As World Leaders Launch Paris Climate Talks Monday, Bill Gates Will Launch a Supporting Science Push

Updated, Nov. 30, 12:01 a.m. | Here’s the White House announcement on “Mission Innovation” and Bill Gates’s explanation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition:

Original post | As world leaders meet in Paris on Monday to kick off two weeks of talks aimed at shaping safe targets for emissions of greenhouse gases, Bill Gates will be in town, as well, to announce a modest first step toward bolstering the basic energy research and technology development that will be needed to meet those targets affordably.

The gap between 179 countries’ modest, but creditable, emissions pledges so far and any reasonable trajectory toward avoiding dangerous climate change is huge, as I wrote recently. [The United Nations Environment Program has posted the full 2015 Emissions Gap Report here.] This is what that gap looks like:

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A portion of a graphic in a United Nations Environment Program report shows the gap between commitments for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions filed with the United Nations by the world's nations (the orange band) and a track (blue) deemed safe. The gray area reflects projections with no policy. Yellow is existing policies. Credit UNEP.org

Lisa Friedman had the scoop on Gates’s plans this morning on Greenwire, so please read her piece, which her editors kindly set up outside the (hefty) paywall there. Here’s the opener: 

Technology giant Bill Gates will unveil the world’s largest clean energy research and development partnership on Monday, joining in Paris with other billionaires and world leaders, several sources told ClimateWire.

The multibillion-dollar announcement will come at the opening day of landmark U.N. climate change negotiations in the French capital, and is expected to inject significant momentum to the talks.

According to government and business officials knowledgeable about the announcement, a group of developing and developed countries — including the United States and India — will agree to double their research and development budgets for clean energy and form a coalition to conduct joint work.

Gates and other billionaires, meanwhile, will pledge a pool of money to assist the cooperative projects. The exact spending amount was unclear yesterday, but one source put it in the billions of dollars.

“This is the single biggest cooperative research and development partnership in history,” the source said.

Of course there’s a sad irony in that last line because it shows just how underinvested the world’s major nations have been in sustaining the intellectual infrastructure generating basic insights that entrepreneurs like Elon Musk can then build into potentially transformative products.

Just look at the roots of any significant energy innovation now — from LED bulbs to, yes, fracking, and you see the same pattern leading back to the space race, Cold War or 1973 oil crisis.

Gates has for years been making the case for rebuilding the scientific and innovative capacity to have an affordable — and thus politically feasible — path toward a post-fossil global energy menu. For more on that click back to this Dot Earth piece: “Four Graphs Bolster Bill Gates’s Case for Greatly Boosting Clean-Energy Research.”

Here’s one of the four graphs I posted in that piece, with a bit of the accompanying explanation:

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Federal research and development spending on energy has always been a dribble compared to spending on health, space and other priorities (enlarge). Credit AAAS

What the graph shows is that RD&D investment is, in essence, a proxy for what a country cares about. Yellow was the space race, with basic RD&D spending approaching $30 billion a year (constant dollars). Blue is the war on cancer, reaching roughly the same level of spending. Green is energy science (all energy science, including how to get more fossil fuels out of the ground).

One other thing to note about the graph. It shows the bipartisan nature of our slumber party on energy. Ronald Reagan has been rightly blamed for pulling the plug, but no one ever since has plugged our energy-frontiers effort back in.

Keep at it, Bill.

Postscript, 5:20 p.m. | Here’s how I summarized things on Twitter;