“The Race Of Our Lives Revisited” by Jeremy Grantham

LaRae LongGreen Prosperity, Reforming Global Finance, Earth Systems Science, Beyond GDP

“Ethical Markets highly recommends this  new White Paper by one of the best-informed investors on the planet, Jeremy Bentham,  of GMO www.gmo.com, who  has been sounding alarms on climate change and threats to  our food supply  and long-term survival for many years.

This paper updates his earlier forecasts and shows the performance  of  his investment strategies in shifting from fossil fuels to  renewable energy, efficiency and green technologies, and his current portfolio holdings.  We have tracked these same trends since 2009 in our  annual Green Transition Scoreboard®, with current totals of these green private investments worldwide since 2007.

Our 2018 report now shows  $9.3 trillion in the pipeline, and also  addresses the major trends in Grantham’s paper:  the current threats to  agriculture and our global food supplies, the need to  continue this shift to  green economies, from  meat to  plant-protein diets, as well as to  capture CO2 directly from the Earth’s atmosphere:

“Capturing CO2 While Improving Human Nutrition & Health “,   agrees with all Grantham’s recommendations for action and policy shifts , while also  advocating a global shift from investing in  the planet’s current 3% of  freshwater,  on which all our agriculture and   food supply depends , to  the 97% of saltwater and the thousands of varieties of salt-loving plants ( halophytes,  e.g. quinoa )  which grow in 22 countries on desert and degraded lands , requiring no fertilizers or  pesticides , and provide high quality complete proteins and minerals for optimal human nutrition.

 

Even though we refer to  all the scientists who  advocate this shift to  halophyte agriculture , including NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell, whom we interview in our companion TV program “Investing In Saltwater Agriculture: The Next Big Thing”, we realize the cognitive bias  in denials of this obvious, viable and cost-effective shift: ” theory-induced blindness“!  In addition, the agro-chemical industrial food complex is as powerful as the fossil fuel  sector, and will resist this paradigm-shifting change .

~Hazel Henderson, Editor“

GMO
White Paper
Introduction
It was always going to be difficult for us – Homo sapiens – to deal with the long-term, slow-burning
problems that threaten us today: climate change, population growth, increasing environmental
toxicity, and the impact of all these three on the future ability to feed the 11 billion people projected
for 2100.
Our main disadvantage is that our species has developed over the last few hundred thousand years
not to address this kind of long-term, slow-burning issue, but to stay alive and well-fed today and
perhaps tomorrow. Beyond that we have a history of responding well only to more immediate and
tangible threats like war.  [Read More]

“The Race of Our Lives”