Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and several other of the world’s wealthiest tech and business titans are banding together to fight climate change by investing billions in clean-energy research and technologies.
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Along with United States president Barack Obama and French president François Hollande, Gates launched Mission Innovation, a multination initiative, which aims to reinvigorate and accelerate public and private global clean energy innovation, with the hope of making clean energy widely affordable.
Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and philanthropist, will launch the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of 28 private investors who hail from Silicon Valley to South Africa, that will invest billions of dollars in “patient, flexible risk capital” to bring riskier new technologies to market.
The offer from Mr. Gates and others was part of a larger initiative with world governments that promised to double spending on renewable energy research. “And we’ll work to mobilize support to help the most vulnerable countries expand clean energy and adapt to the effects of climate change we can no longer avoid”.
The coalition includes names like Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Jack Ma, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla and Meg Whitman, among others and is expected to give a huge push to clean energy.
Twenty countries – including the U.S., China and India – have signed the pledge, which was announced in Paris alongside the Gates initiative.
The founders of Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have joined forces to invest in a massive clean energy initiative.
UC officials say global warming could be slowed dramatically by reducing greenhouse gases such as methane emissions by 50 percent and black carbon by 90 percent over the next 15 years.
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“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”, said the coalition in a statement. He added that he was “optimistic that we can invent the tools we need” to battle climate change while “providing energy to the world’s poor”. “And it would stabilize energy prices, which will have an even bigger impact on the global economy as more people come to rely on energy in their daily lives”.
