Warren Buffett: WHY WE STILL NEED COAL ◼⛏Everything he and Charlie Munger ever said about coal 🏭🔥

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger explain why the world still needs coal as an energy source.

THIS ENCOMPASSES EVERYTHING THEY HAVE EVER SAID ON THE SUBJECT DURING ALL BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY MEETINGS.

Many believe coal consumption in the world is decreasing. It's not. The use of coal is on the rise globally, with about 27% of global energy consumption coming from coal.

Here's a comprehensive transcript of everything Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have ever said about coal and the necessity of hydrocarbons in the world:

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In the short-term the world is going to use more coal,

If you shut down the coal-generated utilities in the United States, you know, this — we would not be able to hold this meeting in a room with the lights on.
So it’s a very tough problem to solve, or to even make big inroads on in a short period of time

We are dependent a lot on coal. It’s cleaner coal than it was 20 years ago, but — and we will be dependent on it for a long time.

People who are very against the use of coal should reflect: which one they’d rather use up fast — the hydrocarbons, the oil and natural gas, or the coal?
I would rather use up the coal because it’s less desirable as a chemical feed stock for what we need to feed the world.
And so I would argue that there’s an environmental reason, in terms of human kind, for being very pro-coal use.

Right now, we’re building coal plants in the country. We’re building gas plants. We’re doing various things

Well, if we get another 200 years of economic growth pretty well disbursed over the world, while the population of the world also goes up, all of the oil, coal, natural gas, and uranium reserves of the world are like nothing.

So eventually, of course, you have to use the sun. There is no other alternative. And I think we can confidently predict that there will be some pain in this process of adjusting to a different world.

Personally, I think it’s extremely stupid to use up the hydrocarbon reserves of the world as fast as we are.

I don’t think we’ve got any good substitutes for those things as chemical feed stocks, and I think it’s perfectly crazy to use up something so precious for which you have no alternative that’s sure to be available.

And if you look at it backwards, what should we have done? Hell, we should have bought all the oil in the ’30s in the Middle East and take it over here by tankers and put it in our own ground.

I mean, it’s obvious to see what should have been done in the past.
Even though that’s obvious, are we doing the equivalent of that now? And the answer is, basically, no.

So I think the governmental policy tends to be way behind in terms of rationality. And I think we’ll just have to soldier through. But eventually the — if we’re going to have a prosperous civilization — we have no other alternative than the sun.

Don’t ever give up on humans’ ability to innovate in ways that create solutions to problems that seem insolvable.

We’ve faced all kinds of predictions.

We haven’t really started. I mean, if you could pick a time in history when you would want to be born — leaving out the nuclear, chemical and biological threat, which is something to leave out — but I would pick today. The world has a bright future.

Obviously, you’re dealing with a finite resource

If there’s enough energy, you can always get enough clean water.

I think one of the main reasons for being restrained in the use of hydrocarbons is that modern agriculture won’t work without them.
So I’m a great believer in being conservative, in terms of blowing all the hydrocarbons on heating houses and running cars

It’s probably quite wise to use up the other fellow’s hydrocarbon while preserving our own.

Despite the wild things we’ve seen in pricing, particularly this ratio of natural gas prices to oil, you can’t change — I mean the installed base is so huge when you get into electricity generation — that you can’t really change the percentages too much

The single-most precious resource in the United States are its hydrocarbon reserves, the ones that are right here and, of course, I want to use up —

We are using up a precious resource, which we need to create fertilizer and so forth, and sparing a resource which is precious but not as precious, which is thermal coal.

I would use up every ounce of thermal coal before I’d touch a drop of natural gas. I think those natural gas reserves we just found are the most precious things we could leave our descendants.

The gas is worth more than the coal.

I think a lot of the people who think they know how climate change is going to change weather patterns and hurricanes are overclaiming.

I think that all hydrocarbons will be used, including all the coal.

People think that all this hydrocarbons are going to be stranded and the whole world’s going to change. I think we’re going to use every drop of the hydrocarbon sooner or later. We’ll use them as chemical feed stocks.

[zzappligator]

They’re seeing the energy but not the emissions causing permanent atmospheric warming. At the current rate, there is no point looking at 200 years from now.

[jamesbyrne]

Its not about economic growth, its about pollution Charlie