THE Financial Times of December 23, 2015, wrote about philanthropy in our time. It describes the evolution of giving, from traditional endowments (charitable foundations) to for-profit networks (limited liability companies without tax privileges). The best example of the first category is the Rockefeller Foundation, a modern model of philanthropy, the best known being Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. An example of the second is the Omidyar Network used by eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar and followed by Steve Jobs’s widow and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
There are at present 1,826 billionaires in the world, controlling a total wealth of $7 trillion. Current charity outlays usually consist of one-off gifts to a cause or multiple causes. Several pioneering young philanthropists pursue a system-wide giving. An example is the case of Bill Gates and company, their collective giving goes to rescuing the environment.
Our planet Earth is facing serious risks within the lifetime of millions of Filipinos. United Nations scientists calculated that with current proposals, global temperatures would still rise 2.7oC by the end of the century—higher than the 2oC threshold above which scientists say spells irreversible global catastrophe and much higher still than the ambitious 1.5oC target set in the Paris Agreement. If humanity is to be rescued at all from falling off a “climate-change precipice,” nothing less than an audacious global effort to rapidly “decarbonize” economic development is needed.
That entails an urgent and costly transition to improved and more affordable clean-energy technologies, which, in turn, requires billions of investments in research and development (R&D) and deployment. The International Energy Agency (IEA) calculated that up to $51 billion a year should be invested in relevant R&D so that global warming can be kept below the 2oC threshold.
But as governments tighten belts around the world and are constrained from investing in clean-energy R&D, the private sector have come forward with some novel financing schemes for scientific innovation.
Bill Gates (cofounder of Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (cofounder of Facebook), Richard Branson (chairman of the Virgin Group), Jack Ma (chairman of Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon) and up to 23 other billionaires are doing just that. At the sidelines of COP 21, they launched the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which aims to invest billions of dollars over the next few decades in start-up clean-energy companies. Months before the announcement, Gates already committed $2 billion of his own money to accelerating R&D in zero-carbon energy.
Such initiatives follow a trend which a 2014 New York Times article described as the philanthropy of the new economy, where more of the rich become “patrons of social progress through science research.” This represents a dramatic expansion from previous notions of philanthropy as simple donations to charities. Extra emphasis is placed on spurring innovation, which the world direly needs right now to face down climate change.
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