Environmental Talk

“Fear? That’s the other guy’s problem. Nothing you have ever experienced will prepare you for the absolute carnage you are about to witness….”

Let’s try a little test. When I say, “Wall Street,” what’s the first thing that pops into your head?

“Socially conscious,” right?

Not hardly. At the end of the day, no one on Wall Street cares if Warren Buffet recycles his cans, as long as his company still makes a profit.

This goes a long way toward explaining the attraction of oil and gas stocks over the last couple of years. Investors bought these stocks because the companies made a profit.

By contrast, conventional wisdom has been that “green” companies were generally assumed to be nice places to put your money if you wanted to make some kind of social statement but you shouldn’t really expect to make a whole lot of money off your investment.

With the growth of exchange traded funds (ETFs) over the two years, it has become even easier to select stocks that mirror a particular industry sector.

ETFs take some of the guess work out of trying to pick individual stocks by building a portfolio of stocks with similar characteristics. ETFs generally trade round the clock, allowing for greater liquidity and diversification than you might be able to get from just owning an individual wind power company, for example.

If you wanted to make a bet at the beginning of this year that oil companies were going to continue to profit from higher prices, one way to have done that would have been to buy one of the available of the oil sector ETFs back in January.

If it didn’t bother you to be involved in a carbon-based industry, you would have done very nicely.

A look at two of the more popular oil ETFs show that the United States Oil Fund and Oil Service HOLDRs were up 45.7% and 41.9%, respectively.

There’s a reason Jed Clampett and his family didn’t move to California by putting up solar panels on their shack.

Of course, maybe the reason the Beverly Hillbillies was canceled was because the clan wasn’t environmentally conscious enough for this day and age.

To settle the debate, the curious financial types over at CNBC thought it would be a good idea to see how “green” energy companies compared with the more traditional “black” energy companies this year.

The results would make Al Gore proud … and, probably, richer.

If you’d invested in the Powershares WilderHill Clean Energy ETF or the Market Vectors Global Alternative Energy fund, you would have done even better than your obnoxious carbon-based investing cousin. Powershares is up 46.7% on the year and Market Vectors is up 43.4%.

So, maybe it is possible to be socially conscious and profit conscious at the same time.

And just think … with all that extra cash, now you can afford to eat organic.

At least for the next couple of weeks.

global warming, climate change, investing, ETF, Al Gore, whole foods, Jed Clampett, Beverly Hillbillies, Jethro, Ellie May