The source of Napier’s value as an environmental leader, Ward added, was his ability to see industry as an opportunity, not a threat, which allowed WWF to foster “ethical partnerships that brought not just financial benefits but changes in working practices and attitudes, too.”

The environmentalist community, of course, did not exactly give Napier the warmest of welcomes when he was appointed in 1999. Traditionalists could not get past the fact that he was a former Rio Tinto mining executive who didn’t despise the corporate sector.

After Napier took charge at WWF-UK, celebrated British activist and occasional Corporate Knights contributor George Monbiot raised the alarm over a “corresponding decline in the radical content of the organization’s work.”

Environmental groups, Monbiot argued in The Ecologist, should never get into bed with business people because fiduciary duty forces them to pursue “the most unsustainable development they can get away with.”

Since then, the environmental landscape has shifted dramatically. So-called “dark greens” like Monbiot continue to play an influential role confronting evil as they see it. But like it or not, they are now surrounded by “bright greens,” meaning business-friendly earth lovers like Napier.

Indeed, as Yale environmental management grad Ben Goldfarb points out, “the stereotype of the conservationist hurling himself between the whale and the harpoon is increasingly anachronistic and so too is the image of courageous litigators taking down evil polluters.” For better or worse, he wrote in a Guardian column earlier this year, the “modern environmentalist is more likely to partner with a chemical company than prosecute one.”

That might be a stretch. Nevertheless, the shifting landscape has had a profound impact on today’s environmental organizations, which are nothing like your grandparents’ NGOs.

Forget tree-hugging liberal arts grads sporting ponytails. Thanks to bright green thinking, international environmental organizations are now stocked with MBAs, lawyers, engineers and professional policy wonks. Determined to use their expertise to help clean up capitalism, they jump back and forth between environmental organizations and the private sector.

Believe it or not, it is now even relatively common for environmentalists to work corporate assignments while still at NGOs. In Canada, for example, Pembina Institute, a non-profit focused on sustainable energy solutions, generates a significant proportion of its revenue from a for-profit consulting arm, which has a client portfolio ranging from Albertan oil plays to Bay Street financial institutions.

As an early adopter of this semi-business business model, you might expect Calgary-based Pembina to have been ostracized by its peers. But according to former Pembina executive director Marlo Raynolds, now a private sector executive with renewable-energy developer BluEarth Renewables, the organization was flooded with requests to assist other NGOs in figuring out how to make some green by helping corporations reduce their carbon footprints and develop sustainable practices.

College of the Atlantic president Darron Collins, a former WWF managing director who worked with global retailers such as WalMart to reform procurement policies, says the rising tide of business-friendly environmentalists stems from a realization in the 1980s that activists and scientists alone can’t solve the world’s problems.

“It didn’t take that long to recognize that the private sector is the ultimate driver of change,” Collins says, noting he was attracted to the WWF as a young anthropology PhD precisely because of its willingness to work with the corporate world. “I always believed that if you are not playing with the private sector, you are not going to effect change.”

Not everyone, of course, has noticed the growing environmentalist appreciation for the suit-and-tie crowd. Earlier this year, Joe Oliver, Canada’s natural resources minister, generalized environmentalists as left-leaning activists with one goal: “No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.” The sheer ignorance of that comment almost makes bright greens laugh.

“I am a radical,” jokes Mark Tercek, head of The Nature Conservancy, America’s largest environmental group, which seeks non-confrontational, market-based solutions to conservation challenges. “After all, I am willing to work with the other side.”

Tercek, a former partner at investment bank Goldman Sachs, wrote the bookNature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature to promote even closer relationships between bright greens and the corporate world. Under his leadership, The Nature Conservancy passionately pursues working with companies such as Dow Chemical to incorporate the value of nature into corporate goals, strategies and business objectives.

Bruce Lourie, president of Canada’s Ivey Foundation, which also takes a pragmatic approach to conservation, realized about 20 years ago that NGOs had to reinvent themselves. After launching a consulting company to build relationships among government, the private sector and environmental organizations, he was surprised to learn that young people joining his company had no interest in working for traditional NGOs, which were seen as “so 1970s.”

These were smart individuals determined to change the world, he says, “but they thought the best way to do that was by working with the corporate sector.” Lourie blames misconceptions about modern environmental organizations on the media. “One of the big frustrations we have is a lack of balanced reporting. You can have a thousand scientists say climate change is real and reporters seek out ones who say it isn’t, or they take extreme views and write a confrontation story.”

