New Coalition will Invest in Clean Energy

Zuckerberg announced the launch of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition on his Facebook page Sunday evening, ahead of this week’s COP21 climate change conference in Paris, where world leaders aim to reach an agreement on limiting the rise in global temperatures. We can’t wait for the system to change through normal cycles.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are joining forces with other prominent tech figures to tackle the problem of renewable energy.

According to Climate Action, the research project “will direct seed financing into innovative ideas that have been rejected by the energy sector”.

“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 revolutionize the way the world thinks about and uses energy”.

As these two clean energy initiatives demonstrate and those to be announced through the Action Agenda in the coming days only reinforce, the transition to a clean energy future is accelerating and coming up fast.

Zuckerberg, together with wife Priscilla Chan, partnered with Gates to launch the campaign to try to achieve a zero-carbon energy technology.

The summit is a meeting of many nations, including the U.S., China and India, in an attempt to kick-start clean energy initiatives and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

The initiative will require countries to commit to doubling their clean energy technology research and development budgets by 2020. 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 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”.

Members of the coalition include Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and Alibaba Group executive chairman Jack Ma, among others. Mission Innovation’s goal is to boost the collective annual spending on energy research to $20 billion, up from $10 billion.