Recently 28 wealthy businesspeople and University of California made headlines when they unveiled their Breakthrough Energy Coalition to take on climate change through technology research and funding. Announced at Cop21, the UN Climate Change Conference held in Paris, the coalition is led by Bill Gates, founder of software company Microsoft and one of the trustees of the philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Breakthrough Energy’s website states that “the existing system of basic research, clean energy investment, regulatory frameworks and subsidies fails to sufficiently mobilise investment in truly transformative energy solutions for the future”.
Recognising that the world cannot wait for the system to change through normal cycles, the coalition reunites businesspeople, such as Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of e-commerce company Amazon, Marc Benioff, founder, CEO and chairman of cloud computing firm Salesforce, and Meg Whitman, CEO of IT infrastructure services provider Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Although the members of Breakthrough Energy Coalition have a collective wealth of more than $350bn, they understand that they are unable to provoke change on their own.
As politicians gathered in the French capital to discuss how to tackle global warming, it remained unclear whether the world’s leaders would agree to make any deal legally binding. A pick-and-mix scenario, where the world’s richest nations would again choose not to take up their fair share of work, could prove disastrous for poorer countries in the not-too-distant future. In fact, countries such as Republic of the Marshall Islands are already experiencing constant flooding and face the danger of being entirely submerged.
Gates, in a blog post, wrote: “The renewable technologies we have today, like wind and solar, have made a lot of progress and could be one path to a zero-carbon energy future. But given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths – and that means we also need to invent new approaches. Private companies will ultimately develop these energy breakthroughs, but their work will rely on the kind of basic research that only governments can fund. Both have a role to play.”
Indeed, Gates also announced his initiative Mission Innovation at the Paris summit, a commitment by 20 countries to double research funding into clean energy. The list of countries features the US and China. Many, though not all, European nations have also joined the initiative, while the most notable country missing is Russia. Mission Innovation and Breakthrough Energy will work closely together.
The billionaires will invest in a fund to back startups in the electricity generation, storage and efficiency, transportation, industrial and agriculture sectors. The fund has no target, though Gates was confirmed by news publication Forbes as planning to invest $1bn over the next five years.
Similarly, University of California has also committed to invest $1bn and an additional $250m to fund its own spinouts focused on clean energy. The remaining backers are expected to provide a combined total of at least $1bn.
Gates has shown himself hopeful that his initiative will succeed, telling news provider CNN: “All these things that enable the modern lifestyle are very energy intensive. [Five years from now] I see the price of energy actually being lower than today, and that is for clean energy.”
Janet Napolitano, president of University of California and a former US Secretary of Homeland Security, noted: “With access to the private capital represented by investors in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, we can more effectively integrate our public research pipeline to deliver new technology and insights that will revolutionise the way the world thinks about and uses energy.”
Napolitano is no stranger to such commitments, having launched the university’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative in 2013 to make all the institution’s 10 campuses fully carbon neutral by 2025.
It was good to see some form an agreement emerge in Paris, and it is certainly a relief to see private individuals and academia pushing politicians towards change.