Here's what Warren Buffett thinks about climate change and investing.
Key Points
Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Bill Gates attend a product launch in Beijing, China for BYD, the electric battery, car, and solar energy company in which Munger long ago led an investment for Berkshire Hathaway., is for many people the first source to consult when it comes to the development of an investing philosophy. The billionaire investor has has never shied away from sharing his views with the public, either — and not only when it comes to stock market value.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Buffett's large utility conglomerate, owns western utility PacifiCorp, which has a sizable fleet of coal power plants. Berkshire's Burlington Northern railroad ships a lot of coal, too. But the Berkshire utility company also is one of the biggest wind energy producers in the U.S.
At the 2016 Berkshire annual meeting, the eminent climate scientist and former NASA official James Hansen was among the shareholders who made an appeal to Buffett. Buffett was not dogmatic or ideological, but rejected the plea not as a matter of climate denial but his sense of current business reality.
At the 2015 meeting, Munger said: "I don't think it's totally clear what the effects of global warming will be on extremes of weather. I think there's a lot of guesswork in that field and a lot of people who like howling about calamities that are by no means sure, like a crazy ideology. Not that global warming isn't happening, just you can get so excited and make crazy extrapolations that are not necessarily correct.
"I get all these questions from people who tell me they want me to fill out lots of forms about how will affect our insurance business," Buffett told Berkshire shareholders in 2015. "It just doesn't operate in that time period."
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