Jeremy Grantham: preference

Transcript context

…How would you describe your media diet to follow the areas you care about? The environment, commodities, resource scarcity, bubbles — what do you do to track those and other issues? That has become the great problem for me. I wanted to try and keep up with COVID, and I was hiding in the countryside, and I was doing 8, 9, 10, 11 hours of reading a day because, suddenly, climate became an investment issue. Resources — my other pet theme — I had a decent paper done on that in 2013, “Time to Wake Up,” we’re running out of resources — which I still believe is much more right than wrong. Suddenly, they became fashionable. Then to add insult to injury, if you will, we got into a bubble, which is the last specialty that I have in the investment business. It was the first one I got into, and it will be the last one on my way out. All three components went from really back burner to front burner. At the same time, our activity in our foundation with climate became much more intense because we decided to invest our principal. And in two and a half years, we have built up our own team and done going on 45 of our own investments in early-stage green VC. Fascinating, wonderful people. Couldn’t be a better topic to spend time on, in my opinion. I think it’s a candidate to make more money than anything else, particularly after the new bill has passed. Countries all over the world are beginning to put their shoulder behind climate change. Taxes on carbon are coming in here, there, and everywhere. Incentives for electrification and alternatives. The real money is usually in the early stages of the next wave of inventions, and they are unbelievably important. We have to find our way to engineer around the bottlenecks. We live in a world of bottlenecks, suddenly, from COVID, from climate change, from resource shortages. We really need to spend more money and time and talent on anticipating the next level of bottlenecks and working on them in advance. That is what we try and do in the foundation. Are taxes on carbon so common? I see Australia repealing theirs, Germany still getting rid of nuclear power and burning more dirty coal, Japan seems to be returning to nuclear power, but remarkably little progress toward making dirty energy more expensive.…

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