EPA rolls back Obama-era coal pollution rules as Trump heads to West Virginia

CNN)As his Environmental Protection Agency delivers its latest blow to environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions, President Donald Trump is heading into the heart of coal country to deliver the good news.

Trump will join supporters in Charleston, West Virginia, for a political rally on Tuesday to celebrate his administration's proposal to allow states to set their own emissions standards for coal-fueled power plants.
The move would reverse Obama administration efforts to combat climate change and marks the fulfilment of a campaign promise at the heart of his appeal in coal-producing states like West Virginia.
The EPA Tuesday morning formally unveiled the details of its new plan to devolve regulation of coal-fired power plants back to the states, one that is expected to give a boost to the coal industry and increase carbon emissions nationwide.
The move is just the latest effort by the Trump administration to revive an ailing coal industry and strip climate change-fighting regulations established by the Obama administration. He previously announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, calling it an unfair deal for Americans. Read More

Kiribati president says Australia's loyalty to coalmines 'selfish and unjust'

The president of Kiribati has criticised Australia’s commitment to new coalmines on economic grounds as a “very selfish perspective” that illustrates the “fundamentally unjust” dynamics of climate change.

Anote Tong, whose small Pacific island nation is threatened by rising sea levels, has written to other national leaders calling for a worldwide moratorium on new mines ahead of UN climate talks in Paris in December.

Tong, who called for a pact to end new coal projects “simply to find some very concrete action on climate change”, told Guardian Australia he knew it would “touch on sensitivities”.

“I know the closure of coal-fired power plants will not happen,” he said.

“But at least the moratorium on coalmines, it gives people that sense that something can be done … and it allows those involved in the industry time to adapt. I thought it would be more achievable.

“In climate negotiations to date we keep talking around the numbers, two degrees or more than two degrees celsius. [But] it’s about what we do. And coal is certainly something very concrete, very significant in terms of what it does.”

In recent weeks the Australian government and the mining lobby have portrayed environmental groups as saboteurs of valuable coal projects, using legal challenges to put jobs and economic growth at risk.

Tong, who said he was yet to receive a reply from the Australian government, wrote in his letter that “science, as confirmed by the [intergovernmental panel on climate change], dictates that for the world to avoid catastrophic climate change, we must leave the vast bulk of carbon reserves in the ground”.

Asked about the economic arguments raised in defence of the continued advance of Australia’s coal industry – including its self-proclaimed role in helping alleviate world poverty– Tong said: “My response is very simple: it’s a very selfish perspective.

“I understand and I’ve always said that for Australia, climate change is not the top of the agenda because they’ve got high ground,” he said. “We don’t.”

Other countries had refused to acknowledge the “fundamentally unjust” situation that climate change is “not contained within the countries that create it”.

“The question is: do we have the moral obligation to worry and care about those for whom this is a serious issue?” Tong said.

“My answer is yes. You have every responsibility and obligation to do something about it. If it was happening inside Australia, there is no doubt at all in my mind that it would be on top of what everyone was doing.”

Amid fears about Kiribati’s survival, the government has been forced to consider radical engineering schemes to mitigate a shrinking land mass, while buying farmland in Fiji as a “food security” measure.

Climate change had dominated his 12-year term as president (which will end next year), but recent unprecedented tidal flooding and cyclones represented a “new and frightening” development.

“It puts some panic in people,” Tong said. “It’s not something we’re talking about happening into the future – we can see the problem. What do we do when the next tide comes? And we have a spring tide coming at the end of this month.

“There are really no sceptics [in Kiribati] at the present moment in time.

“I must be honest to say that I’ve never really gone out of my way to publicise to our own people what is happening because I didn’t see the sense in making them fear what they really cannot do anything about.

“So my focus has been trying as much as possible to alert the international community to the fact planet Earth has a problem, and so do we.”

Tong said the ideal outcome of Paris would include “realistic solutions” to the impacts that Kiribati and others face. He is among those lobbying for an international aid package for Kiribati and other vulnerable nations to meet the costs of climate change.

“For us, zero emissions is not even good enough. The reality is what’s already in the atmosphere will … continue to raise the sea to levels that would ensure that we go down,” he said.

