Money may not buy much comfort 10 years from now. In fact, depending on where you live, and how, cash may not buy much comfort even five years down the road, at least not by today's standards. Or at least that's what some believe following more frequent reports on what is happening to the globe's resources and climate.

A January report in The Washington Post warned residents in the nation's steamy capital that rolling electrical blackouts will plague the city just two years from now. As if greater caution were needed, it's clear that few of the preventative measures city energy engineers plan to implement will be online by 2010, The Post reported.

Jammed garage doors, still air conditioners and dark stoplights are not things we're prepared to deal with inside the Beltway, where tempers rise considerably if we're forced to linger in a bank line or if our designer coffee isn't on the bar, piping hot and made to order in 90 seconds flat. Of course, those doubtful about how blackouts work can just ask Californians, since energy outages began sweeping that state last year.

Is it possible that people are realizing that oil, water, forests and even soil are finite-and that our uses of them are having crippling effects? As with all potential risks-the rise and fall of financial markets, the risk of overinvesting in real estate or the risks of undersaving and overspending-good planners could help us avoid some or most of the discomfort, right? Or at least they should be able to, shouldn't they?

Less than 15 miles away from the White House, Richard Vodra is pondering the same question from his office in McLean, Va.

"Global climate change and energy and resource shortages are not theoretical problems," the 22-year veteran of financial planning says in his hallmark, guy-next-door tone. "If it's a hot summer here in 2010, we will get to choose whether we want to turn up the thermostat on the air conditioning or walk down from the 20th floor of our office buildings."

OK, so there are a few things you should know about Vodra before you write him off as the global warming Chicken Little of the advisor industry. He manages $100 million for 40 clients, who have, on average, $2 million invested with him. He is a founding member of the Nazrudin Project (albeit a quiet one), who last year led a fair number of advisors through measured discussions about how they could help investors grapple with climate change and peak oil. The Nazrudin Project is a group of about 125 financial advisors who believe that life and money can and should intersect in a meaningful way. Vodra, 59, spoke at several conferences in 2007, including the Financial Planning Association's retreat in Galveston, Texas, and at Nazrudin's own annual meeting.

While Vodra is an earnest, down-to-earth guy, what is becoming abundantly clear is that he is very capable of communicating highly abstract concepts effectively. It's a good thing, because he may be the only advisor in the country talking about climate control, about peak oil and, if you're a believer, about profound, relatively near-term resource shortages. His environmental concerns grew out of his "growing sense that the physical economy, and not just the financial economy, matters and that there are limits to our resources, contrary to what we have been taught to think."

Vodra will lead the FPA's "under-the-trees," planner-driven session at the group's retreat this year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in May, and he says he'll be interested to see how responsive advisors will be, if at all, to the notion of the earth's finite resources and how to help investors plan for those decisions.

After all, while many investment advisors bill themselves as problem solvers, like most people, they don't like problems that are nearly impossible to plan for. You can plan for death with a will, estate documents and even step-by-step funeral arrangements. But how, really, do you plan for mass shortages of water? And yet, looming on the radar are disturbances such as the potential for extreme gasoline and oil rationing, instability in the transportation and agriculture sectors, economic, political and international volatility, not to mention dwindling water supplies. There might even be a scenario no one could have predicted. Or, as Vodra often asks clients who are planning to move or retire: "Given these particular set of circumstances, how far do you want to be from public transportation or the grocery store or your work?"

It's a question Vodra may be alone among advisors in asking. Advisors, like many people, aren't always eager to embrace the knowledge that environmental changes and resulting resource shortages are already changing life as we know it.

"When I offered to get Lester Brown, the head of The Earth Policy Institute, to speak at a financial association conference last year, the group's leadership told me the subject was too depressing," Vodra says.

Even when he offered to pay out-of-pocket to buy Brown's latest book for a couple hundred attendees, the conference planners didn't want to put climate change or peak oil concerns on their annual seminar's agenda. "It's just remarkable how few people in the advisory and life planning communities are talking about any of this," Vodra says.

Instead of being incendiary or alarmist, Vodra has done what we imagine good advisors are supposed to do. He's explained what he believes are actual threats to the future of his clients' lifestyles and finances, in a clear and compelling 80-page presentation called Peak Oil, Global Climate Control and the Planner's Response.

