This page and my webpage
Barron’s caught up with Jeremy Grantham, 81, at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit.
Mike Bloomberg was a classmate at business school, and Tom Steyer is a buddy and colleague in climate work. They’re both very, very good on climate. So either of them would do very nicely. I’m also a great fan of interfering with corporate power. I think corporate power is weakening the U.S. capitalist system in particular, as well as the democratic system. And the people who look at that as No. 1 on the agenda are, of course Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, and Elizabeth Warren. That for me is an important issue.
People listen but don’t really take it in. If that continues, climate change is going to trample through your portfolio and kick its ass. And you have to care about it, because it’s not just an issue for your miserable portfolio. It’s an issue for your grandchildren. Capitalism has a way of taking perfectly reasonable human beings who play at the weekend with their grandchildren, who are occasionally altruistic, and turning them during the workweek into Milton Friedman zombies working to maximize short-term profit. If you said, “My only objective as a human being is to maximize my own advantages,” that’s a workable definition of sociopath. And yet that is what the corporations do. And we treat them as damned human beings. It’s remarkable. So wake up.