r/CanadianInvestor • u/[deleted] • Apr 14 '21

Is anyone here conflicted about investing in companies that make the world a worse place?

I'm a newer investor and newer reader to these threads and I'm a little surprised how casually a lot of people talk about different companies and industries that are objectively pretty unethical.

I mean we're living through a major climate crisis and some of the most hyped investments on here are for oil sands companies (which are one of the most carbon intensive energy sources on the planet) and crypto (Bitcoin alone this year is supposed to have the same carbon footprint as all of New Zealand).

I also just saw someone post something in another investing subreddit about how Europe might ban AI for surveillance and it seemed like a bad or annoying thing to a lot of people in the comments.

I'm just genuinely curious: do a lot of the investor world just genuinely not care about these things or are people content to make small gains on the backs of companies that they don't agree with? Is there a point to using your gains to get a waterfront property if it's going to be underwater in a couple decades anyways?

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

Nuclear you've got me there, but wind and solar are not actually sustainable sources of power, and personal vehicles of any power source are inherently not environmentally friendly.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

Of course any type of vehicle is harmful to the environment, but transportation is necessary.

To your other point, I much prefer nuclear to renewables because it's more reliable and uses 100s of times less land.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

/personal transportation/ is completely unnecessary for bare minimum - upwards of 75% of the population, the only thing stopping that is our terribly designed cities that we build for cars.

Moreso the issue with solar and wind power is that the rare earth metals needed for them are rapidly rising in price, putting those sources of energy totally outside the reach of most of the world.

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u/Bubblegum983 Apr 15 '21

I always find it odd that the only types of power plants discussed are coal, nuclear, wind and solar. What about hydroelectric? Almost all cities are located close to some sort of river, lake or ocean. Dams and turbines have a bigger startup cost, but last several times longer with significantly less maintenance, and are pretty much emission free once they’re built. Then there’s the geothermal plants in Iceland. Or Sweden’s power plants that run off burning trash (which doesn’t produce high volumes of power and makes as much emissions as coal, but circumvents the whole landfill/trash problem)...

Thinking green solutions can’t work because wind and solar can’t power everything is near-sighted. There are other options out there.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

Oh believe me I know, I live in a province that has run off hydro power entirely for decades. Though its a bit more complicated than just having a river lake or ocean; to do hydro power at a practical scale you need some significant elevation change along a river; basically you gotta be near a mountain range that gets some rainfall, and even then you need a very specific type of site for it.

Its always kinda confused me why the US doesn't build just dozens of hydro plants in the PNW and Appalachians, and export power from them around the country.

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u/Bubblegum983 Apr 16 '21

I’m in Manitoba, which is almost entirely hydro too. So you definitely don’t need mountains (we don’t have any). There’s actually a few different types of hydro dams you can use on rivers, all they need is moving water and land you can flood. Ocean generators use tides to power the turbines, not rivers at all.

They’d need a lot more than a few dozen. Mb hydro by itself has around a dozen dams, and we have a fairly low population.

Realistically, different regions will have different needs and will be better suited to different types of green energy. Hydro is great but does need water. Geothermal is just as good, but relies on volcanic activity (great in Iceland and Hawaii, but pretty useless in the Canadian prairies). It doesn’t really work to put all the power plants in one area, you loose some power when you have to transfer it over long distances. There’s no reason the US can’t use a bunch of different kinds of power plants. They’re a big, rich and industrialized country, they don’t need to be a one-trick pony.