November 24, 2018

The Impact of Climate Change on Stocks

Despite what many people think like some in power south of the border and others closer to home, global warming has started to greatly affect our planet and already too-many lives consequently have suffered from it. Unfortunately, global warnings are not enough to fight global warming.

Social media and live news probably amplify our exposure to it but you cannot deny that catastrophic events sure are more frequent and violent. Luckily for us, significant disasters have spare our family so far. Nevertheless, we have felt Mother Nature unleashing its power in the form of extreme heat, stronger winds and rain.

We know that human lives have no cost and should be treated with respect and dignity. In the current circumstances, everything within our power should be put in place to save and help as many human beings as possible.

That being said, we are even more worried about the profound impact climate change could have on our economy. If our economic system collapses because of it, we won’t be in a position to help anyone anymore.

We have been reflecting on it for a while and so far, are not reassured. A lot of troubling questions arise and for now, we have failed to find adequate answers. Here are some on those questions.

Companies say they are already accounting for climate change. Are their measures for real or is it only a PR thing?

How will climate change affect the economy? Will huge disaster relief costs ruin our economy or will it stimulate it, like for instance, some war efforts did in the past? It’s not that evident.

Do some corporations directly profit from climate change? Do others will just be bankrupted because of it? Regrettably, it’s not the most environment friendly corporations that will necessarily survive.

Apart from supporting administrations and governance with reasonable environmental policies, we’ve only taken a couple of obvious measures in regard to our investments.

For instance, we have started avoiding oil stocks and will eventually disregard them altogether. They just can’t survive in the long run. In the same sense, we are leaning toward renewable-energy corporations.

In other domains, we try to avoid companies that could potentially be run over by climate change. For instance, we privilege life insurance versus property and casualty insurance stocks.

All in all, we are still puzzled on what should we do more.

We are still not afraid to invest in stocks. The alternative would only be to get poor. In the end, if our economic system completely falters, it won’t matter if you have stocks or not. Everyone could become disastrously hungry and poor regardless of their possessions. 

Let’s try to stay optimistic as history proved many times before that humanity’s resilience can be very strong. For all our sake, let’s hope sensible ingenious humans will rise again and provide somewhat miraculous solutions.

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