Dropping fossil fuels INCREASES investment returns
The fossil fuel divestment movement has faced some fairly stiff headwinds from institutional money managers who insist that universities, foundations, or individual investors will suffer financially if they choose to forgo investment in energy companies that have, historically, been among the best-performing stocks to hold. But a recent analysis by Fossil Free Indexes paints a very different picture: if you take the S&P 500, and remove companies that are among the Carbon Underground 200 (companies that have the largest as-yet-untapped reserves of coal, oil, and gas), replacing some of them to maintain a balanced portfolio, your investment returns can be higher than they’d have been if you stayed on the business-as-usual path. Applying this criteria to the past ten years, you’d have earned about an extra 1% per year. This includes several years early on when the fossil fuel free approach slightly underperformed; it appears that in recent years, you’d have done much better than that (e.g., more than 2% a year over the past 3 years):
Tags: energy, financial assets, fossil fuel free, fossil fuels, sustainable global economy strategy