Profile: James Cameron
Cowardly, he calls them. Carbon finance guru James Cameron says that Australians who call themselves business leaders are simply protecting the status quo and protecting the value they have in the high-carbon economy.
“They do this as if there are no alternatives, as if they can’t afford to make the change. I don’t think that is leadership, that is cowardly.”
Lest Cameron’s words be read as the predictable warnings of yet another climate change warrior, it is important to point out that this is a businessman who has put considerable amounts of money where his mouth is.
James Cameron is an Executive Director and Climate Change Capital’s Vice Chairman. He is responsible for strategic and sector development and represents the firm at the highest levels of business and government.
James is a pre-eminent expert in developing policy responses to climate change. Prior to CCC he was Counsel to Baker & McKenzie and was the founder and the head of their Climate Change Practice.
James has spent much of his legal career working on climate change matters, including negotiating the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol as an adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States. He has held academic positions at Cambridge, London, Bruges and Sydney and is currently affiliated with the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy.

Here’s the story from PAOLA TOTARO for Business Day and The Age (24 October 2009):
JAMES Cameron is seated at the conference table in his company’s swish offices beside the Thames, smack bang opposite the architectural folly that is London’s Tower Bridge.
A key player in the feverish world of climate change politics, Cameron’s manner exudes the easy confidence of the Cambridge-educated international lawyer and the passion of a pioneering environmental activist.
Today, however, with the Copenhagen summit just around the corner, this Anglo-Australian is not in the mood to mince words: ”One of my difficulties is that Australian business people that call themselves business leaders are simply protecting the status quo and protecting the value they have in the high-carbon economy,” he says in his perfectly modulated lawyer’s voice.
“They do this as if there are no alternatives, as if they can’t afford to make the change. I don’t think that is leadership, that is cowardly.”
Lest Cameron’s words be read as the predictable warnings of yet another climate change warrior, it is important to point out that this is a businessman who has put considerable amounts of money where his mouth is.
He is founder and chairman of Climate Change Capital, a unique British financial house that specialises in investing in companies that combat global warming. Six years after its inception, CCC has £1.7 billion ($A3.05 billion) in funds under management, 130 staff and offices in China as well as the US.
Cameron argues that it is the world of business that can – and must – find innovative ways to help save the planet from climate change and that there is money, big money, to be made from backing ventures that are the forefront of forging solutions.
This long-standing personal conviction about the need for business-led solutions is reflected in the company’s credo, ”creating wealth worth having”, and saw him join forces six years ago with two like-minded fellow entrepreneurs – Briton Mark Woodall and an old friend, Gareth Hughes.
They launched CCC from nothing, raising money from others on a model that Cameron says is most akin to a 19th-century merchant bank. Now, six years on, CCC also offers strategic, financial and policy advice in its niche area to government and financial institutions raising and deploying capital for myriad low-carbon activities, from capturing coalmine methane in China to investment in clean technology businesses throughout Europe. Its most recent moves were a €10 million ($16.2 million) investment into the Italian solar company Enerqos, and just this week, Cameron sent a team to Australia to talk to super funds about the huge investment opportunities available in creating commercial property investment portfolios structured around ”clean, green, energy-efficient” buildings.
In Britain, he says, post-credit crunch property prices offer investment opportunities in premium buildings as well as older buildings ripe for retro-fitting. Once they are made energy efficient, clean and green, these office complexes become particularly attractive for long-term tenants such as government and municipal authorities that are themselves shifting to implement energy-efficiency targets.
“I am convinced that that strategy works anywhere in the world … there are many examples of buildings of high environmental quality sold at premium. But it works particularly well here in Britain right now – and I think Australian super funds will get it because there is probably more evidence of the value of green buildings in Australia than anywhere else in the world.”
Cameron’s long-term philosophical commitment to environmental protection stems from his time as a young academic lawyer working at Cambridge in the late 1980s. When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor sent a radioactive plume from the former Soviet Union over the Ukraine and then across northern Europe, for the first time satellite images recorded the effect of an environmental catastrophe that transcended national jurisdictions.