He has also built a portfolio around what he sees as the imminent threats and opportunities that climate change and shortages in energy and other resources will foist on companies and investors alike. He calls it his Worldview 2 portfolio.

"I started bringing this up with clients about three years ago," says Vodra, who is a senior vice president at Spire Investment Partners in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. "A gentleman said to me this morning, 'When you started talking to me about this in 2003, I had never heard about peak oil. Now I hear about it every week.'"

Peak oil? It's the year when oil discovery and production will begin to decline. "The world will use more oil in the next six months than was used by everyone on earth during the six years of World War II," Vodra explains in his presentation. A growing group of petroleum engineers and scientists believe the moment of peak oil production has already been reached. Others say it will be reached by 2012. Production and supplies can hover at their current levels for a finite period, but then they will begin to fall off sharply, resulting in the rising prices we've been seeing since 2004, Vodra says.

"We all like having nice cars and air conditioning and good food and cheap energy," Vodra says. "But if you try to hold on to the 2008 version of the American dream, you'll make it hard on yourself."

So what if peak oil has already been reached? On the plus side, it could mean a rise in alternative energy sources, severe gas and oil rationing, escalating prices to reduce demand, hoarding, black market operations, economic disruption and even political and international conflict.

Vodra's presentation to advisors and clients also looks hard at global climate change. As people burn fossil fuels, cut down forests, make cement and engage in modern agriculture, they produce greenhouse gases that reflect the heat of the earth back to the surface, gradually warming up the planet.         What is the current scientific consensus? In January alone, dire reports of global warming, evidence of lost ice caps and growing drought patterns flooded in from the University of Arizona; from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego; from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; from the University of Washington; and from the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan. The consensus is that average annual temperatures around the world have risen as much as 10 degrees in the past 50 years.

"Clients get this," Vodra says. "They understand peak oil and climate change. They know world oil supplies are finite and prices are going up, and this is a problem that is likely to get worse and not easier. I don't get strong push back that this is a bunch of hooey. Particularly from an investment perspective, clients see the value of having global and energy exposure, global currencies and even global bonds, given the fact that we're importing so much of our oil from a trade deficit position."

To extrapolate his insights about energy-particularly peak oil-and the environment into reality, Vodra continues to refine his unique Worldview Two
portfolio. He says a moderate version of the portfolio has about 20% in cash equivalents; 20% in non-U.S. currencies; and 20% in non-U.S. and inflation-adjusting bonds. Another 30% is in commodities, natural resources and energy investments, which can include commodity price indices, direct investments in energy production and precious metals, options and futures.

Vodra also uses mutual funds and stocks focusing on energy and resources. The rest of the portfolio is invested in a broad range of companies and real estate reflecting the ongoing world economy. "Right now, I don't have a client who has more than 50% in the U.S. economy," Vodra says.

So far, when confronting possible lifestyle changes due to peak oil and climate change, his clients have reacted in different ways, running the gamut from fairly dramatic "green" action plans to what might be termed conservation baby steps. A handful of his investors would like to move to the country so they can create their own farms and convert to solar energy, Vodra says, while at the other end of the spectrum, there are people who believe that simple energy efficient replacement windows in their homes may be a nod in the right direction.

Most clients fall somewhere in the middle. "The back-to-the-land movement is not an option for most people, but staying away from the 7,000-foot home you have to heat and the Land Rover you have to gas up is," Vodra says. "The earlier you can start thinking about these things, the better off you'll be."

While Vodra does not necessarily predict gloom and doom, he reports what he has found and draws a number of conclusions that are far more bipartisan and pragmatic than pundits may want to accept. "There will be less oil and cheap electricity available, and this will lead to the end of a century of cheap and plentiful energy," Vodra says. "It will open up a new energy and economic system, and no one knows what that will look like."

While total solutions aren't really possible-carbon dioxide, for instance, stays in the atmosphere and the oceans for hundreds of years-the problems may be slowed and contained if long-term action is taken fairly quickly. For instance, to slow global warming, it would mean cutting world CO2 emissions by 80% over 40 years. "There aren't any quick fixes," argues Vodra, who also believes that humankind probably does have the will, when facing catastrophe, to avoid worst-case scenarios. "Some of the worst things we predict won't happen [think nuclear war and Y2K], but other things we haven't thought of will happen," the advisor predicts.