Doing good for climate is a valid business strategy, not a philantropy.
Long-term investors should factor in their models that carbon heavy industries will be negatively hitted by regulations and taxes. Especially as climate change will get worse and younger generations already overwhelming support such meassures.
Leading world economists such as Jeremy Rifkin points out that carbon assests will likely be stranded and this may be the biggest bubble of our times.
Since Buffett generates much of the cashflow he uses for investments from his insurance businesses (and re-re-re~...~insurance), I'm assuming he is acutely aware of the financial risk he faces from climate change. This is definitely good business for him.
That’s not a strategy. It’s an observation. It’s an important observation!
Now what do we do about it? Discounting carbon heavy industries is one move. How much? When will those heavy costs hit?
My own preference is to start coffee farming in North America, to offset the coming end of global shipping. What year will that be, so I can have my crop ready?
There will be small market for your backyard craft coffee...but
Coffee requires a very particular environment to grow, so you are going to spend more energy adapting your local environment to produce coffee that is expended by the shipping of coffee.
What I think will happen is someone will make a completely artificial "coffee flavor" beverage, with added caffeine that the mass market prefers to coffee and doesn't require importing coffee beans.
Re: artificial coffee substitutes are you talking about something like Postum? I’m trying to imagine a palatable take on modern energy drinks adapted to be served hot but my imagination is failing me.
I did a bit of research and hydrogen fuel cells look to be the most promising alternative to diesel powered shipping. Batteries are a no go, they would be need to be 10x more energy dense than they are today (which is very unlikely to happen anytime soon).
My strategy is investing in renewable energy shares. So far I am long Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, and Tesla. It’s early to tell if this is a viable long term strategy as carbon assets become stranded etc.
This is a good resource to determine what is financially viable to assess where to put wind farms. According to the chloropleth, light blue has the highest average wind speeds.
As an Iowan, I'm surprised we're not already the "wind capitol of the world". You can't throw a rock without hitting a turbine, especially along I-80 and I-35.
I live in the Des Moines metro and most of the turbines are in rural areas, so I can't really speak to living around them.
As for the few turbines in the urban areas, they're completely unnoticable. They're silent and just blend into the background.
The only thing I could maybe see as annoying is the red flashing lights they use to help aircraft see them at night. The flashing is at least synchronized so there isn't a constant twinkling effect.
>The only thing I could maybe see as annoying is the red flashing lights they use to help aircraft see them at night.
I'm also from Iowa. It's a really eerie effect driving through a wind farm in the pitch dark! I noticed it most recently on 80 near Newton when they put in a wind farm in the last couple years.
> Smallwood says about 100 eagles die each year due to impacts with the spinning blades on windmills.
> "Mr. Trump could not have arrived at his number (hundreds and hundreds) from any reliable source, unless he is referring to all eagles killed by industrial-scale wind turbines since they were installed in the early 1980s," Smallwood said. "Cumulatively over time, there have been hundreds of eagles killed, probably about 2,000."
The article goes on to say that larger, more modern turbines are more carefully sited to avoid eagle deaths, and that it's working.
“This is a big success story,” Thompson said. “Our goal was to have up to 10 nesting pairs in Iowa by the year 2000. Now we have at least 300 – maybe even 400.”
The most common health concern I hear about is claims or turbines causing headaches. It seems likely to just be misattribution, much like the fabled wifi headaches.
Texas produces 25% of its electricity from Wind and US produces about 5% of its electricity from Wind. The point is Wind is location specific - the plains and Rockies is where it is on land.
The state of Jefferson has bright offshore wind future ;)
It's both cost-rational and environment-rational to invest heavily in clean energy (with or without the comparatively paltry tax incentives).
The long-term costs of climate change and inaction are unfortunately still mostly external costs to energy producers. We should expect that to change as we start developing competencies in evaluating the costs and frequency of weather disasters exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. We all get to pay for floods, fires, tornados, hurricanes, landslides, blizzards, and the gosh darn heat.
