Berkshire Hathaway Shows a Rebound From the Pandemic
Summary
The annual investor meeting, gives shareholders a chance to submit questions about the company’s performance, as well as other topics like climate change and whether Berkshire had made mistakes in responding to the pandemic’s initial blow to the United States economy in March 2020. When one shareholder asked why Mr. Buffett had recommended a “no” vote to two proxy initiatives on climate change, he said it would be “asinine, frankly,” to do otherwise. He said that Berkshire had more than a million shareholders, and only three of them had bothered to write to him about their environmental concerns. I don’t think they read the reports of Berkshire Hathaway Energy.” If they had, he said, they would know that Berkshire had begun planning for shutting down coal-fired power plants in 2007, and that the process had to happen in a systematic way, so that homeowners and businesses were not deprived of electricity. “They’re nice people, but they want us to answer a bunch of questionnaires their way,” he said, adding that Berkshire had always complied with environmental mandates from the government, even if they were at odds with business imperatives.