He and his fellow lawyers pondered new models of international law practice, writing a blueprint that would address the issues thrown up by Chernobyl, from human rights, trade, the international movement of money and environmental protection.
“By then, we had already started to organise our work around the environment and I did a piece of work with Greenpeace on whether the international court of justice could bring the US to task for failure to act on climate change. That was 1988. While the argument was sound and the evidence of serious societal risk posed by climate change was there, we argued that the best way to use the law and evidence was not to litigate but to negotiate an international agreement on climate change.” That led to a publication in the university’s Journal of International Lawin 1990 that argued for a protocol, ”the first in the legal literature”.
Then a legal adviser to Greenpeace and to the Alliance of Small States, Cameron says he will never forget the words of Margaret Thatcher at the second world climate conference in 1990.
“She was the only powerful world leader to turn out at that event and there, she said, in a phrase that remains etched in my mind: ‘The climate science is so clear, the need for international co-operation so obvious that we should not be squabbling over who pays for it.’ Was she a left-wing radical? No. Did she have a problem with featherbedding industries? No. She was a hard-edged politician who got the science and was decisive and didn’t faff about. Her and my politics were not the same. But I saw her negotiate first hand that night, all night and she out-negotiated the room. She was determined to get that agreement.”
He says that was the precursor that paved the way for the work that began in Chantilly, Virginia, outside Washington in February 1991 and was complete by May 1992.
“It shows what you can do in a year … I might need treatment if after Copenhagen the document looks like what we negotiated in 1992.”
Cameron’s palpable sense of civic responsibility is reflected in his familial history. His great-grandfather and namesake, James O’Grady, was governor of Tasmania in the wake of the World War I, appointed by the British government after negotiating the release by the Bolsheviks of the White Russians after the Russian Revolution. An Irish immigrant who entered British politics through the union movement, he was also a member of Britain’s first Labour government.
Cameron’s father, John, was born in Government House in Tasmania but moved to Western Australia, to a farm in the wheat belt bought by his parents. A passion for flying rather than farming led him to the RAAF and he was one of the pilots who defended Darwin from the Japanese in World War II. Shot down over the Timor Sea, he survived and led the RAAF fly-past over Perth to mark the end of the war. The family moved around a lot during his later career as a commercial pilot but when the marriage broke up, James moved back to London with his mother, Valerie, and went to boarding school. He returned to study law at the University of Western Australia, then later at University College London and finally to Cambridge.
A highly successful career in international law followed, one that included many high-profile cases including the arrest and extradition of Chile’s General Pinochet. Cameron believes that a global agreement in Copenhagen is important but warns that it should not be seen as the be-all and end-all. What is important is that all the measures already on the table are adhered to, that targets can be translated to domestic legislation and that there is policy continuity for those who have already invested or are about to plunge into the new carbon market.
In the shorter term, he believes that Australia has no excuse for objecting to a “significant price for carbon”. “As one of the most vulnerable nations on earth to climate change, Australia also happens to be lucky enough to have the level of capital resources available to fund the transition to a low-carbon economy. Importantly, too, he says, the continent has access to a plethora of natural resources that are either carbon free or lower carbon, including wind and solar powered energies.
“Here is the thing: Australia is not going to be a poor and unsuccessful economy by switching the recipe to lower carbon. It won’t lose its markets for gas and coal and oil in China tomorrow either. There is plenty of time to make the transition but you have to start now.”
He argues that the notion that Australia’s interests are any different to those of China can only be described as “absurd”: “China cannot afford to continue on its current growth path, does not have sufficient energy, cannot manage the pollution it already generates and does not have enough water to ensure it can feed its burgeoning middle classes.
China has no option but to use climate change as a stimulus for a lower carbon trajectory for its economy and it is doing that.”
Cameron concedes that it will be at least a decade and probably much longer before the massive economy of China is turned to a different course but is adamant that this is China’s long-term intention.
“Australia … shares the same risk profile on the fundamentals of water and energy but has greater scope, today at least, to fund the transition because it’s a wealthy successful economy.”
Source: www.businessday.com.au and www.climatechangecapital.com