As part of its Conserving Canada’s Forests Program, Ivey was a major driver of the coalition building that led to the landmark Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA) in 2010. The deal was a historic truce between 21 members of the Forest Products Association of Canada and nine environmental organizations, who agreed to work together on a comprehensive set of goals and activities designed to make Canada the world’s leading jurisdiction in forest sustainability.

But it was just one initiative supported by Ivey’s program, which helped create more than 2,500 new parks or protected areas covering 60 million hectares as well as increase the number of hectares certified by the Forest Stewardship Council by 5,130 per cent. And yet, media coverage has pretty much focused on Greenpeace’s decision to opt out of the CBFA, despite the fact that other environmental groups are still cooperating with industry on the initiative.

“Environmental confrontations make good stories,” Lourie says, “but focusing on them doesn’t provide an accurate account of what’s happening.”

Dark greens see pragmatic environmentalists as stooges who naively put themselves at risk of being used for green-washing purposes. But Collins insists there is really nothing to lose being “cautiously optimistic that cooperative relationships will do more good in the long run.”

And as far as Tercek is concerned, building trusting relationships with the private sector is the only way to address big, critical and complex issues. He simply does not see the value in deploying scare tactics to push for blanket bans on existing industry practices such as hydraulic fracturing without first exploring possible solutions that are not at odds with economic growth.

“I have tremendous respect for everyone in the environmental movement,” Tercek says. “But we all say we are driven by science and the facts tell us the job is not getting done. We have less forest, fewer coral reefs, less topsoil and biodiversity, more greenhouse gases. So something is wrong. The old fashioned way of doing environmental work is insufficient to the challenge.”

While bad corporate apples will always exist, the bright greens point out that there’s nothing about fiduciary duties that forces business people to support unsustainable practices, especially today. A trash-the-earth culture also makes recruiting and retaining good people difficult while putting companies at risk of revenue disruption and reputation destruction, which executives have a duty to prevent.

Furthermore, as global warming concerns among consumers increase, Tercek insists responsible companies will gain an ever-increasing competitive advantage. “People are smart,” he says. “If you live in New York or New Jersey, you understand risks that storms like Sandy pose. People in areas suffering from floods or droughts right now don’t need environmentalists to tell them they have a problem.”

When Monbiot dismissed Napier’s value as an environmentalist because of his business experience, Jonathon Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future, a UK-based non-profit that works with business and government to create a sustainable future, offered a rebuttal. Simply put, he argued Mother Nature could not afford a single-minded environmental movement committed to just “the easy option,” which he described as looking down with moral superiority on the corporate world, secure in the absolutist view “that multinationals are the principal engine of environmental destruction, that the individuals who work for those companies are amoral, incapable of being influenced by cogent analysis or moved by fears for their own children, and that those who work with them must by definition be morally inadequate and politically compromised.”

Today, with the window to address climate change closing, Porritt firmly stands by his position. “We have no choice,” he says, “but to find the most intelligent and robust ways of working with the private sector. Given that the quality of leadership in the private sector is, in my opinion, infinitely greater than the quality of leadership in the political sector, it would be insane not to try and make those relationships work.”

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With all due respect to Superman fans, when it comes to visibility and popularity, not to mention style, the alien in embarrassing tights can’t hold a candle to Tony Stark and his rocket-powered armoured suit.

But don’t blame Hollywood’s The Avengers franchise. Iron Man has always had a weapon the Man of Steel can’t match. Superman spends most of his time hiding behind glasses as Clark Kent, toiling away for chump change at a daily newspaper. Even if he can type faster than a speeding bullet, story meetings and research eat away at his time as a superhero. As a billionaire industrialist, Tony Stark never worries about deadlines or pleasing a boss. In other words, even when not in character, Iron Man can tackle the planet’s troubles while Superman is stuck simply writing about the world’s woes.

Money is as powerful as good intentions. But fear of losing it typically scares business people off Hail Mary save-the-world projects, unless they are like billionaire Elon Musk, who inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s version of Stark in the Iron Man movies. As one of the co-founders of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.6 billion in 2002, Musk obviously sees value in money. But he still swings for the fences as head of electric car maker Tesla Motors and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a private-sector version of NASA, because he is determined to solve sustainable energy production and make humankind a multi-planetary species. “We need more comic book-style billionaires,” tweeted a Musk fan in mid-2012 after Tesla announced it was ready to begin delivering its Model S luxury electric cars, and SpaceX made history as the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station. True enough.