Insurance firms clearly see these costs. Our military sees the costs of responding to natural disasters. Local economies see the costs of months and years spent on disaster relief; on just getting back up to speed so that they can generate profit from selling goods and services (and pay taxes to support disaster relief efforts essential to operational readiness).
The cost per kilowatt hour of wind (and solar) energy is now lower than operating existing dirty energy plants that dump soot on our crops, air, and water.
With wind, they talk about the "alligator curve". With solar, it's the "duck curve".
Grid-scale energy storage is necessary for reaching 100% renewable energy as soon as possible.
Iowa's renewable energy tax incentives are logically aligned with international long-term goals:
SDG Target 12.6: "Encourage companies to adopt sustainable practices and sustainability reporting" (CSR; e.g. GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards that we can score portfolios with)
> Rationalize inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption by removing market distortions, in accordance with national circumstances, including by restructuring taxation and phasing out those harmful subsidies, where they exist, to reflect their environmental impacts, taking fully into account the specific needs and conditions of developing countries and minimizing the possible adverse impacts on their development in a manner that protects the poor and the affected communities
...
> Thanks. How can I say "try and only run this [computational workload] in zones with 100% PPA offsets or 100% directly sourced #CleanEnergy"? #Goal7 #Goal11 #Goal12 #Goal13 #GlobalGoals #SDGs
It makes good business sense to invest in clean energy to take advantage of tax incentives, minimize future costs to other business units (e.g. insurance, taxes), and earn the support of investors choosing portfolios with long term environmental (and thus economic) sustainability as a primary objective.
Not a holy cow, but simplistic "capitalism is bad" arguments are done to death and teach us nothing new.
From the guidelines:
Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
If you had anything new to say about the topic, that could teach people new things and lead to interesting and productive discussions, you could expect a much better reaction.
Iowa is a terrible place to build wind farms since it still has some of the most valuable soil on the planet.
Better to build these things on land with steady wind, less agricultural value and nearer big population centers, such as Wyoming and Colorado (near the I-25 corridor from Cheyenne to Colorado Springs) or the barren hills on either side of the Bay Area.
I grew up in Iowa. I inherited 160 acres of prime farmland from my grandparents and parents. I actively participated in the successful lobbying of the county commissioners in the county where my property is located to change the offset rules for wind turbines to make life livable for the people directly affected by them. I personally turned down the offer to build turbines on my land.
That's astonishing, then, that you weren't aware that wind farms share land with productive farms just fine.
I live on a planet and consume food. My family has rural acreage in Wisconsin, too, but that's irrelevant. Privilege doesn't have to stop the ability to think critically.
That you're lobbying to make wind harder to deploy doesn't give you better moral or intellectual clarity, here...
When you do the research, you discover that wind is not the panacea it has been portrayed to be. Building and placing turbines is not carbon neutral, the cleanup costs of decommissioned turbines are completely ignored because they are 40 years out, and they are not very profitable without subsidies. There are better alternatives that are less destructive to the environment.
This also ignores the other part of my original comment, which was to build turbines nearer to population centers. Why aren't the hills east of Oakland and southwest of SV filled with wind turbines?
We need to fire on all cylinders, here, to fight climate change.
And as far as non-wind clean energy, there are literally zero options that are immune to NIMBYism like you're engaged in here. Not hydro, not geothermal, not even solar... And SURE as heck not nuclear.
Svierge: I don't own the land yet (parents are still alive) and no one has approached us, but I absolutely would put wind turbines on it if there was an opportunity. My father and I have regularly discussed putting solar and wind and possibly some form of microhydro on the land at our own expense. We have planted trees on it.
> Better to build these things on land with steady wind, less agricultural value and nearer big population centers
I'm sure developers would be happy to if that was the case, but it turns out the valuable locations simply tend to be west central, and the easternmost regions of the mountain states https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/319
I thought something was awry with your link until I realized that from overhead they’re basically invisible; that’s how efficiently the land is also being used for farming. Point well made.
The pads used for the turbines are quite large, they require an access road, power connections, and the turbines create substantial shade, reducing the productivity of the ground below.
