1/14 Hot take: there’s enough money and attention in the green economy space. If you want the impact and the investment return in this space, you’ll have to look for other means of achieving it.

A thread.

2/14 I’ll start off by saying that I think it’s important to take care of the environment that we live in. What we take we must also give back. I am not saying that we should not do this, but that there’s enough resources pursuing this already.

3/14 The green economy is mainstream now. Blackrock (with 7tn+ AUM) said it would make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/business/dealbook/larry-fink-blackrock-climate-change.html

Bloomberg has a column for environmental impact.

https://www.bloomberg.com/green 

4/14 The ECB has now decided that climate change is part of its mandate (??)

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/orga/climate/html/index.en.html

5/14 EV companies are all the rage. Plant based meat is available at large fast-food franchises and are stocked in supermarkets. Lots of people are investing in renewables (solar, wind etc). I think it’s hard to say that awareness in this space is still low.

6/14 Now, think about the impact. A lot of green economy things are substitutes. We replace oil & gas with renewables. We replace beef with lab-grown meat or plant-based meat. All we’re doing is substituting. Net impact => no change to GDP, if any change. https://twitter.com/vncnttrn/status/1309981226929856512

7/14 If there’s no improvement to society (as measured by GDP), are there any other significant benefits? Okay sure, quality of life improves but at the margins (from less climate change). Maybe we get a 10-20% improvement. We invested all of this effort for a 1.2x improvement?

8/14 So we have marginal dollars earning diminishing returns. The improvements are guaranteed, but they are small. And I get it, we are experiencing more extreme climate events (e.g. bushfires). So we must do something NOW.

9/14 We need to invest in innovation and research that is both sustainable and pushes society forward. These “green projects” will not look like what you expect them to. The example I always like giving is asteroid mining.

10/14 We need metals in a lot of the products our society takes for granted. Mining creates a lot of pollution. Space travel is getting cheaper every year. If asteroid mining becomes cheap enough, we can move mining into space. Less pollution on Earth.

11/14 Genuine innovation? Yep (cheap rockets!!!). Pushing society forward? Yep (we get to go to space!!!). Green project? Yep (we pollute in space instead of Earth). Of course, I expect our mining processes will improve as well over the course of time.

12/14 Now imagine if we took a fraction of the money that’s being rerouted from coal, oil & gas to renewables into asteroid mining. How far we could go.

13/14 It’s going to be extremely tough. We might not succeed. But how can we expect to break free from our current limitations if we don’t dream big?

14/14 For a good overview of asteroid mining and also the video that was the inspiration for this thread, here’s the @Kurzgesagt video on asteroid mining.