“The future is guaranteed to be very terrible in a very short space of time. We need a package.”

Suggestions that vulnerable countries be given loans instead of grants were not politically acceptable.

“People will not go for it. It is the responsibility of the international community to come up with a package,” he said.

He hoped that “what happens in terms of delivery, what happens in terms of the targets, will happen very soon – sooner rather than later”.

“It is a moral issue and it’s absolutely unjust for those to go ahead and do what they’re doing without regard for those whose survival will be in question,” he said. More

 

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Climate change: UN backs fossil fuel divestment campaign

The UN organisation in charge of global climate change negotiations is backing the fast-growing campaign persuading investors to sell off their fossil fuel assets. It said it was lending its “moral authority” to the divestment campaign because it shared the ambition to get a strong deal to tackle global warming at a crunch UN summit in Paris in December.

“We support divestment as it sends a signal to companies, especially coal companies, that the age of ‘burn what you like, when you like’ cannot continue,” said Nick Nuttall, the spokesman for the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC).

The move is likely to be controversial as the economies of many nations at the negotiating table heavily rely on coal, oil and gas. In 2013, coal-reliant Poland hosted the UNFCCC summit and was castigated for arranging a global coal industry summit alongside. Now, the World Coal Association has criticised the UNFCCC’s decision to back divestment, saying it threatened investment in cleaner coal technologies.

Several analyses have shown that there are more fossil fuels in proven reserves than can be burned if catastrophic global warming is to be avoided, as world leaders have pledged. Divestment campaigners argue that the trillions of dollars companies continue to spend on exploration for even more fossil fuels is a danger to both the climate and investors’ capital.

“Everything we do is based on science and the science is pretty clear that we need a world with a lot less fossil fuels,” Nuttall told the Guardian. “We have lent our own moral authority as the UN to those groups or organisations who are divesting. We are saying ‘we support your aims and ambitions because they are fairly and squarely our ambition’, which is to get a good deal in Paris.”

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, sent a related message to investors in November, saying: “Please reduce your investments in the coal- and fossil-fuel-based economy and [move] to renewable energy.” But he stopped short of backing the divestment campaign itself.

Many religious groups are among the 180 organisations that have already divested their funds from fossil fuels, as well as city authorities and universities. “We see the divestment of churches very much as a moral imperative for them,” Nuttall said. “If their goal is relieving the suffering of millions of people, then divestment is in line with how they want the world to be.”

A recent tweet from the UNFCCC said: “Divestment worked to free [South Africa] of apartheid. Now it can help free us of fossil fuels.” The tweet carried a quote and image of the archbishop Desmond Tutu, who in 2014 told the Guardian: “People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change.”

— UNFCCC (@UNFCCC) February 11, 2015

#Divestment worked to free SA of #apartheid. Now it can help free us of #fossilfuelshttp://t.co/RWEszTzWvp @350 pic.twitter.com/0yWJOAn1y8

Divestment campaigners say their aim is to bankrupt fossil fuel companies morally, not financially. “No one is saying divestment by churches and universities will shift the market in a one-to-one way,” said Nuttall. “The message now is that you can get off fossil fuels without undermining your investments. It’s a different world now. You can save the world and get a good return on your investment.”

Many senior figures and institutions in the financial world, including the World Bank, Bank of England, HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Standard and Poor’s, have warned that only a fraction of known fossil fuel reserves can be safely burned and that the remainder could plummet in value posing huge risks to investors.

Benjamin Sporton, acting chief executive of the World Coal Association, rejected the linking of divestment from fossil fuels with divestment from tobacco and apartheid South Africa. “The coal divestment campaign is not comparable to any other divestment campaign,” he said. “Active and responsible investors play a vital role in encouraging investment in cleaner coal technologies. Demand for coal is not going away.”

As global warming argument moves on to politics and business, Alan Rusbridger explains the thinking behind our major series on the climate crisis

Sporton said the divestment campaign was a concern: “There are economic and social dimensions that mean divesting from fossil fuels – and in particular coal – comes with significant risks, not least when 1.3 billion people are still without access to electricity.” The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in November that global warming is set to inflict severe and irreversible impacts on people and that “limiting its effects is necessary to achieve sustainable development and equity, including poverty eradication”.

