The decline of green investments

I blogged a long time ago that getting involved in anything green would be a mistake, and it is always a pleasure to be able to say I told you so. Since then, the bottom has fallen out of carbon trading, green power subsidies are falling, and 'green' generally has lost a great deal of its fashionable status. The genral public has lost trust in anyone proclaiming doom on the basis of supposed AGW (man made global warming). I was greatly amused to find the first ads Google put alongside were for carbon trading companies. Click them, those companies will need all the help they can get. The traders, not Google, who are doing just fine.

This isn't the beginning of the end, that was ages ago. What we are now seeing is the rapid collapse phase, before the green industry as a whole will start to level off with the hard core of supporters in classic S-curve manner. Among those who are currently involved but are deserting like rats from a sinking ship are governments and big companies especially those who have been investing in wind energy. Much of the US government is running away now and trying to block any further green programmes while closing down existing ones. The Germans, the Japanese, and the Australians are all going in that direction too. The UK government is even showing a few signs of reform now. Expect that the previously high but already falling subsidies for wind farms and solar panels will soon collapse or even be blocked, though existing contracts will have to be honoured of course.

I suggested that the moment that the CERN CLOUD experiment crew announced their results would be critical. They have now announced them, and serious scientists will note their conclusions and start worrying about their own affiliations, even if they historically were ardent warmists. It will be extremely hard now to retain any momentum for further green programmes based on avoiding  human-caused climate change. It looks increasingly certain that the warming has stopped and was mostly due to natural causes, especially solar activity. If you look at all the results of experiments and measurements over the last year or two, the contribution to previous warming from CO2 looks like being at most 15%, probably less than 10%.

That should scare off anyone thinking of getting into carbon avoidance industry, and will certainly reduce greatly the value of investments in associated assets.

My advice: if you still can, get out now.