As the International Energy Agency recently noted, the goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius might already be a pipe dream. And yet, politicians around the world remain focused on financial issues. Even if the global economy somehow experiences relatively smooth sailing over the next four years, the International Monetary Fund estimates the debt-to-GDP ratio of every G7 economy will remain higher than before the financial crisis. As the Bridgespan Group recently noted, “we are now in a period in which advocating to increase spending in one area entails decreasing it in others or raising taxes to pay for more government. So advocacy to expand the role of government and government spending is becoming a zero-sum game.”

Meanwhile, the financial crisis forced a pullback in individual giving in 2011. “The outcome of falling donations is clear,” warns the most recent World Giving Index. “It means less aid during disasters, less access to good hygiene and decent housing, and a reduced capacity to care for the sick, the old and young. Ultimately, it means a worsening quality of life for millions.”

Musk isn’t the only planet champion from cyberspace. Peter Thiel, another PayPal cofounder, funds Breakout Labs, a venture capital program targeting radical ideas that could make the world a better place (click here for more on Breakout Labs). Twitter co-founder Evan Williams supports The Climate Group, a not-for-profit organization calling for a massive scale-up of clean energy and infrastructure.

According to Olivia Fox Cabane, an executive coach and author of The Charisma Myth, impact investing is all the rage in Silicon Valley, where, “money per se doesn’t really mean that much anymore.” Musk isn’t even the only green billionaire to influence a comic book hero. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson would obviously make a good British Batman since he is often seen flying through the air, or across water, in high-tech crafts. Branson has also been known to jump off tall buildings. But as IGN Entertainment reports, it was his efforts to battle CO2 emissions that convinced producers of the soon-to-be-released animated series Beware the Batman to use him as a model to make Bruce Wayne more “of an altruistic guy.”

Matching other enlightened billionaires to comic book heroes isn’t hard. Warren Worthington III, the fictional winged billionaire known as Angel (and later Archangel), has nothing on former eBay president Jeff Skoll. After all, the dot-com legend flies high above other philanthropists for being one of the relative few individuals to have donated more than $1 billion in their lifetimes. And like Angel, who used his fortune to finance superhero ventures like the X-Men, Skoll supports peace on earth by funding social entrepreneurship and producing edifying movies such as An Inconvenient Truth.

What about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a heavy-hitting philanthropist who advocates fighting carbon emissions via efficiency makeovers for urban buildings? Unlike comic book billionaire Oliver Queen, aka the Green Arrow, Bloomberg isn’t into market manipulation. But as founder of a financial services empire, he is obviously into trading stocks. And like Queen, who was mayor of the fictional Star City, Bloomberg is a progressive politician known for shooting verbal arrows. After witnessing the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, for example, he issued the following call to action: “Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week’s devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”

The problem, of course, is that there are more superheroes in comic book land than mega-billionaires who focus their time and philanthropy on environmental and social issues in the real world. As things stand, wealthy good guys (and gals) could easily increase their influence, insists Matthew Kiernan, author of Investing in a Sustainable World and chief executive of Inflection Point Capital Management, which aims to redirect investment flows to promote, rather than undermine, “the necessary global transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable economy.” To increase their powers, Kiernan says the wealthy simply need to stop listening to old-school financial advisors who ignore (or remain woefully unaware of) the real positive returns that can be made via green investing and force charitable foundations to invest their capital as though they were run by the oil and gas industry’s David and Charles Koch. “I’ve long thought that the poor, downtrodden Rockefellers and their ilk need to be liberated from the yoke of capitalist oppression,” says Kiernan, who, not so playfully, thinks the world needs a Billionaires Liberation Organization to educate well-heeled do-gooders on how to make better use of their “dead money.”

But billionaire superheroes are needed for more than just their money. As Leon Black noted at a Forbes-sponsored gathering of 161 billionaires and
near-billionaires in September, “people are on The Forbes 400 because they are tenacious problem solvers.” Furthermore, as pointed out by Tzeporah Berman, eco-activist and author of This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge, the real power of super-rich individuals is the ability to counter lobby groups that maintain the unsustainable status quo. “T. Boone Pickens,” she notes, “came out a couple of years ago saying, ‘Look, I think the future is in wind,’ and it had a huge impact, quite frankly, on wind investments.” When Bloomberg announced his $50-million contribution to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, she adds, his words were at least as beneficial as his donation. “Bloomberg stood on a podium and said, ‘We need to see the end of coal because coal kills.’ That had a huge influence.”

