Jeremy Grantham: evaluation

Transcript context

…If I look at long-term trends for weather disaster–related deaths and even flooding deaths, they’re both down slightly, but they’re down over time. How worried should we be about climate change, given that mitigation is relatively effective? Mitigation has barely gotten going yet.* I haven’t noticed the great sea walls appearing around the vastness* of the world. I think the world is in complete denial about ocean level rise, and one day when Miami gets an incredible flood, it will wake up and do something down in Miami. This is a pay-as-you-go system that we have. We respond, as I say, when we get whacked on the nose. We’re not anticipating in mitigation expenditures. We’re spending nothing. We’re just waiting to see what happens, and what happens is getting obviously very much worse very quickly in the last two years. The climate, I hope, is just having a run of bad luck from our point of view. I don’t believe this could possibly be typical. The fact that we have severe droughts in China, India, Europe, and North America at the same time is completely without parallel in history. You will notice that even though they are in severe droughts, they are simultaneously having, here and there, floods of a level that we have never seen before, washing away German towns. Not enough to break the drought. The Rhine is unpassable. We have floods in Pakistan, but not enough to break the drought in the Indian subcontinent, et cetera. Floods in China, floods in North America, down in Mississippi, Kansas, Louisiana. If you could easily short coastal property, would you do so?…

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