At the 2018 Morningstar Conference this month, Grantham gave an insightful presentation about climate change.
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Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc, Also read Lear Capital: Financial Products You Should Avoid?
Watch Jeremy Grantham's 'Race of Our Lives' Speech
Transcript
In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am all in on the topic of climate and toxic damage to the environment; 98% of my net worth is either in two foundations or is committed to it. Fortunately, I come from a vastly overpaid industry, ours, and so that still leaves me enough to have two houses and a Tesla Model 3, if they would just deliver it to me. I'm going to give you first a broad overview of this topic, which I'll read to save time, because if I ad lib all this we'll be here all day. Then I'll give you lots of backup data with slides.
You could call this presentation the story of carbon dioxide and Homo sapiens. You may not know, but if we had no carbon dioxide at all, the temperature of the Earth would be minus 25 degrees centigrade, and we would be a frozen ball with no life except bacteria perhaps. 200 to 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide has taken us from that frozen state to the pretty agreeable world we have today. CO2 is therefore, thank heavens, a remarkably effective greenhouse gas. The burning of fossil fuels has played a very central role in the development of civilization. The Industrial Revolution was not really based on the steam engine, it was based on the coal that ran steam engine. Without coal, we would have very quickly run through all our timber supplies, and we would have ended up with what I think of as the great timber wars of the late 19th century. The demand for wood would have quickly denuded all of the great forests of the world, and then we would have been back to where we were at the time of Malthus, living at the edge of our capability with recurrent waves of famine as every other creature on the planet does. A few good years, the population expands and bad years, you die off.
