How Trump could gut Biden’s climate law

Executive actions and lack of hiring could maim it, but business lobby will fight him.

This column is for Callaway Climate Insights subscribers only, but it’s OK to share once in a while. Was it shared with you? Please subscribe.

Photos: Gage Skidmore/flickr.

(Bill Sternberg is a veteran Washington journalist and former editorial page editor of USA Today.) 

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — Following Joe Biden’s historically awful performance in the first presidential debate, you might have expected oil stocks to soar and electric vehicle stocks to plummet. Donald Trump, after all, has made “drill, drill, drill” a centerpiece of his dictator-for-a-day agenda and has expressed unrelenting hostility toward EVs.

In the week after the debate, however, shares of ExxonMobil XOM 0.00%↑, the world’s largest oil company by market capitalization, dipped 1.3%, while shares of Tesla TSLA 0.00%↑ , by far the biggest EV-maker in the United States, surged 27.4%.

The market’s reaction was yet another example of how climate-related investing is rarely as intuitive as it might seem and how the global economy doesn’t necessarily revolve around policymaking in Washington, despite what the capital’s denizens think.