The post you are reporting:
from another tread..................
Jeremy Grantham, environmental philanthropist: 'We're trying to buy time for the world
to wake up'
You've probably never heard of him, and for years Jeremy Grantham liked it that way
. But now the man who made billions by predicting every recent financial crisis is speaking out
'Anyone who says government can't do this, or can't do that, I say a pox on you' ...
environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
One icy morning in February, a train pulled into Washington DC. It was loaded with
environmentalists planning to handcuff themselves to the gates of the White House,
in protest at the building of a 3,500km oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico
. Amid the hundreds of placard-carrying protesters stood a somewhat incongruous
figure in a suit - Jeremy Grantham, a 74-year-old fund manager. "What we are trying to do
is buy time," he told reporters. "Buy time for the world to wake up."
Grantham - who occupies a legendary place in the world of finance for predicting all the
major stock market bubbles of recent decades (and doing very well in the process) -
had decided, after 15 years of low-key environmental philanthropy, to, as he puts it, "walk the walk".
Grantham, co-founder and chief strategist of GMO, a Boston-based global investment group,
manages $106bn (£69bn) of assets on behalf of 1,000 institutional investors, and employs
600 people, so he decided that the fallout would be too great. He was forced to stand
back and watch as his daughter Isabel got arrested, alongside the actor Daryl Hannah,
the US's highest-profile environmentalist Bill McKibben, and Nasa climate scientist
James Hansen.
So he is speaking out instead. From where he stands, this bubble, the "carbon bubble"
is the biggest he's seen. "We're already in a bad place. The worst accidents are [only]
20, 30, 40 years from now." Such apocalyptic talk is often the preserve of deep-green
doom-mongers - the kind of talk that has led many to reject environmentalism.
But Grantham insists he's guided "by the facts alone". On some issues (immigration
and education) he "would be considered rightwing", but with the environment, he says
he calls it as he sees it. He is disdainful of those who ignore the data, or worse, misinform the public