President Donald Trump thinks solar installations are “ugly as hell,” that “the wind is bullshit,” and that coal is “beautiful” and “clean.” He promised on the campaign trail to “drill, baby, drill.” He declared a national energy emergency the day he took office. And last week, in signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he slashed support for clean energy while ordering at least 30 sales of leases for oil and gas exploration in the “Gulf of America.”
So you can only imagine what’s happened to stocks of clean energy companies. Then again, maybe you can’t. Because since Trump took office, clean energy stocks are up, while stocks of oil and gas explorers are down.
That is surprising, to say the least. Investors would have made a killing if they had seen it coming. John Authers, the great Bloomberg columnist, wrote last week that shorting drillers and buying renewables in the first half of 2025 would have earned a 60 percent return for Hindsight Capital, his fictitious hedge fund that invests “with the benefit of knowing what will occur.” Even in hindsight, what’s happened is hard to grasp. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act scales back tax breaks for clean energy that were put in place by Joe Biden’s administration. Among other things, it speeds up phaseouts of some renewable energy credits and shortens deadlines for projects to qualify. Tax credits for electric vehicles will end this year instead of in 2032.
Researchers at Princeton University’s Zero-carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory (ZERO) Lab calculated that the law will decrease clean electricity generation in 2035 by “more than the entire contribution of nuclear or coal to our electricity supply today.” The law is also not helping Americans in the race for artificial intelligence leadership; AI needs a lot of electrical current, and electricity prices are likely to rise as a result of the new law. “The preceding Biden administration bill was called the Inflation Reduction Act; this one would be better named the Inflation Promotion Act,” wrote David Goldwyn and Andrea Clabough of the energy consulting firm Goldwyn Global Strategies, LLC in a commentary last week.
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Author: Peter Coy
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