Jeremy Grantham on the Battle to Save Society from Climate Change: ‘We’re Not Winning’

15 May 2019

Jeremy Grantham on the Battle to Save Society from Climate Change: ‘We’re Not Winning’

Re: Jeremy Grantham (MBA 1966)

Topics: Environment-Weather and Climate Change Social Enterprise-Nonprofit Organizations Communication-Communication Strategy

Photo by Tom Jamieson for the Financial Times

In a recent interview with the Financial Times , Jeremy Grantham (MBA 1966) noted his pessimism about the global attitude towards climate change. “My odds are about 50:50 that we will protect society in somewhat the same shape …as we’ve had, with a few glitches, in the last 50 years,” he told the newspaper. “But if anything [that ratio is] shading down, we’re not winning. We’re overtly losing, despite some of our best efforts.”

The article mentions that Grantham—who recently spoke at an HBS Business and Environment Initiative panel on climate change—has pledged 98 percent of his wealth to his own environmental foundation and currently directs half of his foundation’s grants to “communications and research into the psychology of denial” to help improve messaging. Part of that messaging, the article notes, includes localizing the appeal—though Boston-based Grantham says that his perspective is broader. “The world coming to the end is what gets me, not Boston coming to an end,” he tells the Financial Times.

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Jeremy Grantham

MBA 1966

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MBA 1966

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