However, while the superheroes of capitalism have their moments, Berman argues they almost appear to take it for granted that standalone initiatives can somehow overcome global challenges, not to mention a better organized and more focused opposition. “The sad thing is that we haven’t seen major progressive corporations from cleantech or the IT industry or billionaire philanthropists step up and coordinate themselves into a progressive and persistent lobby to support significant pieces of legislation or international deals in the same way that has been done by the fossil fuel industry.”

Political activist Ralph Nader couldn’t agree more. He says there is no question that the world needs more billionaires like San Francisco hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, a cleantech investor. Steyer led a campaign that blocked Justin Hammer-like efforts by the Koch brothers to roll back California’s greenhouse-gas emissions law and bankrolled the push for legislation that will help finance energy-efficiency and clean-energy projects with funds gained by closing a corporate tax loophole. But what Nader thinks the world really needs is a Justice League-style group of billionaires dedicated to institutionalizing public interests and empowering the people.

Like comic hero Nick Fury, who organized the Avengers “to bring together a group of remarkable people, so when we needed them, they could fight
the battles that we never could,” Nader has tried to get billionaires to join forces to fight the good fight. In 2009, he published Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, a roadmap for progressive change in America. In it, a fictional version of Warren Buffett is moved by the political paralysis that followed Hurricane Katrina to join forces with other super-rich individuals (and a few well-heeled celebrities) to take on the special interests and political dysfunction that stand in the way of making America a more just and sustainable nation.

The 735-page book didn’t have the impact Nader hoped. In fact, he doubts it was read by many members of his fictional dream team. Shortly after the book was published, however, Buffett and Bill Gates launched the Giving Pledge, an effort to get billionaires to commit to giving away at least 50 per cent of their wealth before or upon death. Gates and Buffett also host dinners so pledge members can exchange ideas. Nader gives credit where it is due. “At least now they are gathering,” he says. Unfortunately, he adds, what gets exchanged at group gatherings “are basically soft philanthropic preferences. As one billionaire stated, ‘We all know how to make a lot of money, but we don’t have a clue how to spend it.’ ”

By and large, Nader argues the Giving Pledge is still mostly “about charity, not shift-of-power advocacy for justice” because it has no criteria and lacks a mechanism for members to meet with movers and shakers at the grassroots level, where solutions are waiting to be backed. “We still need the super-rich to step up and empower the people,” he says, noting gatekeepers and ill-informed advisors are just part of the challenge. “The enlightened rich really don’t want to work together. Like many progressive groups, they are competitive. They don’t read each other’s books. They don’t collaborate. They don’t engage in mutual support. As a result, they weaken themselves.”

The good news, Nader says, is that it just takes one billionaire organizer to show what can be done. He thinks a senior citizen is required because young billionaires tend to lack perspective. And since he recalls Ted Turner failing to get a response when trying to create a coordinated billionaire group years ago, Nader thinks Canada might be a better bet for the first formation of a “Billionaire League of Justice.” Musk was born to a Canadian mother and Skoll is full-blown Canuck, so Iron Man and Archangel could be on the team.

As for a grey-haired leader, well, as luck would have it, Buffett wasn’t the billionaire credited with doing the most to shore up America’s leaking trust in capitalist society in the wake of Katrina. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, that honour goes to Austrian-Canadian Frank Stronach, whose generosity “shames us,” the paper said. After watching lame rescue efforts by U.S. authorities, the retired founder of the Magna International auto-parts empire sent a private-sector team to rescue hundreds of Lower 9th Ward residents while he rallied Canadian businesses to supply aid. Stronach then offered storm victims five years of rent-free accommodations in Canadaville, a new town built from scratch in central Louisiana that provided its original residents with counselling and job training and now serves as a disaster facility.

Stronach, who is currently trying to save Austria from the euro, isn’t known to work well with peers. But leading a group of superhero billionaires would probably appeal to the self-proclaimed philosopher king’s ego.

And who, after all, cares if ego is the driving motivation. To quote one line from The Dark Knight Rises, any “save-the-world project, vain or not, is worth investing in.”

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