UKC

Say I have the following sums to inest with the aims of 1) reducing climate change 2) a decent chance of return of (not necessarily on) the money. What would be most effective way to invest?

£1k

£10k

£50k

A cursory google revealed that a single acorn is worth approximately 4p.

Your £50,000 would allow you to plant 1,250,000 oak trees!

Google (again) suggests the average oak takes 165kg CO2 out of the atmosphere every year*.

1,250,000 x 0.165 = 206,250 tonnes of CO2 removed per year

You have single handedly rewilded Britain for £50k! (I think this demonstrates how it's low inclination and not resources that remain responsible for the crisis).

*I think this how much it converts into wood, I bet if you include how much the fungus around it's roots converts it would be way more**

**I don't know much about this but would be very interested to learn!

I have actually looked quite seriously and investing in land for exactly the purpose of planting trees.  The issue is the cost of the land, not the acorns!! £50k gets a tiny scrap on land, if you can find one for sale. 

Fill every usable space on your property with as many solar panels as you can afford? 

You could spend your £10k on a solar panel and battery system.

We're forecast to get our money back in 9 years.

Contribute to 5 green start ups at £10k each that might potentially do or create something that really makes a difference. Chance of return is very low, potential reward vast, but either way if it's stuff you're interested in it could be fun to follow them over a decade or so. 

Not sure but I think:

£1k, quick trip to South America

£10k, business class flights on trip to Australia

£50k, second hand Porsche

800 tress per acre, 60,000,000 acres - you have re-wilded 0.002% of the UK for 50k.

Still a good effort though. Assuming that you had the land it would cost about £192 million to buy enough acorns to plant 10% of UK land area - and assuming your figures are correct that would be 792 millionkg of CO2 per year, so about twice the UK's carbon footprint.

Assuming 100% viability is the real flaw here

You could invest in someone else's solar panels and batteries and have your money back (give or take) whenever you like but make ~6% in the meantime. 

I did the maths for my situation and concluded that solar panels on your own roof is about the least cost effective way to contribute solar capacity to the grid. Your cash buys the planet twice as many kW invested in a big scheme, or ETF that funds big schemes. So I did that.

Shrubs, maybe

I looked at that but was told the panel lifespan was 10 years, the battery possibly less than that. As an investment it makes no sense. In terms of doing something for the planet it maybe does.

See my post above 

I'll take your word for it - got my data from here:

https://www.woodlands.co.uk/tree-planting-faqs/

the main point is that it takes a lot of trees to cover significant land mass!

For £10 I’ll stop farting and put a £5 each way for you on the 2.30 at Epsom. 

Fair enough, they probably know better than me, but that's about 2.5m between trees so you're not talking majestic oaks.

perhaps they are allowing for losses?

Yes, good ideas. It's also possible to put.panels somewhere sunnier than my house.

Are you in an ETF for this? I have a small amount with Reading (I think) council but could do more.

Investing in developing nuclear technologies might be one way of  achieving what you are looking at, although £50k is unlikely to go far. There are so many options that I wouldn't know who to recommend (given that Rolls-Royce are now looking for orders to self sustain the business rather than funding for development and I don't know the competitors very well).

An investment into decommissioning equipment could be beneficial as this cost is now considered at the start of plant life, it would make it easier to get new plants  off the ground if they can reduce costs associated with decommissioning and waste handling.

The grid is going to need storage capacity to support renewables, possibly have a look at some of the stuff done by the centres for doctoral training to get an idea of people involved in promising technologies?

https://www.energystorage-cdt.ac.uk/about

Solar panels these days should last 25 - 30 years before the performance drops below acceptable levels and most reputable suppliers are offering 25 year guarantees.

Battery performance will degrade faster, we were told to expect the decision time to be around 9 to 10 years (obviously will depend on how hard they are used though). 

I would expect that in 10 years time it will be pretty cheap to replace with a similar capacity as the technology continues to mature and/or we have new breakthroughs.

Our projected Internal Rate of Return is 14.9%, with a Net Present Value of just over £30k (minus the battery replacement costs).

I take the point above about getting more watts for your money by investing in a larger scheme rather than home solar, but I think home solar has the benefit of being a very visible project that encourages others to think about taking the same steps. We've had lots of enquiries from neighbours wanting to know about costs and whether we would recommend the company that fitted them (shout out to Flowing Energy Solutions for anyone in the north east of England, we definitely would recommend them!)

Alarming...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-colla...

Who on earth said that?  PV panels aren't immortal, but they have no moving parts and typically degrade at ~1% per year.  They'll still be working just fine, with slightly reduced outputs, when you and I are long gone.

Battery will certainly fail at some point, but ten years looks pessimistic.  Given that you can buy 10 year warranties (often warrantying 80% of original capacity) for not very much, the manufacturers clearly don't expect too many to fail.

As part of a renowned financial group my team calculates that you have £61,000 in total to invest. I will forward our bank details so that your funds can be managed most effectively.

For £1k, have a look at Energise Africa.  Micro-loans to help sub saharan africans to replace very polluting sources of energy with mini PV systems.

The rates of interest are high (usually 5-6%) and so far I've only had one company fail and not repay in full, so I'm well on my way to making around 4.5% overall.  I wouldn't put my life savings in there, but a small portion feels an acceptable risk.

Trees, left to their devices, will happily propagate themselves. We have loads of tiny oaks growing in the field probably planted by squirrels.