Research companies and buy shares. Don’t limit your self to AC companies either, lots of opportunities abound, look at renewable energy build out, mineral exploration. deep sea mining, and I feel like defense companies are going to see more growth too.
Climate change will shrink the pie, but you can have a larger share of it.
I will add that the pie has never grown faster, and shows every indication of speeding up.
Major challenges like climate change (challenges to the economy, that is) look relatively minor when you compare it to past issues like WW1, WW2, possible nuclear destruction, widespread famines as recently as the 20th century; and when you also take into account that we have proven tech like nuclear and solar power and greenhouse and hydroponic farming that we can now use to tackle this issue.
Climate change is an ecological catastrophe, but we'll find a way to grow wealthier with or without a thriving ecosystem.
This of course will not happen on autopilot, so investors must as always keep a close eye on the CEO and vote in shareholder meetings instead of just buying-and-forgetting.
It doesn't solve climate change of course, but it does make a tiny improvement to one aspect of it. Multiply by every company touching the climate, and you can effect real change.
and from a more short term perspective;
slowing the migration of people from warm places to another will reduce the spike of resources required to house those people.
I take your point. But only partly: the profit motive can be useful to some degree for some situations, provided that market failures don't undermine the connection between private action and public benefit.
(Aside: Many classes of problems are solved without an explicit profit mechanism.)
Also useful:
- rules for such mechanisms (a "floor", in a sense, for how they operate) - expectations for such mechanisms (what we hope they accomplish) - philosophies and moralities for people that guide us
P.S. Bonus points if you can answer this question. Mathematically speaking, what would it take for a market to incorporate the relevant time horizons and externalities such that we might have even a 50% confidence that a market would get the incentives right to reduce global warming?
This whole mindset of “at least I profited” seems to rely on the notion that there is somewhere on the planet that will still be safe and enjoyable to live in as the climate apocalypse settles in. I don’t see where that is.
I'm still doing my part by advocating for good policies and collective action, but like ActorNightly, I think it's prudent to build a boat just in case things continue to not change.
Given the world’s track record in not changing for as long as the alarm has been raised, I think this is a pretty sensible approach to take. At this point, it may well be more prudent for the individual to assume that the climatepocalypse is going to happen anyways, and prepare accordingly rather than continuing to hope for futile efforts to stem the tide
If we are to overcome climate change as a earth-wide society, it will have to be through collective action of enough people forcing those in power to be "nice" - whether that will happen in a fast and large enough scale - I have my doubts about too.
If we aren't systematically nice to a wider swath of people (even if in a self-interested Machevellian, The Prince kind of way), I share concerns about needing to plan for a general decline of civilization.
Being nice to the whole world? Not so much.