Illustration by Cristoph Niemann I try to limit my carbon footprint, but can I ethically invest in companies that will benefit from the consequences of global warming?
A Solomonic dilemma indeed! Which may be why green investors are neatly divided over the ethics of this question. Mark Townsend Cox, CEO of the New Energy Fund — a multimillion-dollar hedge fund — argues that it's fine to profit off climate change if you're not actually exacerbating it. "You're profiting off a second-line effect," he says. That may sound discomfitingly ambiguous, but hey, even seemingly "green" investments might rely on exploited labor downstream or have hidden embedded energy costs. Hedge-fund CEOs aren't exactly known for ethics; capitalists are typically driven by return on investment. If you're actively trying to avoid the worst offenders, the reasoning goes, you're in the clear.
The problem with this strategy, says Cliff Feigenbaum, founder of the GreenMoney Journal, is that you're waiting for the worst to happen so that you can profit from it. "That's like buying bonds in Poland and waiting for the Germans to arrive so you can go, 'OK, I get to work with you guys.'" (Though, to be fair, bond values actually plummeted after the Nazis rolled in.)
The real problem with putting cash into supposedly climate- neutral industries is that money is finite. Every dollar you invest to develop Arctic shipping firms is a dollar not being invested in technologies to prevent those ice caps from melting in the first place. It's a matter of priorities. If you want to make green by going green, put your money into technologies devoted to reducing the world's carbon footprint. Leave the Arctic exploration to venture capitalists.
My mother keeps spamming me with good-luck chain-letter scams, weird rumors, that cookie recipe thing. How do I convince her to stop forwarding all this crap?
It won't be easy. Urban legends and magical good-luck stories spread precisely because we're hardwired to believe credible-sounding narratives, according to Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things. "We're anecdotal thinkers, so we accept things, particularly if they're in the form of a story, even if it's outland- ish," he notes. Email has turbo- charged this oral tradition, which is why your inbox is crammed with daft pass-arounds.
Worse yet, your mother is only a tiny part of the problem. Junk email spreads in epidemiological patterns. So as with any disease outbreak, those bits keep on spreading as long as there's a steady supply of new suckers. "Newbies are like people with no immune system — they can't tell junk stories from real ones, so they quickly get 'infected' with online rumors," says Andrew Noymer, a sociologist who studies pandemics at UC Irvine. Every person waiting for their $100 laptop is just another potential vector for the tragic, tragic story — did you hear? — of how the kid who played Mikey on the Life cereal commercials in the 1970s died after mixing Pop Rocks with Coke.
You can minimize your exposure to this kind of nonsense. Shermer suggests calmly explaining to your mother that urban legends are usually untrue — "but I'm not optimistic," he admits. So here's a sneakier idea: Encourage her to start a blog and post all that fascinating stuff she finds online. It'll appeal to her vanity, and it'll permanently reroute her chain emails — taking them out of your inbox and pushing them into the ether.
Need help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at mrknowitall@wired.com.
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