Super-rich warmist Jeremy Grantham: Skeptics are allegedly led by a "little army of non-scientific, persuasive loony lords"; he's got nearly $400 million to fight their alleged "misinformation machine"; also, he recently became a fan of the oil and gas companies

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

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..."
...
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 around $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.
...
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."

Tom Nelson: Epic cage match: Planet-healing warmist Jeremy Grantham versus super-evil, greedy planet-destroying fossil fuel investors like Jeremy Grantham

[2011] Grantham has become a fan of the oil & gas companies