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Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
41–50 of 103 posts
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#42He waits until after he has his billion to tell you that pursuing your own wealth is destroying the world.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. That quote does come from the article and it's is a very real concern. This article seems to be about Grantham's new investment strategy disguised as philanthropy.
Not really new for him. He's discussing and working on climate change for a long time, go check some of his prior letters to investors.
It's not new, however, it is an investment strategy. Investors at this level are very good at "talking their book." Because doing so helps their investment. I am not suggesting that giving away $1 billion won't help climate change. I'm merely suggesting that Grantham may have other motives for giving money away.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't food instability a contributing factor to the crisis in Syria?
From what I understand it led to (young) people leaving the countryside to live in cities. This lead to large congregations of unhappy unemployed young people, all new to a particular area. These people then grouped up and protested about the ruling regime, which was the start of the current crisis.
Exactly, that's a good summary as far as I understand it. In other words, we're already seeing the impacts of food insecurity as a result of climate change and it will only get worse from here.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"While giving away $1 billion, Grantham’s planning to make even more money, and he’s hoping climate change offers the opportunity. " I think that you might be on to something...
Bad/neutral people can still do good things if they take action on things that reward good deeds (with money). That's why non-profits hire people to help reach their goals.
Many non-profits are tax write-offs and money-laundering schemes, which I didn't want to get into too deeply as it is off-topic; but it is definitely related and not surprisingly, Grantham is involved in that, too...
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#46>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
> Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
Does anyone really believe that?
Not anyone who ever had a large compost pile in the backyard...
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#47While giving away $1 billion, Grantham’s planning to make even more money, and he’s hoping climate change offers the opportunity. The key sentence, buried halfway through the article...
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. That quote does come from the article and it's is a very real concern. This article seems to be about Grantham's new investment strategy disguised as philanthropy.
Hmmm. I think that aiming the power of capitalism at real problems is a good way to go (the cap and trade system of SO2 in the NE being the canonical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program ).
I agree the lede was buried, but don't have any trouble with Grantham making a boatload of money helping solve big problems.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years," Such a vague assertion leaves me with more questions than it resolved. Topsoil should properly be measured in volume, not distance. Presumably they mean a given area will gain three centimeters in 1,000 years, but what area and under what conditions? There are some environments with zero topsoil and some environments with quite a lot of topsoil, so is th…
It's also just wrong. Maybe this is true under "natural conditions" (however you want to define those). But intentional farming practices can produce this much top soil every year. The problem is that few farmers use those practices. But I do, and I can tell you that planting green fertilizers and nitrogen-fixing cover crops, and then plowing them under, will produce pretty good topsoil very quickly.
Yep. You can definitely "grow" topsoil very very quickly. Similar to the ratio between the productivity of land for hunting-gathering and agriculture.
Source: Farming & gardening background in the midwest.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#49Just as vast fortunes were made during the financial crisis of 2008 by selling the markets short ( see the film "The Big Short")
I would expect there are people betting on climate change continuing down its current tragectory, and these people now have a vested interest in making this happen.
I don't know how many other billionaires are putting their money on the pro climate change side but wouldn't a smart investor diversify their portfolio by betting on both the pro and con sides of climate change?
I don't know what the form of such investments would take but can think of a simple one being investing in real estate northern regions where temperatures are currently too cold to support agriculture. Possibly an investment in water desalination plants would also see a gain from climate change. I'm sure there are many more better examples, my concern is that for every billionaire looking to save the world, there is another looking to make a buck off its collapse. So what happens when more of these profateers decide to use their vast fortunes to tip the scales further towards the collapse rather than salvation?
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#50Going to get downvoted harshly for this, and I deserve some of it. But let me say, is anyone else just slightly suspicious (don’t have to change your minds though and I agree with the science here) that investing billionaires, people who give truth to the saying “behind every great fortune is a great crime”, would actually be interested in the best possible thing for the world? Doesn’t that sound a little bit suspici…
Of course you should be suspicious.
However. He just turned 80 and realized there's only so much he can do before he dies and that seems to have focused his priorities. A couple of quotes from the article:
> Grantham turned 80 on Oct. 6. Asked how this milestone shifted his perspective, he pauses. “There’s no quick one-liner on aging,” he says. “We know this is an urgent topic, and I know I don’t have that long to do it.”
And Grantham would probably even agree with you that we should be suspicious of capitalist interests:
> Climate change, politics, and capitalism became frequent topics of Grantham’s quarterly letters. In his view, the U.S. has been pushed into the grip of an unhealthy version of capitalism, one in which corporations put profits way ahead of all other considerations. “The social contract of 1964, when I arrived here, has been totally torn up,” he says. “Anything that happens to a corporation over 25 years out doesn’t exist for them. Therefore, grandchildren have no value.”
But even more important, your comment hints at the conflict between profit and ecological health, and I think it's the role of government to realign things so that they aren't in conflict — set up regulation so that if you follow them, what you do is genuinely good. From the article:
> While capitalism “does a million things better than any other system,” he says, it fails completely on long-term threats such as climate change. “You must not expect unnecessary good behavior from capitalists,” he says. The answer, he adds, is strong regulations: “I’m sorry, libertarians, it is the only way.”