Green Investors Were Crushed. Now It’s Time to Make Money.

Invest according to your political views, and you’re unlikely to make money. Companies that appeal to left-wingers or to right-wingers might be good or bad investments, but the fact of being, on current politics, clean and union-friendly for the left or oily and gun-friendly for the right is neither here nor there. What matters is their ability to make money and how highly they are valued.

This has been rammed home for environmentally-minded investors in the past year, as a coordinated selloff in anything with green credentials crushed the idea of making money while doing good.

It turns out that the real world is tougher than advocates of ESG—environmental, social and governance—investing claimed. The lessons have been hard, but should remind investors in the sector of some of the basic facts of investing. The fall in prices has improved the outlook for the stocks.

This year has been almost universally bad for clean investments. The two worst performers still in the S&P 500 are solar companies Enphase Energy and SolarEdge Technologies, down 60% and 70%, respectively. Hydrogen stocks have fallen sharply, led by Plug Power, which warned it might not survive. Wind-farm developers have been doing so badly they have pulled out of some contracts, with Denmark’s Ørsted off 48% in dollar terms and Florida-based NextEra Energy off 29%.

Electric cars have disappointed too, hitting startups and suppliers and pushing the price of lithium ores, used to produce the battery metal, down by three-quarters or more, although market-leader Tesla’s stock has been an exception.

Just as there was a coordinated green selloff, there has been a coordinated partial rebound in the past month or so.

This provides the first lesson: debt. The clean-energy sector is dependent on vast amounts of borrowing, so high interest rates really hurt. Roman Boner, who runs a clean-energy fund at Dutch fund manager Robeco, points out that major projects are typically financed with 80% debt, so rises in financing costs have a big impact on competitiveness.

Investors who bought into green stocks probably didn’t think they were making a leveraged bet on Treasurys, but that is what they ended up with. It isn’t only about corporate financing costs, either. High borrowing costs hit consumer demand for rooftop solar and for electric cars, both of which are often leased, since leasing costs depend on the cost of debt.

At a very high level, this is about long-term thinking. Low rates encourage investors to think long term, because they make future profits almost as valuable as current profits, and encourage borrowing to try to secure those future profits.

High rates encourage short-term thinking, by making profits today far more valuable than future profits—why bet on the future when you can earn 5% from Treasury bills? Short-term we get fossil-fuel profits, while long-term we get either clean energy or global warming; recently investors have been encouraged by rising rates to think short term.

The second lesson: government. Ronald Reagan overstated it when he said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” But investors who rely on state subsidies to ensure profits leave themselves at the mercy of both fickle politicians and the bureaucrats Reagan was concerned about. This year’s selloff has been worsened by the bureaucrats and their failure to provide the details of many of the subsidies promised in last year’s badly named Inflation Reduction Act.

“We’re still hoping to get them by year end,” says Ed Lees, co-head of the environmental strategies group at BNP Paribas Asset Management. The next problem might be the politicians, at least if Donald Trump wins the presidency and torches the IRA. Lees thinks this will be hard, because so many IRA-subsidised projects are heading for Republican states. But Trump certainly has no sympathy for environmental causes.

The third lesson is the one most relevant to buying today: valuation. Buying stocks when they are trendy and wildly overpriced is a recipe for disaster. Perhaps the most extreme example of late is the L&G Hydrogen Economy ETF, launched in London at the height of clean-energy excitement in February 2021. It plummeted from day one, never regained its launch price, and is down 55% since then.

“We’ve seen a very harsh reality check,” said Sonja Laud, chief investment officer of L&G Investment Management.

The question is whether the hype has left. Laud worries that one year of high rates won’t have crushed all the excesses built up in 12 years of near-zero rates. But clearly valuations are much lower than they were, and she is hopeful there are opportunities to be found now.

“The huge green premium you had previously is no longer there,” says Velislava Dimitrova, who runs sustainable funds at Fidelity International. Clean-energy stocks are “much more interesting than they used to be—I don’t believe that renewables are dead.”

In the bond market, investors are no longer paying much if any “greenium,” or extra price for green bonds. In stocks, it is harder to judge: The S&P Global Clean Energy index trades at a discount to the global market on some measures, but not others, making it difficult to conclude that the sector as a whole is a wonderful bargain.

Still, it is good news for buyers that the hype has evaporated. Investors who care about profits more than purpose can finally consider clean-energy stocks again.

Wildfires in California have grown more frequent and more catastrophic in recent years, and that’s beginning to reflect in home values, according to a report by the San Francisco Fed released Monday.

The effect on home values has grown over time, and does not appear to be offset by access to insurance. However, “being farther from past fires is associated with a boost in home value of about 2% for homes of average value,” the report said.

In the decade between 2010 and 2020, wildfires lashed 715,000 acres per year on average in California, 81% more than the 1990s. At the same time, the fires destroyed more than 10 times as many structures, with over 4,000 per year damaged by fire in the 2010s, compared with 355 in the 1990s, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture cited by the report.

That was due in part to a number of particularly large and destructive fires in 2017 and 2018, such as the Camp and Tubbs fires, as well the number of homes built in areas vulnerable to wildfires, per the USDA account.

The Camp fire in 2018 was the most damaging in California by a wide margin, destroying over 18,000 structures, though it wasn’t even in the top 20 of the state’s largest fires by acreage. The Mendocino Complex fire earlier that same year was the largest ever at the time, in terms of area, but has since been eclipsed by even larger fires in 2020 and 2021.

As the threat of wildfires becomes more prevalent, the downward effect on home values has increased. The study compared how wildfires impacted home values before and after 2017, and found that in the latter period studied—from 2018 and 2021—homes farther from a recent wildfire earned a premium of roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over similar homes, about $10,000 more than prior to 2017.

The effect was especially pronounced in the mountainous areas around Los Angeles and the Sierra Nevada mountains, since they were closer to where wildfires burned, per the report.

The study also checked whether insurance was enough to offset the hit to values, but found its effect negligible. That was true for both public and private insurance options, even though private options provide broader coverage than the state’s FAIR Plan, which acts as an insurer of last resort and provides coverage for the structure only, not its contents or other types of damages covered by typical homeowners insurance.

“While having insurance can help mitigate some of the costs associated with fire episodes, our results suggest that insurance does little to improve the adverse effects on property values,” the report said.

While wildfires affect homes across the spectrum of values, many luxury homes in California tend to be located in areas particularly vulnerable to the threat of fire.

“From my experience, the high-end homes tend to be up in the hills,” said Ari Weintrub, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. “It’s up and removed from down below.”

That puts them in exposed, vegetated areas where brush or forest fires are a hazard, he said.

While the effect of wildfire risk on home values is minimal for now, it could grow over time, the report warns. “This pattern may become stronger in years to come if residential construction continues to expand into areas with higher fire risk and if trends in wildfire severity continue.”

Green Investors Were Crushed. Now It’s Time to Make Money.

The lessons have been hard, and are a reminder of the basic facts of investing

Report by the San Francisco Fed shows small increase in premiums for properties further away from the sites of recent fires