Climate is a fundamental investment theme quickly filtering down through the ranks of the wealthy and far below the level of billionaires.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos just named the first recipients of his $10 billion climate fund. Elon Musk’s electric vehicle and renewable energy company Tesla is poised to become the largest company ever added to the S&P 500. At its current market cap, Tesla is bigger than the five largest companies in the S&P 500 energy sub-sector combined. But the attention that the world’s wealthy are paying to climate change is far more widespread than just at the level of the market’s billionaires. There is a saying that you should keep your politics out of your pocketbook, and that is increasingly the case for wealthy investors when the issue is climate change. They are looking at the numbers and see an investing imperative rather than point of divisive debate.

Michael Sonnenfeldt, the entrepreneur who heads Tiger 21, an investment club for the ultra-wealthy, has spent a lot of time over the years at his alma mater, working with the MIT Sloan Management School and climate modelers on the Climate Pathways project, which he helped found. One of its primary goals is to demonstrate to bipartisan elected officials and business leaders what climate data means in terms of real-life consequences.

After the past few years working with the MIT climate project, and showing the data to many elected officials on both sides of the aisle, Sonnenfeldt said it became clear the models were not just showing climatology, but identifying where major opportunity sets exist in the investment world. “It became clear to me, there are real opportunity sets around climate, whether you believe in it or not.”

Source: CNBC