Apocalypse Soon

Hedge fund visionary Robert Gibbins is betting that climate change will change everything soon— and he has $5.5 billion on the line.

- Nathan Vardi

Since November, Robert Gibbins has crisscrossed the globe attending scientific conferences, traveling from his home in Geneva, Switzerland, to Arizona, Spain and Austria. The events had a common theme—climate change—and were well attended by academics, bureaucrats and politicians. One group was conspicuously absent. “I didn’t see any other investors there,” he says.

That boggles his mind. “Climate change is something we have to include in every single analysis, every investment,” he says. Most people think—or hope—that global warming is something their children or grandchildren will have to reckon with. Gibbins disagrees. The 49-year-old founder of Autonomy Capital ($5.5 billion in assets) thinks that climate change is happening suddenly and soon.

He structures every bet his hedge fund makes around his belief that the world is skidding toward a future that’s overheated and underwater—and that carbon will be treated as a costly waste product that needs to be captured and stored. Gibbins has already made good money betting on European carbon-futures contracts and expects richer plays to come.