Jeremy Grantham: prediction

Transcript context

…When the relatively extreme optimism of the 1980s came along, were you already a skeptic at that point? Or that popped up a bit later? I’m a great optimist — I suspect along with you — about technology. I think whatever success we’re going to have will be on new technology. And I am a great fan of American venture capital. It is, I think, the last, best American exceptionalism. We’re not very exceptional at many things. We’re exceptionally bad at plenty of things in America. But VC, we have the best and the biggest — always have, and will for a considerable amount of time. It’s very vigorous, and it attracts the very best foreigners too. They are a shockingly, encouragingly large fraction of the VC leadership, as you see. We also have a lion’s share of the great research universities that go hand-in-hand with VC. If we save our bacon, that is the sector that will do the heavy lifting for everybody, including the US. I am optimistic, incidentally, that we will have a plentiful supply of green energy and that we will green the entire system. My worry has always been — and still is — timing. We don’t have a lot of time to spare. The damage we do is already pretty obvious, and it’s getting worse rapidly. There are many flashpoints that the serious climate scientists will tell you about. We could pass them any time, where the temperature in the far north releases methane and CO2 from tundra and from offshore frozen methane — clathrates, they call them — and that could spiral the temperature out of control. The jet stream could shift; the equivalent ocean currents could shift. There are several of these potential self-reinforcing cycles. Of course, the classic one is, you melt the ice. The ice reflected the sun, and now the dark ocean absorbs it, and the temperature goes up faster, and more ice melts, et cetera. We are really playing with fire, and we just don’t know how long we’ve got, how high the temperature can go without triggering these points. You cannot find a serious climate scientist who would give you a guarantee that that will not happen. Some of them think it’s very likely, some of them think it’s unlikely, but all of them agree it can happen when you play with another degree or two centigrade. Who or what else would you describe as your major intellectual influences?…

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