“Meeting the demand projected by the International Energy Agency will call for $18.5tn of cumulative investment between 2014 and 2035,” said a spokesman for the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP). “This doesn’t support an argument for divestment.” Replacing coal-fired power stations with gas can halve carbon emissions, he added.

IPIECA, the global oil and gas industry association for environmental issues and “the industry’s principal channel of communication with the UN”, declined to comment. More

 

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I'm fighting to keep my home above water

My name is Milañ Loeak, I’m from the Marshall Islands, and I bring you a message on behalf of my Climate Warrior brothers and sisters from across Oceania.

You've probably heard it all before -- that the climate is changing, that the ocean is rising, that my home in the islands will be the first to go. But the people of the Pacific are not drowning, we are fighting. And the biggest threat to our homes is the fossil fuel industry.

So here's how we're fighting back: there's a coal port in Newcastle, Australia and it's the largest in the world, shipping approximately 617,000 tons of coal every single day. If the port were a country, it would be the 9th highest emitting country in the world. That’s why I have travelled to Australia to shut it down for a day.

Using traditional canoes, I and 30 other Pacific Climate Warriors are going to paddle into the oncoming path of coal ships. Behind us will be hundreds of Australians in kayaks, on surfboards and whatever else they can find, united with us as we stand up to the fossil fuel industry.

But we need more than hundreds of Australians standing with us -- we are going to need you too.

The fossil fuel industry will try to dismiss us. They will launch their PR machine to say that we are just a small group acting alone and that we do not speak for others. But we know that we are not acting alone. We are standing with front line communities around the world when we say it is time to end our addiction to fossil fuels before it destroys our homes, our communities, and our culture.

As the Pacific Climate Warriors paddle into the water on October 17th, show that you stand with us -- click here to sign on to our call for solidarity.

Stopping one day of coal exports alone won't keep our homes above water, but it marks the rise of the Pacific Climate Warriors, and the beginning of our defense of the Pacific Islands.

I ask you to join us in this fight -- because we cannot save the Pacific Islands on our own.

Warm Pacific wishes,

Milañ Loeak, Republic of the Marshall Islands

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350.org is building a global climate movement. Become a sustaining donor to keep this movement strong and growing.

 

 

 

© 2014

Providing science to European climate policymakers

IIASA models provided quantitative input to the recent proposal of the European Commission on climate and energy goals for 2030.

On 22 January, 2014, the European Commission agreed on a proposal for new climate and energy targets for 2030, including a reduction of EU greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below the 1990 level. Negotiations leading to the compromise were informed by an extensive impact assessment, for which IIASA researchers contributed data and model results to help policymakers understand future emissions, as well as the potential benefits and costs of various climate policies.

Estimating future emissions

IIASA’s Mitigation of Greenhouse Gases Program estimated mitigation potentials and costs of non-carbon dioxide (non-CO2) greenhouse gas emissions for all EU member states. Non-CO2 greenhouse gases account for about 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. Current policies, which address waste, fluorinated gases, and air conditioning systems, are expected to reduce these emissions by 20% in 2030 compared to 2005. Using IIASA’s GAINS model, the researchers showed that at a carbon price of €45 per ton of CO2, further measures could reduce non-CO2 emissions by about 40%. A higher carbon price would lead to emission cuts of more than 50%.

IIASA’s assessment also highlighted the importance of the co-benefits of addressing both air pollution and climate change simultaneously, showing that cuts in particulate matter concentrations compared to present policies would reduce health damage from air pollution in 2030 by around €5 to 11 billion and air pollution control costs by more than €2 billion. For more information see MAG News: EU climate and energy strategy.

Changing land-use

Researchers in IIASA’s Ecosystems Services and Management Program meanwhile contributed research to the process, showing that changes in land use from agriculture and forestry could mean that European carbon sinks could decline by 12% by 2030. The researchers estimated greenhouse gas emissions from land-use, land use change and forestry using IIASA’s GLOBIOM and Global Forest Models. European lands currently take up more carbon as they emit, making them a net carbon sink. But by 2030, carbon sequestration is expected to decline as the agriculture and forestry sector develop. For more information, see the EUCLIMIT Project Web page.

