Life is short, cruel and bitter. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In time, many things in our life change. The enthusiasm we started our life with turns to cynicism. The strength that once led us to overcome challenges begins to turn to fatigue.

Our family and friends age, and we see our once inspiring and energetic companions turn to a shell of themselves.

With investments the same is true. There are few technologies and few investments that are genuinely inspiring. Most seem to be recycling the same stupid ideas I have been reading about for over a decade. Cringily, every new start up sometimes seems to be involved in property or letting out flats.

You can sit and look at the morasse of humanity as if they are a swarm of ants. We need dreams, ambition and new ideas to inspire and innovate us as a species. Climate change is threatening to tear us limb from limb and wreck what little hope we had as a species.

Geoengineering emerges as one of the few possibilities we have to avoid extinction. Even worse, there are people denying climate change altogether just as we need an aggressive mobilisation of resources to keep our lives in decent shape, and that of our future progeny/fellow humans.

Yet despite that investing in renewable energy is one of the few things in our drab and meaningless existence that can act as a light from the gloom and melancholy that characterises much of modern life.

1. It connects us with nature

The life force that animates us and gives us the energy and strength to go out in the world is the natural ecosystem of which we are all a part. I speak of course of the interplay between nature, human beings and energy.

We are composed of elements that are derived from the natural world and the peace and serenity we encounter in our experiences with nature is something that cannot be matched by an office job.

Investing in renewable energy is a chance to connect to the universe that gave birth to us and to work towards living in harmony with our nature and energy. It is one of the few things we can do in a society in which we are generally powerless to actualise change on energy policy and the environment, but one that can be eternally uplifting.

2. God wants us to

Regardless of whether or not you are a person of faith, the effect religion has had on the modern world is such that it is hard to comprehend of human history without the part that religion has played in growing and building civilisaitons across the planet.

Critically, for those investors with religious beliefs, from Islamic finance to Christian funds, the importance of maintaining a clean and safe planet should also take great precedence.

This June saw the launch of the first shari’ah compliant green sukuk bonds that tapped institutional investors for cash. Meanwhile organisations such as Christian Aid have placed pressure on pension funds to place their cash in assets that help the globe as well as shareholders.

3. Pension funds and dumping dirty energy

We are living at the interchange between the “old” ways of doing business that involved a reliance on fossil fuels. To future generations they will appear as outdated as the typewriter or a filofax.

Why be a part of a dirty, outdated and unsexy industry? The future is green and the future is clean.