1. Climate change is all most of us have ever known
Climate change is often described as something that is going to happen. Yet the world is changing right now: The global average surface temperature is not only higher now than it was from 1951 to 1980, but it also hadn’t been below average in the years before I was born and is clearly trending up. The global median age is 30. That means that for most of us on Earth, a continually changing (read: warming) climate is all that we have ever known.
2. Big business talks about climate change a lot more now
Publicly listed companies are talking about climate change a lot more than they used to. From 2014 to 2018, there was a 16% increase in the number of public companies mentioning “climate change” in their filings, and an increase of more than 50% in the number of total mentions of “climate change.”
4. Even coal’s growth markets prefer other energy sources
A number of countries, most of them in Southeast Asia, still expect and are planning to build new coal-fired power plants. Those plans are policy decisions as much as they are power-market decisions. A smart poll this year asked residents in these markets what they think is better for the long-term development of their countries. In every one, a majority said that renewable energy is better. In Vietnam, that majority was overwhelming.
6. Energy stocks are now more boring than utilities
This year, the yield for the oil-dominated S&P 500 Energy Index passed the yield for the S&P 500 Utilities index. It’s happened once before, very briefly, but this inversion has now been going on for months and it seems robust. In September, Liam Denning and I looked at what this rather technical indicator means and its importance for showing what the market thinks of these sectors. For energy companies, an increasing dividend means that the market requires more cash from companies relative to growth in stock price; for utilities, a decreasing dividend means that investors price greater upside into stocks. The inversion of these two sector yields means that what was once priced as growth is now priced as value, and vice versa. [In other words, the market thinks oil and coal have gone ex-growth.]
10. The battery of today (and tomorrow) wins a Nobel Prize
The lithium-ion storage battery was patented by ExxonMobil, commercialized by Sony and improved by a global value chain. This year, its inventors won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three men “created a rechargeable world.” The lithium-ion battery market has always had a prime mover, so to speak — a particular sector that was the bulk of demand for its production. For years, consumer electronics were that prime mover; this year, electric vehicles became that prime mover. By 2025, BloombergNEF expects passenger EV demand for lithium-ion batteries to be more than four times greater than demand from consumer electronics.
To see all the charts in the original article, go here.
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