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题外话：我没有从事过翻译工作的经验，很难译出 新华网国际频道翻译 掷出的 大炸弹：资源枯竭对战略投资的影响
最多，会译成：混世魔王 还能从 生态大混乱 中受益吗？
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Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem?
By CARLO ROTELLA
Published: August 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-grantham-profit-from-ecological-mayhem.html
Sitting in a Panera in Boston’s financial district in early July with Jeremy Grantham, I suddenly found myself considering how I might safeguard my children’s and notional grandchildren’s future by somehow engineering the U.S. annexation of Morocco. Grantham, the founder and chief strategist of the asset-management firm GMO, was reading aloud from a rough draft of his next quarterly letter to investors, in which he ranks some long-term crises of resource limitation along a scale from “merely serious” to “dangerous.”
Energy “will give us serious and sustained problems” over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons — oil, coal, gas — to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources, but we’ll muddle through to a solution to Peak Oil and related challenges. Peak Everything Else will prove more intractable for humanity. Metals, for instance, “are entropy at work . . . from wonderful metal ores to scattered waste,” and scarcity and higher prices “will slowly increase forever,” but if we scrimp and recycle, we can make do for another century before tight constraint kicks in.
Agriculture is more worrisome. Local water shortages will cause “persistent irritation” — wars, famines. Of the three essential macro nutrient fertilizers, nitrogen is relatively plentiful and recoverable, but we’re running out of potassium and phosphorus, finite mined resources that are “necessary for all life.” Canada has large reserves of potash (the source of potassium), which is good news for Americans, but 50 to 75 percent of the known reserves of phosphate (the source of phosphorus) are located in Morocco and the western Sahara. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in phosphorus consumption, Grantham believes the rest of the world’s reserves won’t last more than 50 years, so he expects “gamesmanship” from the phosphate-rich.
And he rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century — perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.
Grantham, who is 72 and has what’s left of a British accent after living in Boston for more than four decades, outlined this wildly distressing assessment against a bland backdrop of chain décor and piped-in smooth jazz. He marked up his draft with a pen as he went along, departing from the text at times to emphasize a point. “Phosphorus makes up 1 percent of your body weight,” he said, looking up from the page to catch my eye. “It’s a basic element, the residue of exploded stars. You can’t just make more.” He also pointed out that most economists see global trade as a win-win proposition, but resource limitation turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest. “The faster China grows, the higher grain prices go, the more people in China or India who upgrade to meat, the higher the tendency for Africa to starve,” he said.
Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution, which “partially removed the barriers to rapid population growth, wealth and scientific progress.” That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries, but now, ready or not, the age of cheap hydrocarbons is ending. Grantham’s July letter concludes: “We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability. The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable.”
Grantham’s quarterly letters, which command a cult following of readers within and beyond the financial industry, inspire even the most short-term profit-minded investors to do a little fate-of-the-world-scale thinking. I find that they have the opposite, equally mind-stretching effect on a passive investor like me. Although I’m normally happy to turn over my paychecks to the missus and not inquire into what happens to them, my encounters with Grantham tend to whip me into a state of alarm that has me thinking about acquiring tracts of arable timbered high ground, preferably defensible ones well inland from the rising seas.
Doomsayers are always plentiful, and the economic and environmental news has encouraged even more doomsaying than usual of late, but Grantham compels attention, in part because he’s not simply prophesying doom. While it may be too late to “gracefully” deal with depleted resources, climate change and related crises, it’s never too late to mitigate the damage. And, crucially, the consequences will be unevenly distributed, creating angles for you to make money and look out for your interests, however you define them.
more...http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/can-jeremy-grantham-profit-from-ecological-mayhem.html
美资深战略投资家：资源枯竭或引发经济动荡（之一）
2011年09月03日
http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2011-09/03/c_121933506.htm
新华网北京9月3日电（杨潇）在自然资源日渐枯竭、国际大宗商品价格持续上扬的大背景下，许多经济学家和战略投资家开始担心，新一轮的商品价格或许上扬。美国波士顿学院专家卡罗·罗特拉近日采访了被称为“末日预言家”的GMO资产管理公司主席杰里米·格兰森，并在美国《纽约时报》上发表了《资源枯竭对战略投资的影响》一文，分析了自然资源枯竭的严峻形势，批评了美国投资者只顾经济利益不顾生态环境的做法，并号召各方共同采取措施，应对资源短缺可能造成的经济动荡。
为保持文章的原汁原味，新华网国际频道翻译仍沿用了第一人称形式编译了全文。译文从今天开始分三部分连载，敬请关注。今日是第一部分。
杰里米·格兰森
七月初，我和杰里米·格兰森坐在波士顿金融区的一个面包店里，突然开始考虑，怎样能通过策划美国和摩洛哥在石油资源上的合作，来保证我的孩子甚至是还未出现的孙辈们仍然有足够的生存资源。格兰森是波士顿资产管理公司GMO的创始人和首席战略师，而现在，他正在大声地宣读他下一季度给投资者的信的草稿，他在信中列出了资源枯竭将给人类生存带来的长期危机，并按照从“严重”到“极度危险”给这些危机进行了排名。
在未来的50年中，我们将从碳氢化合能源（石油、煤炭、天然气等）向太阳能、风能、核能和其他替代能源转变，而能源“会给我们带来严重而持久的问题”，但是我们终将探索出解决“石油峰值论”问题和相关的挑战的方法。但是当一切商品的价格都开始接近峰值的时候，人类生存所面临的挑战也许会更加严峻。比如铁矿，格兰森说“它们是工作中的熵，不管是顶级铁矿石还是废料都对我们的工业十分重要”，而铁矿资源日渐稀少，价格“持续缓慢上扬”，但是如果我们对铁矿石资源进行合理利用和循环回收，也许就能把峰值到来的时间再推迟一个世纪。
而农业更让人担忧。本地的水资源短缺将会引起持续不断的冲突——战争和饥荒。在三种主要的营养型肥料中，氮的储量相对充足，而且可以回收，但是地球上的钾和磷却在日渐稀少，而这两种有限的元素是“所有生命所必需的”。加拿大有大量的碳酸钾资源，是钾肥的主要来源，这对美国来说是个好消息，但是百分之五十到七十五的已发现的磷酸盐（磷肥的主要来源）都位于摩洛哥和西撒哈拉。格兰森认为，假设磷肥的使用量以每年百分之二的速度增长，地球上还剩下的储备坚持不了50年，所以他希望拥有丰富磷酸盐的国家最好能“动动脑筋，充分利用资源”。
更多。。。http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2011-09/03/c_121933506.htm |
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狗仔卡
楼主
提升卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡
发表于 2011-9-3 22:43
