Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Greenstribution

One of my main concerns towards the future is how low income individuals will live in comfort with long term increasing energy prices and rising temperatures. As individual income in countries like China and India grow , hence their energy requirements (hence the temperature and global demand for oil). Nowadays a middle class European lives far better than Louis XVI and basically is due to energetic and medicine improvement. So far part of the problem was solved by Hydrocarbons, but currently the extraction rate is greater than the natural generation rate, thus creating an unsustainable imbalance for the long term.

All the green movement started mainly in the 50s with Germans but the real boom in terms of capital investment started in 1990s reaching new heights during the last four years. Humanity in one way or another will succeed and the succeeding mechanism will be pricing. As long as crude prices continue to soar and less people could afford some kinds of services the more incentive the human has to develop more alternative sources for energy.

I don’t see the crude prices in 70s per barrel in the long run, way up. Wind and Solar energy are currently the main sources for clean energy (because nuclear is quite efficient but not that clean). Today Wind and Solar energy are not the most efficient sources of energy. Improving technology in these fields will create a massive shift from one energy source to another, thus creating an increase in real income for the whole population.

Green efficient energy will reduce the gap in current comfort that exists between different income classes, and will open the opportunity in markets that before was not efficient to supply. In the next ten years you will see stock prices of green efficient companies to grow faster than the overall market, you will see a lot of new billionaires (pi-hippie billionaires), mainly in the energy sector or in the savings energy sector (products that save energy like insulation and building materials, air conditioning systems, etc) .

There is a lot of optimism about the energy stocks but the real baggers are going to be the ones that nobody gives a dime for until they are no longer cheap, everybody as energy consumers has an edge in this industry but I wonder how many people will use it to increase their wealth.

*this article or any of the previous or following ones does not constitutes any investment advice or suggestion.