Fund manager, Harvard MBA, billionaire - we've become all too familiar with the type. But British-born Jeremy Grantham is best known for predicting all the major economic bubbles in recent decades and making a fortune on them. Now he's speaking out about the most dangerous bubble of them all - the Carbon Bubble - and he's putting his money to work to fight it. His mission, as he puts it, "What we are trying to do is buy time. Buy time for the world to wake up."
Grantham describes a form of high-finance mental illness of the sort that seems to infect our own prime minister and his minions.
"I find the parallels between how some investors refuse to recognise
trends, and our reaction to some of our environmental challenges, very
powerful," he says. "There is an unwillingness to process unpleasant
data. In a bull market you want to believe good news. You don't want to
hear that the market is going to go off a cliff." He finds climate
sceptics – led by a "little army of non-scientific, persuasive loony
lords", as he characterises them (a barely disguised reference to the
former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson and Ukip's Lord Monckton,
both of whom promote, to varying degrees, climate-sceptic views) – a
frustrating ideological phenomenon. "They have profound beliefs – as
opposed to knowledge – that they are willing to protect by all manner of
psychological tricks. So you have people who are very smart – great
analysts and hedge-fund managers – who on paper know that their argument
is wrong, but who promote it fiercely because they are libertarians.
Anyone with a brain knows that climate change
needs governmental leadership, and they can smell this is bad news for
their philosophy. They are using incredible ingenuity to steer their way
around facts they do not choose to accept."
Grantham then proceeded to give our prime minister, along with Mulcair and Trudeau, a big Athabasca black eye.
...he insists his substantial investments in oil and gas don't contradict
his green views. "We need oil. If we took oil away tomorrow,
civilisation ends. We can burn all the cheap, high-quality oil and gas,
but if we mean to burn all the coal and any appreciable percentage of
the tar sands, or even third-derivative, energy-intensive oil and gas, with 'fracking' for shale gas on the boundary, then we're cooked, we're done for."
So, all you supposedly progressive New Dems and Libs, did you get that? Your parties, with their open support for bitumen peddling, are essentially nihilistic. They've embraced the very same mental illness that guides our prime minister.
While Canada is governed by parties led by enviro-mental defectives, Grantham sees hope in, of all places, the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, China.
"I have very high hopes for China because they have embedded high
scientific capabilities in their leadership class. They know this is
serious. And they are acting much faster now than we are. They have it
within their capabilities to come back in 30 years with the guarantee of
complete energy independence – all alternative and sustainable for
ever. They have an embarrassment of capital. We have an embarrassment
of debt. So they can set a stunning pace, which they are doing. And they
could crank it up. To hell with their five-year plans, they should move
up to 25-year plans. They would have such low-cost energy at the end of
it they'd be the terror of the capitalist system. Low energy and low
labour, that's the ball game."
You can find the raw interview here.
1 comment:
If I'm not mistaken I referred to Jeremy Grantham two weeks to a month ago here on a comment thread.....having been impressed with an interview with him I had just caught on PBS!
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