warming  pollution by 80 percent and reach net zero emissions by 2050. This means limiting carbon pollution from the largest source in the U.S. – our power plants – and shifting to 100 percent clean energy.”

She said her organization is willing to cooperate with the incoming presidential administration, “But if the president-elect, or any elected official, tries to roll back the environmental protections so many Americans have worked so hard to put in place, we will be ready to defend the progress we’ve made.”