What If Green Energy Isn't The Future? -- WSJ -- May 20, 2019

For previous posts on this subject:

• OXY-Anadarko-Buffett; and, here; and, what's next for Chevron?

The screenshot:

Great, great, great question. I completely missed that angle when I wrote about OXY-Anadarko-Buffett earlier. Completely missed it.

The first thought someone might have to push back on this -- it's a short-term hedge by Buffett: in the short-term, over the next five years, green energy won't displace fossil fuel energy, and in fact, green energy will come up so short, that fossil fuel will do very, very well. In the short term.

That's possible. That's possibly what Buffett was thinking. He was hedging a short-term investment. Market timing.

One problem: Buffett says he does not invest for the short term. He invests for the long term.

So, that's point one: Buffett thinks long term.

Second, how many times a day does Buffett says he's bullish on America? Literally in every interview.

Now, the really, really cool part. Warren Buffett has access to the brightest minds and thinkers. His Rolodex is filled with the likes of Tim Cook and Bill Gates and T. Boone Pickens and Elon Musk. He (or his people) probably see more energy PowerPoint presentations in a week than most of us see in a year. In other words, Warren Buffett did not make a $10-billion bet on an ill-informed hunch.

It was a great headline, "What if green energy isn't the future?"

That was a great question.

But I think one could argue that a $10-billion bet in crude oil by Warren Buffett should tell other investors all they need to know about the future of green energy.

One word: batteries.

Link here. And this is after decades of research and billions of research dollars from Sony, Toyota, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, et al.

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The Apple Page

I did not read the graduation speech he gave and I won't but apparently the theme of his speech to graduates: "our generation failed you."

Hunter S. Thompson talked about this a lot. It was perhaps HST's favorite hyphenated word: self-loathing.

This is a common adjective conferred among people who ....