All of that is practically a rounding error compared to the actual area used for crops. Seriously, look at any satellite image of a wind farm in Iowa. Swamped by 2 or 3 years of annual crop yield growth: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/average-corn-yields-in-th...
Did you know farmers in Iowa cut down trees around their fields to minimize shade? The graph you provided is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Corn yield growth is resultant from political decisions to fund biofuels.
The yield increases have mainly come from two sources: increased use of chemicals for pest control and fertilizer, and genetic engineering. Both of those are problematic, with consequences only now slowly dawning on most people, and heavy resistance by the industry to any naysaying in public places.
One day, we may recognize the problem and pass laws to limit or prohibit the use of chemicals. (I think the horse is out of the barn on genetic modification.) That will mean lower yields. Further, if California's droughts continue, the Midwest may need to start growing a greater variety of crops beyond corn and soybeans. There is no other place in the U.S. with soil as potentially productive and useful. Wasting it on wind farms when literally any other place will have less potential impact on agriculture is ridiculous.
Each turbine consumes a minimum of one acre of farmland, and should be offset by at least a half mile from any homes. The problem there is that there are often homes every mile in rural Iowa.
Why can't we build them nearer to the population centers with high energy demands, then? Why not build them on vacant land near big cities?
There is a lot of prime wind farms land on the hills east and southwest and northwest of the Bay Area. There is a lot of vacant land in the hills above Los Angeles. The Olympic peninsula and western slopes of the Cascades have plenty of room for wind farms to serve Seattle. Same on the east coast: Cape Cod actually had a proposed wind farm that was stopped by the moneyed interests that live there, but that could supply Boston with all the power they need.
> Same on the east coast: Cape Cod actually had a proposed wind farm that was stopped by the moneyed interests that live there, but that could supply Boston with all the power they need.
> The project is expected to produce an average of 170 MW of electricity, about 75% of the average electricity demand for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket island combined.
Those three areas have ~250,000 people, and are largely residential. Boston has ~685,000, likely with larger per-capita electrical demand due to industry/office space.
Have the been any advanced in either technology or farm design to minimize bird deaths? While it's seen as somewhat of not a big deal and a necessary evil now, I imagine that may change as there's more built, there's more built making it more likely to be present in an area with endangered species, dm'd climate change affects increase the amount of engaged species.
Birds are not a major concern for wind turbines, despite popular misconceptions [1]. Avian impacts depend a lot on siting, so some wind farms see no bird deaths while others see a few.
Generally, it's worse along migratory routes, but even then it pales in comparison to other human impacts on birds. As the linked Wikipedia article states, estimates for bird deaths due to plate glass collisions are in the hundreds of millions per year in the US. By comparison, a Canadian study found an average of less than ten bird deaths per turbine per year in that country.
So, it's not zero-impact, and it's definitely something we ought to keep an eye on, but it's not nearly as bad as some people would leave you to believe. To hear the anti-wind lobby explain it, you'd imagine that wind turbines are giant spinning fan blades of death that migratory birds get sucked into and shredded in a cloud of gore. The reality is they have a bit of an impact on birds, but it's not nearly as bad as stuff we do already (like having windows on our buildings).
I'd wager it's concern trolling or outright lies more often than misconceptions. The people invoking this rarely give a wit about birds, they just find this a convenient stick to hit wind turbines with, either for denial purposes or for NIMBY purposes. Look no further than sverige downthread.
Yes, by several orders of magnitude. Last I checked, Windmills killed 100s of thousands since their inception while domestic cats kill billions each year.
You are high by at least an order of magnitude, if not two. Most estimates I’ve seen put the number of bird deaths from windmills in the thousands across all time.
I think you're mixing up the stats on eagle deaths (I posted a link elsewhere in this discussion for those, and they are indeed just a couple hundred a year at most) with that of all birds.
> In the end, using 58 mortality estimates that met their criteria, they came up with an estimate. According to the current literature somewhere between 140,000 and 328,000 birds die each year from collisions with wind turbines.
And like I said, it's not a concern yet, but like many other things they start as not a huge issue on a small scale and then all of a sudden it's an issue.
