Here is the performance of a certain solar cell company as seen from Google finance. Solar is up 1157% over a 34 month period. "Solar has tipped", to quote Malcolm Gladwell. I put this chart at the end before, but nobody reads that far anymore.
Sometimes I like to look at what the market is doing to see what collective wisdom is currently in force. This lets me see if what I’m thinking is what the rest of the world is thinking. I would just hate to be out of step. Here is a graph of fossil energy stocks for the past 34 months. Up about 50% on average. Not quite like solar.
Energy is in blue. US industry is in red. The value of energy is rising faster than the dollar or the value of industry. There are 334 energy companies. Over half, 186, of these companies are worth a billion dollars or more. One company, Exxon is worth half a trillion dollars. I took the time to add up their values. Their combined value is 4.13 trillion dollars. If you gave 4 million people a million dollars each, what might they do? At least be quiet, right?
Now let’s look at what the market says about coal. Maybe it will say, “"Say No to Coal"”, and we can take our yard signs down.
Nope. The market says coal is increasing in value more rapidly than gold. Here is gold over the same period:
There are 22 coal companies with a combined value of 103 billion dollars. One company, Peabody Energy is worth 21 billion dollars. Guess we better leave the yard signs up. But there is one piece of good news. Solar cells are rising faster than gold or coal or most anything. Over 1000% in the last two years. Don’t you wish you had been in that?
