Pollution, Population & Purpose
The Great Simplification #99 with Jeremy Grantham
On this episode, I am pleased to be joined by co-founder of GMO Financial Holdings, Jeremy Grantham, to discuss how human population, ecology, and pollution (especially endocrine disrupting chemicals) interact to shape current trends and what they could tell us about the future. Mr. Grantham unpacks why the expectations of perpetual growth - in the economy, standards of living, and finance - are not so likely and that when looking at the system holistically we should expect large paradigm shifts in the coming decades.
Jeremy Grantham co-founded GMO in 1977 and is a member of GMO’s Asset Allocation team, serving as the firm’s long-term investment strategist. He is a member of the GMO Board of Directors, a partner of the firm, and has also served on the investment boards of several non-profit organizations. Prior to GMO’s founding, Mr. Grantham was co-founder of Batterymarch Financial Management in 1969 where he recommended commercial indexing in 1971, one of several claims to being first. He began his investment career as an economist with Royal Dutch Shell. Mr. Grantham earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Sheffield (U.K.) and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds a CBE from the UK and is a recipient of the Carnegie Medal for Philanthropy.
What can the pattern of super (stock market) bubbles over the last century tell us about the larger resource bubble we find ourselves in? How will rapidly changing population demographics and fertility rates interact with the other global crises we face? How might endocrine disrupting chemicals impact these other trends? Where should investors be focusing energy and resources towards to make the largest and most positive impact on human and planetary futures?
In case you missed it…
In this Frankly, a follow up to “One Ring to Rule Them All”, I want to unpack the common misconception that AI will be the answer to all our energy and ecological problems, specifically climate change. As the development of AI continues to accelerate, many propose that we are entering the ‘Exponential Age’, yet what’s ignored is that we’ve just lived through an age of exponential impact on Earth’s systems. If we keep the same economic ‘operating system’, AI can at best act as a more powerful tool for the continuation of this phenomenon - actually the opposite of restoring ecological stability as many hope.
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Interesting that Jeremy mentions Bakelite, which actually WAS a strategic material in the war - used for electrical connectors, insulators, circuit boards, control knobs and instrumentation panels. The raw material for these thermosetting Phenolic plastics came from coal distillation, not oil.
Polythene was probably the first of the oil-derived thermoplastics: it was a new, top-secret material used for insulating cables in radios and radar sets. Like Strontium-90, plastics didn't really exist until after the war. Now there are traces of both everywhere.
Nate, another fantastic podcast! This next comment doesn’t relate to this recent podcast but to the overall issue of climate change. I just watched today’s Guardian podcast with Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg’s conversation about her new book, “The Climate Book” followed by conversations with folks from countries who are taking local direct action about climate change in their areas. I really think you’d both love it and learn from it.