Seems to me that one of the biggest things out there that is almost totally being ignored is this global warming thing.
Well, not really.
This Gasoline Is Made of Carbon Sucked From the Airhttps://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/carbon-engineering-liquid-fuel-carbon-capture-neutral-science/At some point, the earths fossil fuels will run out. They only made so many dinosaurs, after all. But long before it runs out, it will become increasingly more expensive to extract it from the ground. Even without the problems presented by climate change, a dire energy crisis is looming, at some point in the future, that threatens our modern way of life.
Technologies, such as the above link discusses, suggest the tantalizing possibility of delivering a one-two punch to both climate change, and to the inexorable depletion of the earths accessible fossil fuels. At some point, it will become more economical to mine CO2 from the atmosphere than to mine fossil fuels from the ground. When that happens, driving your car around town becomes a carbon-neutral activity.
Taking just that one technology a step further, excessive mining of CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, and converting it into stockpiles of liquid fuel simply to store it safely, either for future yet-to-be-discovered applications or for later use as a carbon neutral fuel, could, in theory, play a role in moderating or even reversing the effects of climate change.
Other technologies, such as this one, can convert CO2 to carbon fiber, at about 1/25th the cost of making carbon fiber today; permanently eliminating the CO2 from the atmosphere:
A Novel Way to Pull CO2 Out of the Air and Turn It Into Jetlinershttps://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-novel-way-to-pull-co2-our-of-the-air-and-turn-it-into-jetlinersThere are other technologies in the works that will also play important roles in the climate change problem.
Until recently, CO2 has never been considered a resource. It's so cheap and easy to make. All you have to do is exhale to make it with your own body, or build a camp fire to cook a meal, etc.
I am hopeful that capitalism and economics will at some point force humankind to view CO2 more properly as both a vital resource as well as a resource that needs to be carefully managed and stored; regardless of whatever the curmudgeon du jour occupying the White House might think about the causes of climate change.
Right now we're using our atmosphere as a giant untapped battery, essentially. That atmospheric battery is overcharged beyond safe operating capacity.
Whether it is overcharged due to human activity or natural phenomena is really a moot point. It's due to both. I find it astonishing that this moot point is even part of the debate. Just because it's "natural" doesn't mean nature owes humankind a perpetually habitable environment. Just ask the dead dinosaurs in your gas tank how well nature took care of them. "It's not our fault," is perhaps the silliest reason imaginable for failing to address an existential threat. It's a problem that needs to be dealt with, regardless of the causes.
Now we are beginning to understand how to recover CO2, and less dangerous ways to store and use that resource, and how to bend it to our needs in economically beneficial ways.
I'm not trying to be a "Pollyanna" here. We are definitely in a desperate race against time. But there is reason to hope that our modern way of life is salvageable and, with some adjustments around the edges, can be made sustainable. We are learning how to do it. Now we just have to do it. And some very smart folks are already on the job.
Governments can't solve the problem. But governments can certainly accelerate the many endeavors already underway to solve it. Some governments are doing that. The current incarnation of the federal government has obviously stepped away from participating in the solution. But the USA is not a monolith, even unto itself. And its current position on climate change is neither absolute or permanent.
More to the OP's point, attempting to exploit breakthrough innovations that address climate change for financial gain entails taking on the same single-stock risk that investing in new technologies has always had. If you own a broadly based index, the superstar companies that manage to hit the ball out of the park will eventually become part of the index.
Climate change, in and of itself, offers no better way to gain financially than trying to guess the winning horses in any other technology race.