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.