More information

Report: EU Trends to 2050 Update (PDF).

Climate Change Occurring Ten Times Faster Than at Any Time in Past 65 Million Years

If the trend continues at its current rapid pace, it will place significant stress on terrestrial ecosystems around the world, and many species will need to make behavioral, evolutionary or geographic adaptations to survive.

Although some of the changes the planet will experience in the next few decades are already "baked into the system," how different the climate looks at the end of the 21st century will depend largely on how humans respond.

The findings come from a review of climate research by Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science, and Chris Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science and the director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution. The work is part of a special report on climate change in the current issue of Science.

Diffenbaugh and Field, both senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, conducted the targeted but broad review of scientific literature on aspects of climate change that can affect ecosystems, and investigated how recent observations and projections for the next century compare to past events in Earth's history.

For instance, the planet experienced a 5 degree Celsius hike in temperature 20,000 years ago, as Earth emerged from the last ice age. This is a change comparable to the high-end of the projections for warming over the 20th and 21st centuries.

The geologic record shows that, 20,000 years ago, as the ice sheet that covered much of North America receded northward, plants and animals recolonized areas that had been under ice. As the climate continued to warm, those plants and animals moved northward, to cooler climes.

"We know from past changes that ecosystems have responded to a few degrees of global temperature change over thousands of years," said Diffenbaugh. "But the unprecedented trajectory that we're on now is forcing that change to occur over decades. That's orders of magnitude faster, and we're already seeing that some species are challenged by that rate of change."

Some of the strongest evidence for how the global climate system responds to high levels of carbon dioxide comes from paleoclimate studies. Fifty-five million years ago, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was elevated to a level comparable to today. The Arctic Ocean did not have ice in the summer, and nearby land was warm enough to support alligators and palm trees.

"There are two key differences for ecosystems in the coming decades compared with the geologic past," Diffenbaugh said. "One is the rapid pace of modern climate change. The other is that today there are multiple human stressors that were not present 55 million years ago, such as urbanization and air and water pollution."

Record-setting heat

Diffenbaugh and Field also reviewed results from two-dozen climate models to describe possible climate outcomes from present day to the end of the century. In general, extreme weather events, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall, are expected to become more severe and more frequent.

For example, the researchers note that, with continued emissions of greenhouse gases at the high end of the scenarios, annual temperatures over North America, Europe and East Asia will increase 2-4 degrees C by 2046-2065. With that amount of warming, the hottest summer of the last 20 years is expected to occur every other year, or even more frequently.

By the end of the century, should the current emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked, temperatures over the northern hemisphere will tip 5-6 degrees C warmer than today's averages. In this case, the hottest summer of the last 20 years becomes the new annual norm.

"It's not easy to intuit the exact impact from annual temperatures warming by 6 C," Diffenbaugh said. "But this would present a novel climate for most land areas. Given the impacts those kinds of seasons currently have on terrestrial forests, agriculture and human health, we'll likely see substantial stress from severely hot conditions."

The scientists also projected the velocity of climate change, defined as the distance per year that species of plants and animals would need to migrate to live in annual temperatures similar to current conditions. Around the world, including much of the United States, species face needing to move toward the poles or higher in the mountains by at least one kilometer per year. Many parts of the world face much larger changes.

The human element

Some climate changes will be unavoidable, because humans have already emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the atmosphere and oceans have already been heated.

"There is already some inertia in place," Diffenbaugh said. "If every new power plant or factory in the world produced zero emissions, we'd still see impact from the existing infrastructure, and from gases already released."

The more dramatic changes that could occur by the end of the century, however, are not written in stone. There are many human variables at play that could slow the pace and magnitude of change -- or accelerate it.

Consider the 2.5 billion people who lack access to modern energy resources. This energy poverty means they lack fundamental benefits for illumination, cooking and transportation, and they're more susceptible to extreme weather disasters. Increased energy access will improve their quality of life -- and in some cases their chances of survival -- but will increase global energy consumption and possibly hasten warming. More

 

Arctic Council: John Kerry steps into Arctic diplomacy

Three and half a months into his tenure as US secretary of state, John Kerry is grappling with war in Syria, tensions on the Korean peninsula and other crises. But on Tuesday, he takes a short break to dive into an issue in which he has long been interested - climate change.

