Bill Gates to invest $2bn in breakthrough renewable energy projects

[Source: The Guardian | 29th June 2015 by Emma Howard. Images: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images]

Bill Gates plans to double investment in green energy technology and research to combat climate change, but rejects calls to divest from fossil fuels

Bill Gates has announced he will invest $2bn (£1.3bn) in renewable technologies initiatives, but rejected calls to divest from the fossil fuel companies that are burning carbon at a rate that ignores international agreements to limit global warming.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Gates said that he would double his current investments in renewables over the next five years in a bid to “bend the curve” on tackling climate change.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, lead by Gates and his wife, is the world’s largest charitable foundation. According to the charity’s most recent tax filings in 2013, it currently has $1.4bn invested in fossil fuel companies, including BP, responsible for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In March, the Guardian launched a campaign calling on the Gates’ Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to divest from coal, oil and gas companies. More than 223,000 people have since signed up to the campaign.

Gates dismissed the calls of the fossil fuel divestment movement – which has already persuaded more than 220 institutions worldwide to divest – on the basis that it would have little impact.

Instead he said there was an urgent need for “high risk” investments in breakthrough technologies. He said that a “miracle” on the level of the invention of the automobile was necessary to avoid a climate catastrophe and that current renewables are not yet close to being able to meet projected energy needs by 2030.

Gates told the Financial Times that the only way current technology could reduce global emissions is at “a beyond astronomical cost” and that innovation is the only way to reach a positive scenario.

Between two-thirds and four-fifths of existing fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground if the world is to remain within a 2C rise in global temperatures, the level agreed on the international stage as necessary to avoid irreversible and catastrophic climate change.

Gates’ announcement comes as Christiana Figueres, who is leading the UN’s climate change negotiations, has written to the chief executives of six leading oil and gas companies asking them to show more ambition and thanking them for supporting December’s landmark climate change conference in December.

Her letter is a response to a call from the heads of the energy companies – Shell, BP, Eni, Statoil, Total and the BG group – to make gas and a strong carbon price a core part of global efforts to tackle climate change.