Sustainable Energy Opportunity

• How to invest if you don’t want to lose money
• The only sustainable energy source today
• Do electric cars pollute more?

I’m hitching a ride on a
topic that my boss Ian Wyatt is writing about today: renewable energy.

I have to
say right out of the gate that I am extremely skeptical of investments in
general. That’s the only way to be if
you value your investment capital and hope to make it work for you in the
markets. Being generous and trusting are
good qualities in a boy scout, but not an investor. We need to be skeptical misers.

So when it comes to an
industry that’s largely unprofitable, filled with failure, buoyed only by
government grants and lots of hopeful talk from environmentalists, I’m wont to
be even more skeptical, if that’s possible.

It’s been said before, but
it bears repeating: wind and solar only work when it’s windy or sunny. You simply can’t rely on these two
technologies as they are and get anything close to the electricity generation
that’s required to power today’s infrastructure.

I’m confident that solar
power will one day come into viability on a large scale, but there’s still the
problem of what to do if the sun doesn’t shine. You hear environmentalists throw around the word “sustainability” a
lot. It’s actually kind of humorous,
because there’s NOTHING sustainable about getting our electricity generation
from ANY of the current green alternatives.

Let me back up and define
sustainability from an environmentalist’s perspective. According to the World Commission on
Environment and Development:

“Environmental sustainability is development that
meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.”

That’s kind of a broad
definition, but I think the idea of saving a finite resource just so my
grandkids can use it seems a little…pointless, I guess, especially if we really
don’t have much of an alternative.

To put it into perspective,
here’s a pie chart that shows electricity generation by source from the
International Energy Agency:

Is stopping the usage of
fossil fuels a sustainable venture? That
is, if we cut way back on that usage, will we even be able to have the energy
to sustain our current way of life? I
don’t see how.

So anytime I hear someone
talk about green energy, or renewable energy or sustainable energy, I just
think to myself, “We get the lion’s share of energy from coal, and that’s not
going to change in my lifetime or yours.”

Is coal renewable? Not in the strictest sense of the word – and
not in the way environmentalists mean – but there’s so much of it that at this
point, it really doesn’t matter if we’re not replenishing our coal reserves.

By almost any measure, our
coal use is sustainable.

According to the Dept. of
Energy, we have enough coal in the United States alone to last for
another 232 years at current rates of consumption.

Now,
there’s no question that coal is dirty, so it’s not green. But I don’t see many environmentalists living
without electricity. You could argue
that the whole electric car phenomenon will force us to use more coal. Coal spews even more carbon into the air than
gasoline, so it could be that electric cars pollute more than gas-run
cars.

It’s another example of
unintended consequences and how the cure can be worse than the disease.

For me, the only prudent
investment in “sustainable” energy these days is to buy coal and natural gas
companies at cheap prices. I’m not about
to start investing in “could-be” companies or “might-be” technologies or
“should-be” initiatives.

Why bother when coal
companies are so inexpensive, already profitable and in it for the
long-haul? Why look for the next tiny
wind-farm startup when there are American natural gas companies selling at
cheap valuations? Why re-invent the
wheel when we already have perfectly good wheel factories providing plenty of
wheels?

Here, I’ll make it really
simple for you: if you want sustainable energy, invest in coal. If you want greener sustainable energy,
invest in natural gas.

Right now I’m looking at a
full report on a coal company written by Chief Investment Strategist Ian Wyatt
for Energy
World Profits subscribers. So
far this year, this stock is up 20%. If
you believe in the trend that we’ll use more energy, and therefore, more coal
in the future, there’s not a better way to get started than to buy this company
now. Click
here for access to this report.

If you like natural gas,
we’ve just completed a research report all about America’s largest oil and natural
gas reserves and the small companies with the drilling rights. Click
here now to read this free report.

If you have any questions or
ideas about alternative energy stocks, I’d certainly like to read them. Send your letters to [email protected]

Good investing,

Kevin McElroy

Editor

Resource Prospector