Citola Blog
Warren Buffett, Gold and Sustainability
Warren Buffett, the ‘Oracle of Omaha’, famous US investor and Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has been quoted as saying about gold:
“It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”
In response, some people have applied the same logic to fiat currency: “It comes in abundance from trees with little to no efforts, we print as many as we want and assign whatever “value” to it, but we make certain that it contains official looking faces and logos so that we can pay people to stand around guarding it.”
It could be said that anyone watching from Mars, who we could assume has pioneered an abundant, renewable and clean energy source, would also be scratching their head about the drilling for oil and our current reliance on fossil fuel based power generation. And the lack of value attributed to natural capital (i.e. the dividend society receives from nature such as filtered water from rainforests). Of course this is changing with the emerging environmental and carbon markets, however, where does this lead to?
Sustainability and valuing natural capital are fundamental to society and should be core business for all governments and private enterprise (i.e. not something to be ‘tacked on’).
At Citola, sustainability is fundamental to our commercial model (i.e. rather than a sustainability strategy retrofitted to a legacy operation) in that we optimise for Triple-Bottom line outcomes: (1) Economic performance, (2) Environmental performance and (3) Societal impacts. The new paradigm is that the best commercial outcome is achieved by considering environmental/social impacts over the long-term.
"Someone's sitting in the
"Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." - Warren Buffett
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