John Kerry

Mr Kerry arrived in Stockholm and headed to Kiruna, Sweden's northernmost city, in the province of Lapland, for a meeting of the Arctic Council.

The council, founded in 1996, brings together eight nations with land above the Arctic Circle - Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US.

Mr Kerry, who held one of the first US Senate hearings on climate change as early as 1988 with then-Senator Al Gore, is hoping to put the spotlight on the issue of climate change again, after efforts to make concrete progress faltered during President Barack Obama's first term.

Despite a multitude of international crises, Mr Kerry insisted on attending the meeting of the once-obscure council.

Climate change has countries as far away as India also paying attention to the Arctic - and seeking observer status in the council. Melting polar ice is making mineral and oil resources easier to exploit, setting off a scramble for access. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that some 22% of the world's undiscovered oil and natural gas deposits were located above the Arctic Circle.

The warming climate also opens shipping routes that were once mostly inaccessible. The northern sea route would cut the distance between Shanghai and Europe by several thousands of miles, saving time and money.

China is courting Nordic countries, signing a trade agreement with Iceland and several commercial agreements with Denmark.

Greenland, a self-governing part of Denmark, is considering awarding mine exploration licenses to companies this year for a $2bn (£1.3bn) project north-east of the capital Nuuk.

One of those companies is London Mining, which would join a Chinese mining company in the project that could supply China with 15 million tonnes of iron ore a year.

China is one of 14 countries that have applied for observer status in the council, along with Japan, South Korea, India and others. Several European countries such as France and the Netherlands are already observers.

Observers do not participate in the decision-making process. But the Arctic's growing geopolitical significance allows countries with even a toehold in the small club - like China - to be closer to the action.

The council will consider the new applications during the Kiruna meeting and possibly come to a decision, which requires consensus. Canada and Russia are opposed, while the Nordic countries are in favour. More

 

Four energy policies can keep the 2 °C climate goal alive

Warning that the world is not on track to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, the International Energy Agency (IEA) today urged governments to swiftly enact four energy policies that would keep climate goals alive without harming economic growth.

“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in London at the launch of a World Energy OutlookSpecial Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map, which highlights the need for intensive action before 2020.

Noting that the energy sector accounts for around two-thirds of global greenhouse-gas emissions, she added: “This report shows that the path we are currently on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 °C and 5.3 °C but also finds that much more can be done to tackle energy-sector emissions without jeopardising economic growth, an important concern for many governments.”

New estimates for global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in 2012 reveal a 1.4% increase, reaching a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt), but also mask significant regional differences. In the United States, a switch from coal to gas in power generation helped reduce emissions by 200 million tonnes (Mt), bringing them back to the level of the mid‑1990s. China experienced the largest growth in CO₂ emissions (300 Mt), but the increase was one of the lowest it has seen in a decade, driven by the deployment of renewables and improvements in energy intensity. Despite increased coal use in some countries, emissions in Europe declined by 50 Mt. Emissions in Japan increased by 70 Mt.

The new IEA report presents the results of a 4-for-2 °C Scenario, in which four energy policies are selected that can deliver significant emissions reductions by 2020, rely only on existing technologies and have already been adopted successfully in several countries.

“We identify a set of proven measures that could stop the growth in global energy-related emissions by the end of this decade at no net economic cost,” said IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol, the report’s lead author. “Rapid and widespread adoption could act as a bridge to further action, buying precious time while international climate negotiations continue.”

In the 4-for-2°C Scenario, global energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions are 8% (3.1 Gt CO₂‑equivalent) lower in 2020 than the level otherwise expected.