Birds will evolve to avoid them. Though I don't know if it takes 10 or 500 years.
If not, the ecological niche of eating the dead birds by our wind mills will be filled by some species.
Without knowing any numbers, I suspect the actual impact of wind power bird deaths is wholly insignificant, but it makes us feel bad since they're so visible.
I am no animal rights fundamentalist, but I found that new item so depressing, it sounds like "we found this awesome >130yo whale, which survived a hunt in 1890. Well it didn't survive this one, the sucker."
One pod of orca has been observed using human-built structures and human activity to assist their hunting. At least one pod has been observed splitting up and engaging in decoy-like activity to protect their juveniles from human capture. The pangolin maybe hasn't figured out Chinese traditional medicine yet. To be fair, I'm not exactly clear on how it works either.
Glass curtain walls have already provided competitive advantage to pigeons, parrots, and corvids over sparrows, thrushes, buntings, and warblers.
Some crows have figured out how to use window glass to get free meals. Herd that sparrow flock into the windmill, and the murder feasts below the mast.
Anthropogenic challenges overwhelmingly favor species with higher levels of individual intelligence.
The evolution will be that the dumber birds become endangered or go extinct, while the smarter birds expand their populations.
Buffett is wary of companies pursuing social and environmental goals. He told the Financial Times that executives shouldn't funnel shareholders' money into peripheral projects and that it was difficult to assess whether businesses were truly doing good.
"It's very hard to evaluate what they're doing," the so-called Oracle of Omaha told the newspaper. "I like to eat candy. Is candy good for me or not? I don't know."
Wow Warren, really? You don't know if candy is good for you? You don't know if de-carbonization is good for the planet? I really don't get his rationale here...candy is a known treat, it is not "good for you" in any nutritive sense. Is he implying that there is a psychological benefit to the candy, even if it's not healthy? How does that apply to renewables and companies?
Overall, I know he's hailed as brilliant at investing, but what is this candy rationale??
Because he's been around the block enough times to know that it's not so simple. There are a ton of variables, confounding factors and second order effects in play when it comes to things like forecasting climate and nutrition. There are plenty of examples where we got things terribly wrong, even when there were high levels of confidence (e.g., dietary recommendations).
In the case of candy, he probably thinks sugar isn't good in and of itself and doesn't eat it with a spoon. But it's the overall effect of candy that matters. If it reduces stress, then maybe it's not so bad or even a net good in some amounts or for some people. Warren himself made it to 89 (so far) eating quite a bit of junk food, drinking coke and is still sharp and has enough energy to be working, traveling and so on. Many examples like that, so indeed it's not so simple.
With CO2, he probably thinks there is or can be too much in the atmosphere. But again it's not the whole picture. For one thing, you need to be sure that building and operating the solution (making machines, transporting, maintaining, powering them) doesn't exceed their net benefit.
It's easy to find yourself in a situation where the cure is only marginally better or even worse than the disease. Which happens a lot with complex systems.
Warren is exceptionally skilled at getting to the ground truth. When he says he doesn't know about something that you feel is obvious or basic, then it may be worth re-evaluating your level of confidence.
It is difficult to tell decarbonization projects with high long term output from those that merely serve the social and identity preferences of executives
Not sure why you are down voted. Buffet’s reasoning here is incredibly weak and he deserves to be criticized for it.
It’s “difficult to assess” whether or not an investment will produce a financial return but he doesn’t apply that argument to criticize those who pursue investments with the goal of growing their personal wealth.
I think this is the worst quote I’ve ever read from warren buffet and it makes me very much dislike him.
> I'd choose my comparisons and metaphors more wisely.
I was basically looking for your comment but you're the only one that decided to look at the uncommon attributes between Iowa and Saudi Arabia. Metaphors compare dissimilar things with common attributes. The common attribute being an energy production behemoth.
Long-term investors should factor in their models that carbon heavy industries will be negatively hitted by regulations and taxes. Especially as climate change will get worse and younger generations already overwhelming support such meassures.
Leading world economists such as Jeremy Rifkin points out that carbon assests will likely be stranded and this may be the biggest bubble of our times.