An Inconvenient Truth

Yesterday my family watched the movie created by Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth. The movie was highly educational and informative, providing good evidence for global warming and the increased CO2 levels that humans are continuing to spew into the atmosphere. The movie helped to highlight several megatrends:

1. Clean water will be a problem in the future as global warming dries up freshwater lakes, rivers, and mountain glaciers and we reach the limit in tapping fresh water from underneath the ground.
2. Energy demands globally are continuing to increase each year, especially in the developing world. To exacerbate the situation, the US has spews 1/3 of the world's greenhouse gases and has done very little to slow the growth in CO2.
3. Increased flooding and droughts will occur. This has been validated by the record huricane season in 2005 and also by my experience living on a farm in Maryland. Most recently on our farm we have experienced several month intervals with no precipitation at all during the fall and winter of 2006 and other months with record precipitation such as June 2006 and October 2006. The extremes seem to be a lot more common these days.
4. Trees and forests are becoming more critical to the environment to help convert the CO2 in our atmosphere to oxygen and slowing the build up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

So how do we take advantage of these megatrends from a financial and investment perspective?

To be continued...