Jeremy Grantham on Sustainability and Energy Policy

As I’ve mentioned, I always look forward to Jeremy Grantham’s quarterly newsletter. I admire his fluid and conversational writing style, his common sense, and his viewpoint that, while making lots of money is nice, we should at least consider the idea that we all share a greater responsibility to one another.  His piece “Everything You Need To Know About Global Warming In Five Minutes”  is one of only a few documents that I hail as a “must read.” 

I hope you’ll take a few minutes and go through this quarter’s report, linked above. If I could sum it up in a sentence, I would say: the party’s over.

The pure, unavoidable mathematics of the world demonstrates clearly that we cannot continue to ignore our consumption of resources and think that our civilization will continue without consequence. There are policy elements – especially vis-à-vis energy – that we need to have in place. But this is news that we don’t want to hear, and thus our leaders feel they need to avoid.  Yet the result of inaction will be dire.

The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that we’re talking about the viewpoints of an unapologetic capitalist. If you were reading this from a left-leaning tree-hugger, you may write it off as liberal blathering. But here’s a guy who manages $107 billion on a minute-to-minute basis.  I have to think that counts for something.