• Targeted energy efficiency measures in buildings, industry and transport account for nearly half the emissions reduction in 2020, with the additional investment required being more than offset by reduced spending on fuel bills.
• Limiting the construction and use of the least-efficient coal-fired power plants delivers more than 20% of the emissions reduction and helps curb local air pollution. The share of power generation from renewables increases (from around 20% today to 27% in 2020), as does that from natural gas.
• Actions to halve expected methane (a potent greenhouse gas) releases into the atmosphere from the upstream oil and gas industry in 2020 provide 18% of the savings.
• Implementing a partial phase-out of fossil fuel consumption subsidies accounts for 12% of the reduction in emissions and supports efficiency efforts.

The report also finds that the energy sector is not immune from the physical impacts of climate change and must adapt. In mapping energy-system vulnerabilities, it identifies several sudden and destructive impacts, caused by extreme weather events, and other more gradual impacts, caused by changes to average temperature, sea level rise and shifting weather patterns. To improve the climate resilience of the energy system, it highlights governments’ role in encouraging prudent adaptation (alongside mitigation) and the need for industry to assess the risks and impacts as part of its investment decisions.

The financial implications of climate policies that would put the world on a 2 °C trajectory are not uniform across the energy sector. Net revenues for existing renewables-based and nuclear power plants increase by $1.8 trillion (in year-2011 dollars) collectively through to 2035, offsetting a similar decline from coal plants. No oil or gas field currently in production would need to shut down prematurely. Some fields yet to start production are not developed before 2035, meaning that around 5% to 6% of proven oil and gas reserves do not start to recover their exploration costs. Delaying the move to a 2 °C trajectory until 2020 would result in substantial additional costs to the energy sector and increase the risk of assets needing to be retired early, idled or retrofitted. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) can act as an asset protection strategy, reducing the risk of stranded assets and enabling more fossil fuel to be commercialised.

To download the WEO special report Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map, click here.

To read Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven's comments at the report's launch, please click here.

To see the presentation that accompanied the report's launch, please click here.

Accredited journalists who would like more information should contact ieapressoffice@iea.org.

About the IEA

The International Energy Agency is an autonomous organisation which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 28 member countries and beyond. Founded in response to the 1973/4 oil crisis, the IEA’s initial role was to help countries co-ordinate a collective response to major disruptions in oil supply through the release of emergency oil stocks to the markets. While this continues to be a key aspect of its work, the IEA has evolved and expanded. It is at the heart of global dialogue on energy, providing reliable and unbiased research, statistics, analysis and recommendations.

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Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map

 

A Moral Question

A Moral Question from Sustainable Man on Vimeo.

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Jeremy Grantham, environmental philanthropist: 'We're trying to buy time for the world to wake up'

You've probably never heard of him, and for years Jeremy Grantham liked it that way. But now the man who made billions by predicting every recent financial crisis is speaking out.

Jeremy Grantham

One icy morning in February, a train pulled into Washington DC. It was loaded with environmentalists planning to handcuff themselves to the gates of the White House, in protest at the building of a 3,500km oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Amid the hundreds of placard-carrying protesters stood a somewhat incongruous figure in a suit – Jeremy Grantham, a 74-year-old fund manager. "What we are trying to do is buy time," he told reporters. "Buy time for the world to wake up."

Grantham – who occupies a legendary place in the world of finance for predicting all the major stock market bubbles of recent decades (and doing very well in the process) – had decided, after 15 years of low-key environmental philanthropy, to, as he puts it, "walk the walk".

"I was committed to getting arrested," says Grantham, a tall, slight man, as he looks out across the City from his London office on the 15th floor of a glass-and-steel tower next to the Bank of England. He speaks machine gun-quickly in a soft, mid-Atlantic accent. "But the day before [the protest] my wife checked with the lawyer, who said, 'Don't do that!'" It turned out that being arrested would give him serious problems when it came to travelling. "I've had a green card since completing my MBA at Harvard in 1964."

Grantham, co-founder and chief strategist of GMO, a Boston-based global investment group, manages $106bn (£69bn) of assets on behalf of 1,000 institutional investors, and employs 600 people, so he decided that the fallout would be too great. He was forced to stand back and watch as his daughter Isabel got arrested, alongside the actor Daryl Hannah, the US's highest-profile environmentalist Bill McKibben, and Nasa climate scientist James Hansen.

