A: No therapist, priest, or plumber—even an environmental columnist for that matter—has all the answers in their respective fields. Ditto for financial advisers. Sure, he is right in one sense. Unless you buy newly issued stock, you are not directly handing a company your money, as you aren’t purchasing shares from it but from somebody else who already owns the stock. However, the purchase of stocks can help boost a company’s prices.

 

Regarding the financial yield of clean-energy investments, your adviser should try to dig at least as deep as some of the oil wells he’s touting. With 9,000 U.S. solar energy companies, plus 900 wind power companies in the American Wind Energy Association, there might just be a few sound investment opportunities lying around somewhere. Also a lot depends on how an individual outfit has been performing over time. Some clean-energy stocks and mutual funds have done quite well, according to mainstream financial publications such as Forbes and Kiplinger’s, which have noted that some have matched or even outperformed the market (lesser-known sources like Renewable Energy World have documented the same). 

 

When considering clean-energy investments, be sure to look beyond companies that produce energy to those that conserve it by making devices that cut our prodigious energy waste. All options are worth looking into, even at a time when policy-makers are openly threatening the prospects for clean energy, dismissing climate change as a hoax, and falsely claiming that reverting to coal will create a huge increase in jobs.