As the news of Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobile CEO, being appointed as the Secretary of State comes, hope about making inroads in the cause of climate change has certainly dipped. But it seems like it will take one billionaire to trump another, as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has announced a fund of over $1 billion to fight climate change using the Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
The BEV was found by 19 tech giants at the Paris Climate Conference, in a bid to invest in clean energy technologies around the globe while reducing greenhouse gas emissions in electricity, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and buildings. The fund has been created for the next 20 years and will focus on clean energy startups in any part of their journey, from seed money to commercialisation.
Gates wrote in a post on his Gates Notes blog.
“We need affordable and reliable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gas to power the future — and to get it, we need a different model for investing in good ideas and moving them from the lab to the market.”
The BEV venture has a combined worth of nearly $170 billion. The directors of BEV include; Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, CEO of Bloomberg LP; Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group; Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise; Tom Steyer, president of NextGen Climate and Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan, CEO of The Primary School.
Gates revealed earlier this year in an interview with MIT Technology Review that the clean energy fund is aimed at achieving net-zero carbon emissions at least in the developed world by 2050.