So he is speaking out instead. From where he stands, this bubble, the "carbon bubble", is the biggest he's seen. "We're already in a bad place. The worst accidents are [only] 20, 30, 40 years from now." Such apocalyptic talk is often the preserve of deep-green doom-mongers – the kind of talk that has led many to reject environmentalism. But Grantham insists he's guided "by the facts alone". On some issues (immigration and education) he "would be considered rightwing", but with the environment, he says he calls it as he sees it. He is disdainful of those who ignore the data, or worse, misinform the public.

"I find the parallels between how some investors refuse to recognise trends, and our reaction to some of our environmental challenges, very powerful," he says. "There is an unwillingness to process unpleasant data. In a bull market you want to believe good news. You don't want to hear that the market is going to go off a cliff." He finds climate sceptics – led by a "little army of non-scientific, persuasive loony lords", as he characterises them (a barely disguised reference to the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson and Ukip's Lord Monckton, both of whom promote, to varying degrees, climate-sceptic views) – a frustrating ideological phenomenon. "They have profound beliefs – as opposed to knowledge – that they are willing to protect by all manner of psychological tricks. So you have people who are very smart – great analysts and hedge-fund managers – who on paper know that their argument is wrong, but who promote it fiercely because they are libertarians. Anyone with a brain knows that climate change needs governmental leadership, and they can smell this is bad news for their philosophy. They are using incredible ingenuity to steer their way around facts they do not choose to accept."

Grantham, who was born in Hertfordshire and raised by his Quaker grandparents in Doncaster, freely admits to being a "late arrival to all this". After completing a degree in economics at the University of Sheffield in the early 1960s, he worked for a short stint at Shell before going to Harvard for an MBA. In 1977, he co-founded GMO [Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo]. Making his clients – and himself – wealthy filled his working days until the mid-1990s. And then he went on holiday with his children, to the Amazon and Borneo. "And without thinking about it, you start talking about the logs along the side of the river and the lack of mature forests in Borneo." He smiles, seeing the risk of being accused of being driven by emotion rather than rigorous statistical analysis. "That played a role, but we didn't treat it as an epiphany."

And he didn't preach. For years he has remained, Oz-like, behind the curtain of the environmental movement. He has shunned in-depth interviews and expressed his views only in quarterly newsletters published on GMO's website, where he writes of long-term risk, climate change and dwindling resources – not just oil, coal and natural gas, but also phosphorus and potash, whose use in modern farming methods "must be drastically reduced in the next 20–40 years or poorer countries will begin to starve".

At the same time, he has poured an ever-larger amount of his personal wealth into his Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, which he runs, with family input (his children are trustees) and minimal staff, out of GMO's Boston headquarters. The foundation's latest tax filing shows that in 2011 he increased the fund's coffers by $46m (£30m), bringing the total to something approaching $400m (£260m), up from $106m in 2006. Ever the wise moneyman, he has largely reinvested this money, in order to guarantee the foundation's long-term security. But he also spends about $17m annually on his chosen causes, in the process becoming, according to one magazine, the "world's most powerful environmentalist".

Run your finger down the tax document and you see why. In 2011 alone, his foundation gave $1m to each of the leading US conservation charities, the Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy, as well as $2m to the Environmental Defense Fund, where his German-born wife Hannelore is a trustee and where Isabel has also worked. He is perhaps best known in the green world for funding the London School of Economics' Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment ($2.2m in 2011), and Imperial College London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change ($1.9m in 2011), but he funds climate researchers in India, too. He has written large cheques for the Carnegie Institute of Science, the Smithsonian, 350.org, WWF, Greenpeace and, keen to counter what he calls the "misinformation machine", funds environmental journalism at National Public Radio, the Center for Investigative Journalism, grist.org, Media Matters and the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. Until last year (when he decided investigative and environmental journalism was "dying out" due to cutbacks), he funded the world's most lucrative journalism award, the annual $80,000 Grantham prize for environmental reporting.

In the past few months, however, there has been a conspicuous gear-shift in his activities. In addition to being more outspoken, he intends to support new research initiatives, particularly into "avant garde, sustainable" farming techniques. He talks of a "hybrid" form of farming that takes the best of organic farming and the best from "Big Ag". He doesn't rule out "compromises" such as genetic modification, which some environmentalists will find hard to swallow.

