Time to put my money where my mouth is

‘As oil crashes, is it time to short solar stocks?’ Gosh, I wish I’d read that headline a year ago. The solar stock it tipped for doom in January 2015 has since plummeted from $19 to $2.65.

Yes, hindsight can be a wonderful thing. But what if there were an area of the markets which you knew to be grotesquely overvalued as a result of ignorance, dishonesty, and false sentiment? You’d be mad not to bet against it, wouldn’t you? It would hardly be gambling: more like plain common sense.

This is how I’ve felt for quite some time about the climate change industry. Very often when I read the expert commentators writing on the subject in the City pages, I’m shocked by how much more I know than they do. Invariably — and the same goes for financiers and big corporates — their opinions rest on assumptions that man-made global warming is real, that renewables are a viable alternative to fossil fuels, that the data hasn’t been fiddled, and so on.