Trump Likes Fossil Fuels. Investors Don’t.
Shares of sustainable-energy companies are soaring. Oil, gas and coal? Not so much.
Warming investors’ hearts.
Photographer: Sergio Flores/BloombergFossil fuel never had a better friend in the White House than Donald Trump. So why, two years into his presidency, are investors favoring public companies devoted to renewable energy and giving the Bronx cheer to the coal, gas and oil crowd?
Trump campaigned against the scientific consensus on climate change and promised to repeal any regulation that impeded the exploration, drilling, mining and burning of traditional energy. Since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, he rescinded the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, the Interior Department’s moratorium on new coal mining on public land, and President Barack Obama’s 2013 climate action plan and 2015 climate mitigation efforts. He withdrew from the Paris agreement signed by 195 countries in 2015, revived construction of the Keystone XL pipeline connecting Canada’s oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries, and increased by 600 percent the public land (not to mention coastal waters) for lease by oil and gas companies.