Having said that, his interest isn't entirely selfless. "Fifteen years ago, we started a forestry division [at GMO] because I had fallen in love with land and trees, and because I realised it was a mispriced asset class. We have done extremely well in that sector, outperforming the benchmark for 15 years."

Many deep-greens – who claim the root cause for our environmental woes is the slavish quest for economic growth – will recoil at the thought of a hard-boiled capitalist such as Grantham underpinning so much of the environmental movement. He is unconcerned. "Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to. However, it is totally ill-equipped to deal with a small handful of issues. Unfortunately, they are the issues that are absolutely central to our long-term wellbeing and even survival."

More awkwardly, he insists his substantial investments in oil and gas don't contradict his green views. "We need oil. If we took oil away tomorrow, civilisation ends. We can burn all the cheap, high-quality oil and gas, but if we mean to burn all the coal and any appreciable percentage of the tar sands, or even third-derivative, energy-intensive oil and gas, with 'fracking' for shale gas on the boundary, then we're cooked, we're done for."

He does think there's some cause for hope. For example, "the business mathematics of alternative energy are changing much faster [than many people] realise." Looming carbon taxes ("hopefully, in the not-too-distant future"), coupled with the increasing affordability of alternative energy, will mean that coal and oil from tar sands run the "very substantial risk of being stranded assets". There there's the "amazing" fall in fertility rates across the world ("the absolute minimum hope of survival is a gracefully declining population").

 

What America Will Look Like Under 25 Feet Of Seawater

If climate models are correct, then Hurricane Sandy, and the flooding it brought, gave us a gentle preview of the not-so-distant future.

A recent NASA study found that between 1992 and 2012, global sea levels rose, on average, a little more than one inch each decade or about 3 millimeters per year. That's much faster than climatologists had expected.

See what could vanish when sea level rises >

The trend is not reversing.

Sea levels rise because of melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica as a result of warming temperatures. The ocean also expands as it warms.

Rising sea levels make coastal areas, particularly those with dense populations, much more vulnerable to heavy flooding.

The day when continents are overtaken by seawater may seem far off, but the threat is very real.

Nickolay Lamm, from StorageFront.com, wants the world to know just how real.

The artist and researcher created sea-level-rise maps depicting what major U.S. monuments would look like over the next century if we continue on a business-as-usual track.

You may have have seen Lamm's work featured on Business Insider before. He recently illustrated how to make Google Glass look fashionable and what the child of Prince William and Princess Catherine will look like all grown up.

For his sea level project, Lamm collaborated with Remik Ziemlinski, who did research and created sea level maps for "The New York Times."

Real-life scenes

The hypothetical scenes show icons like the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, and depict four levels of flooding at each: 0 feet (today); 5 feet (possible in 100 to 300 years); 12 feet (possible by about 2300); and 25 feet (possible in the coming centuries).

"I want people to look at these images and understand that the places they value most may very well be lost to future generations if climate change isn't a bigger priority on our minds," Lamm told Business Insider. "These illustrations are not based off wild Hollywood scenarios, but sea level rise maps from Climate Central."

An artist at work

Each scene took anywhere from five to 15 hours to create, said Lamm. First, Lamm had to find a stock photo which, according to the sea level rise maps generated by Ziemlinski, would be affected by extreme flooding in the future. Then he used Google Earth to figure out exactly where the photo was taken in order to be able to label the streets, roads, and pathways visible in the photo.

Using the sea level rise maps, Lamm estimated where the flooding would be in the stock photo.

He used topography maps to determine the correct depth of the flooding in each scene. All of this was drawn by hand in Photoshop using a physical pencil that translates the brush strokes to a touch sensitive surface, Lamm said.

In the following slideshow, each sea level rise map precedes the "real-world view." A white triangle in the maps represents where the "camera" is positioned in the illustrations. The blue shading represents the amount of sea level rise. After these maps are shown, we see what this camera is viewing in real life.

For Lamm, these haunting images are more than just a fun project. "We are trying to show that 'Space is Limited,' he said. "Not just for our personal belongings, but for the places in which we live."

See what could vanish when sea level rises > More