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I studied renewable energy engineering at a mid-tier Canadian university. My experience, both personally and talking to my peers, is that just like one cannot s

I studied renewable energy engineering at a mid-tier Canadian university. My experience, both personally and talking to my peers, is that just like one cannot solve every problem by throwing money at it, one cannot solve every problem by throwing brainpower at it. The climate crisis being one of those. There are a lot of people looking to work for someone else in order to solve this problem, smart people willing to change careers isn't what's lacking. What's lacking, not to get too Ouroborean about it, seems to be energy. A number of my former classmates have gone into entrepreneurial ventures since graduation, since that seems much more what the industry is lacking. To give one example relevant to your background - if you're skilled in finance, a fund of some kind that invests dividends from fossil fuel companies into emerging alternative sources would probably do a lot. That is really the global challenge, to invest the dividends from the fossil fuel era into a post-fossil era with as little reduction in human living standards as possible. Fossil fuels have an energy that renewables lack, never mind the hype. It's bringing that energy over with as few losses as possible that I see as the challenge.

cableshaft 4y ago
Wouldn't it be better to invest directly into emerging alternative sources instead? Dividends in anything will only be about 5% of the money invested, meanwhile you've given 20 times more money to the fossil fuel companies, who will use that money to lobby to keep themselves in power and shut out or slow alternative fuel companies as much as possible. Granted the dividend pays multiple times, but still. Seems to me like that could be counterproductive overall. If you want to go the forwarding dividends route, why not invest in a non-fossil fuel company and use those dividends to invest in alternative fuel companies? You'd be able to use almost the same amount of money without directly supporting fossil fuel companies (those other companies might be almost as bad, though, for other reasons).
- suoduandao2 4y ago
  Because the trouble I'm suggesting OP could do something about isn't precisely that there are no investors in alternative fuels. It's that too much of the money ever put into fossil fuels gets reinvested in fossil fuels, which makes said lobbying much more desperate than it could be were the money part of a mixed portfolio that started out with mostly fossil assets but reinvests outside it. It also makes it necessary for fossil companies to drop the price precipitously when there is a downturn, which shakes out a lot of promising alternate startups. If the backers had the capacity to wait out a fossil fuel downturn, those resources could be sold later at top dollar, but that would require a diversified approach. It's obviously not as simple as what I'm imagining (not a finance guy here, just an enthusiastic private investor) but what I'm sure needs to happen at the macro level is that the returns from capital currently invested in fossil fuels need to go to nonfossil investments in a gradual, continuous manner so that costs can be averaged out over a number of business cycles. If that happens, we'll probably be okay when the fuels do run out. If capital sources for clean vs fossil are segregated and antagonistic, fossil will simply win.

cableshaft 4y ago

Wouldn't it be better to invest directly into emerging alternative sources instead? Dividends in anything will only be about 5% of the money invested, meanwhile you've given 20 times more money to the fossil fuel companies, who will use that money to lobby to keep themselves in power and shut out or slow alternative fuel companies as much as possible. Granted the dividend pays multiple times, but still. Seems to me like that could be counterproductive overall. If you want to go the forwarding dividends route, why not invest in a non-fossil fuel company and use those dividends to invest in alternative fuel companies? You'd be able to use almost the same amount of money without directly supporting fossil fuel companies (those other companies might be almost as bad, though, for other reasons).

suoduandao2 4y ago
Because the trouble I'm suggesting OP could do something about isn't precisely that there are no investors in alternative fuels. It's that too much of the money ever put into fossil fuels gets reinvested in fossil fuels, which makes said lobbying much more desperate than it could be were the money part of a mixed portfolio that started out with mostly fossil assets but reinvests outside it. It also makes it necessary for fossil companies to drop the price precipitously when there is a downturn, which shakes out a lot of promising alternate startups. If the backers had the capacity to wait out a fossil fuel downturn, those resources could be sold later at top dollar, but that would require a diversified approach. It's obviously not as simple as what I'm imagining (not a finance guy here, just an enthusiastic private investor) but what I'm sure needs to happen at the macro level is that the returns from capital currently invested in fossil fuels need to go to nonfossil investments in a gradual, continuous manner so that costs can be averaged out over a number of business cycles. If that happens, we'll probably be okay when the fuels do run out. If capital sources for clean vs fossil are segregated and antagonistic, fossil will simply win.