Wealthy friends of Earth

As British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched their new pact on global warming in Los Angeles last week, they were watched by a man in a grey T-shirt with a solar-panelled rucksack at his feet.

Instead of being collared by secret service agents as an eco-protester, he was invited on-stage for a photo-call. But then this was Sergey Brin, the Russian-born entrepreneur and co-founder of Google who has made US$11 billion ($17.5 billion) from the internet search engine. The rucksack that powers his phone and MP3 player is just one of his latest investments.

Brin, 32, is typical of the new breed of wealthy, powerful tycoons piling into environmental issues - including media moguls, nightclub owners, hoteliers and property barons. The dollars they have in vast quantities are known to Americans as greenbacks. That's why the new rich greens are being called the Greenback Pack.

Perhaps the most quietly influential member of this set is James Murdoch, 33, the son of the global media magnate Rupert Murdoch and the chief executive of satellite broadcaster BSkyB. He has made Sky "carbon neutral" by using renewable energy for its power, cutting electricity use and air travel, and rewarding staff who switch to bicycles, buy green "hybrid" cars and install low-energy bulbs at home. Sky executives claim that he wants to spread this message to Sky's eight million subscribers.

He persuaded his father to screen Al Gore's acclaimed film on climate change to News Corporation executives at their annual summit in Pebble Beach, California.

Last week, the Sun newspaper in London announced its conversion to the green cause with two dramatic pieces warning about climate change. The paper's 8.5 million readers were urged to watch Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, branded as "more hair-raising than any Hollywood horror".

Tony Juniper, the director of Friends of the Earth, said this marked a "high-water mark" for the green movement. "I've lived and worked through several green waves ... But this time it's a bit different with the depth and seriousness of the things now going on."

Britain's Greenbacks include Zac Goldsmith, the millionaire editor of The Ecologist and wannabe Tory MP. Many of them have been on a farm near Bristol for the annual Big Green Gathering. The festival is on the new green society circuit, on which charity raffles are held at exclusive Christmas parties to raise funds to promote organic farming. Names such as Pink Floyd's David Gilmour turn up at FoE rallies; and the music Svengali Malcolm McLaren pops into Soil Association events.

Goldsmith - the son of the maverick tycoon Sir Jimmy Goldsmith and the nephew of one of Britain's most charismatic early environmentalists, the founder of The Ecologist, Teddy Goldsmith - is at the centre of the network of elite greens. It includes Elizabeth Hurley, who is converting her 160ha farm in the Cotswolds to organic production and has mused about launching an organic baby-food range.

Donna Air, a former actress and TV presenter, is also in the set, together with her husband, Damian Aspinall, scion of the Aspinall zoo-owning family. Air, a supporter of Fairtrade produce, is the "face" of this year's Soil Association Organic Food Fortnight.

Another prominent member is Robin Birley, 47, the owner of Annabel's and four other exclusive London clubs. Birley, who is Zac Goldsmith's half-brother, remembers watching the first edition of The Ecologist running off the presses in the early 1970s.

He runs environmental projects in Africa and five years ago launched an EU-funded programme costing some £500,000 a year to support ecologically sound farming and forestry in Mozambique. It offers polluting companies the chance to "offset" their damaging release of global warming gases by supporting these farming and forestry projects - a system known as "carbon trading".

Birley helped to launch a "green" lobbying outfit, Consensus Environmental Group, with a friend, the Iranian property developer and Hilton hotels owner, Vincent Tchenguiz, last month.

Birley says the rise in green awareness among his friends was sincere. Its catalyst was "unquestionably" global warming. "I think people are now aware of it. They know that they're contributing to it. It's something where people can do things on an individual basis. I think there's been a complete and utter sea-change."

Other tycoons and industrialists are bidding hard to establish their green credentials. Sir Richard Branson, always one to smell a trend, wants to establish Virgin airline as the first to be powered by greener biofuels.

Being green - and loaded - is most definitely in.

- INDEPENDENT