Investors Debunk 3 Big Lies About Inevitable Climate Change

Traditionally investors have bought into the concept that environmental mandates come with a significant cost relative to investment performance.  However, David Miller and Rob Gough the portfolio managers of the new Strategy Shares Halt Climate Change ETF (Nasdaq NZRO) know that the opposite has been true.  If you had eliminated the worst polluters including oil companies, airlines, automakers, and coal power plants from the S&P 500 over the past decade you would have done much better. 

In fact, the big winners have been those that capitalized on technological innovation to create solutions that delight customers in a way that is sustainable.  There is certainly no question that Elon Musk has proven that Tesla TSLA can blow away internal combustion vehicles on a 0-60 and create the best performing automaker in the process.  Google has been on a tear with 24% annualized growth over the past decade while running on exclusively renewable power.  Enphase Energy has been nearly a 50x for investors since their IPO while bringing the down the cost of solar power to homeowners by over 82% since 2010 with improvements in inverter technology. 

Mainstream media and movies like “Don’t Look Up” have spread the perception that it is all doom and gloom with an inevitable crash course leading to climate disaster.  However, David counters that we have the technology today already in place to bring climate change to an end if we all join forces to invest in scaling the solutions that already exist.  Unlike many “green ETF” issuers Strategy Shares has made a commitment to actually invest their own money in reversing climate change by contracting with the world’s largest “carbon sucking” factory.  This past September ClimeWorks launched their Orca factory in Iceland that utilizes geothermal energy from the volcanoes to power giant fans that suck air out of the atmosphere, separate the CO2, and convert the carbon dioxide into a carbonate before burying it permanently beneath the rock layer.  If we could build 40,000 of these direct air capture factories the numbers suggest we could get to NetZero carbon emissions.

Sceptics argue that we can’t do anything about climate change because countries like India, China, and Russia will continue to build more coal power plants to serve their expanding economies.  While it is certainly true that these countries continue to add more coal to the mix, that doesn’t mean that those new plants will inevitably be a problem. The Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan Canada has already begun scaling a process that is known as carbon capture and sequestration or CCS.  SaskPower the owner of the plant installed a CCS attachment designed to capture carbon dioxide emissions straight from the source, thereby preventing them from entering the atmosphere.  This new CCS attachment to the coal plant that has existed since 1959 is capable of capturing up to a million tons of CO2 annually.

The duo leading the Strategy Shares Halt Climate Change ETF (Nasdaq NZRO) make the case that bringing climate change to an end will likely be a multi-trillion dollar market.  The scale of the problem that climate change presents for businesses focused on solving for sustainability is of a similar scale to the growth of the internet back in the late 90s.

Disclosure: This article was provided by an external writer and does not necessarily represent Benzinga's Opinion