Britain's Billionaire Enviro-Philanthropist Outs People Like Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau

Fund manager, Harvard MBA, billionaire - we've become all too familiar with the type.  But British-born Jeremy Grantham is best known for predicting all the major economic bubbles in recent decades and making a fortune on them.   Now he's speaking out about the most dangerous bubble of them all - the Carbon Bubble - and he's putting his money to work to fight it.   His mission, as he puts it, "What we are trying to do is buy time. Buy time for the world to wake up."

Grantham describes a form of high-finance mental illness of the sort that seems to infect our own prime minister and his minions.

"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 then proceeded to give our prime minister, along with Mulcair and Trudeau, a big Athabasca black eye.

...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."

So, all you supposedly progressive New Dems and Libs, did you get that?   Your parties, with their open support for bitumen peddling, are essentially nihilistic.  They've embraced the very same mental illness that guides our prime minister.

While Canada is governed by parties led by enviro-mental defectives, Grantham sees hope in, of all places, the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, China.

"I have very high hopes for China because they have embedded high scientific capabilities in their leadership class. They know this is serious. And they are acting much faster now than we are. They have it within their capabilities to come back in 30 years with the guarantee of complete energy independence – all alternative and sustainable for ever. They have an embarrassment of capital. We have an embarrassment of debt. So they can set a stunning pace, which they are doing. And they could crank it up. To hell with their five-year plans, they should move up to 25-year plans. They would have such low-cost energy at the end of it they'd be the terror of the capitalist system. Low energy and low labour, that's the ball game."

You can find the raw interview here.