Invest with Greens or Sinners?

One stock many Greens would think should be on the Green list is Tesla (symbol: TSLA).
It IPO’d at $35/shr in March 2013 and is now up 10 fold to ~$355/shr today. It has never turned a profit and it continues to bleed capital at a fantastic rate. It’s stock performance to date is purely due to emotional belief not rational investing. The bond market is much more rational, and TSLA bonds are deep in junk territory rating wise, and TSLA pays a hefty yield dividend because it is junk.
So you could include TSLA in the Green stock column, but again you’d be wrong in practice, but correct in virtue signaling.
You’d be wrong in practice because EV’s, as has been blogged about many times here, only shift the carbon emissions elsewhere.
From the Dow Jones NewsWire, August 18, 2017 (my Bold):

“Want to fight climate change? Don’t invest in Tesla
10:35 am ET August 18, 2017 (MarketWatch)
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By Ryan Vlastelica
Building an electric car creates more CO2 than it saves, Morgan Stanley calculates
Climate change is almost unanimously considered one of the gravest threats facing humanity, with the worst-case scenarios representing massive environmental destruction. Investors hoping to combat it with their portfolio allocations can, but one famous environmentally focused company may actually be doing more harm than good.
Morgan Stanley identified 39 stocks that generate at least half their revenue “from the provision of solutions to climate change,” something it said was a central component of investing to make a difference, as opposed to just a making a buck.
“In our view, impact investing needs to begin with companies whose products and services have a notable positive environmental or social impact,” wrote Jessica Alsford, an equity strategist at the investment bank.
Not surprisingly, alternative-energy companies ranked the highest in terms of their positive impact, and the “top five climate-change impact stocks” were all manufacturers of solar and wind energy: Canadian Solar (CSIQ), China High Speed Transmission (0658.HK), GCL-Poly (3800.HK), Daqo New Energy (DQ), and Jinko Solar (JKS).
Not among the top companies? Electric-car makers, including Tesla Inc. (TSLA). Elon Musk’s company has been an investor favorite for years, even eclipsing Ford Motor Co. (F) and General Motors (GM) in market cap.
Tesla shares are up nearly 66% so far this year, but the good it may have been doing for portfolios may not translate to it doing good for the planet. Morgan Stanley said this was one of the “biggest surprises” of its study.
The bank grouped the “climate-change impact stocks” into four sector categories: utilities, renewable manufacturers, green infrastructure companies and transportation stocks. It then analyzed them on a number of metrics, including “the CO2 [carbon dioxide] savings achieved from the products and services sold by the companies,” as well as secondary and tertiary factors centered around the environmental impact of the making of these products.
This is where Tesla, along with China’s Guoxuan High-Tech (002074.SZ), fall short.
“Whilst the electric vehicles and lithium batteries manufactured by these two companies do indeed help to reduce direct CO2 emissions from vehicles, electricity is needed to power them,” Morgan Stanley wrote. “And with their primary markets still largely weighted towards fossil-fuel power (72% in the U.S. and 75% in China) the CO2 emissions from this electricity generation are still material.”
In other words, “the carbon emissions generated by the electricity required for electric vehicles are greater than those saved by cutting out direct vehicle emissions.”
Morgan Stanley calculated that an investment of $1 million in Canadian Solar results in nearly 15,300 metric tons of carbon dioxide being saved every year. For Tesla, such an investment adds nearly one-third of a metric ton of CO2.”

So much for Green wet dreams of EV’s saving the planet.
(Disclosure: I am currently short on TSLA – holding Puts)