PD Editorial: Investing in clean energy

Bill Gates, Meg Whitman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. They need no introduction. Neither do most of their partners in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

The clean-energy investment group, unveiled Monday in Paris, ensures that the United Nations Climate Conference will produce at least one substantial breakthrough.

It’s likely to be another week before anyone knows whether world leaders can reach a binding accord to control, and perhaps reduce, greenhouse gas emissions before it’s too late to prevent a global catastrophe in the second half of this century.

Even a watershed agreement would require a focused effort to develop and market viable alternatives to burning fossil fuels. That’s the goal of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

Gates has pledged $2 billion of his own fortune for clean energy, and, speaking Monday in Paris, he indicated that the investment group will pump several billion dollars into research and development. That augments a commitment by 20 countries participating in the U.N. conference, including the United States, China and India, to double their spending on clean-energy research.

Investing in R&D is a critical first step, but success will be measured by getting carbon-free energy sources out of the lab and into widespread use ­- and making that transition without undermining economies in the developed world or blocking the aspirations of emerging countries.

That’s where the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, with its members’ proven business acumen and track record of transformative ideas, offers the most promise.

“Experience indicates that even the most promising ideas face daunting commercialization challenges and a nearly impassable Valley of Death between promising concept and viable product, which neither government funding nor conventional private investment can bridge,” the group says on its website. “This collective failure can be addressed, in part, by a dramatically scaled-up public research pipeline, linked to a different kind of private investor with a long-term commitment to new technologies who is willing to put truly patient flexible risk capital to work.”

The investment group introduced by Gates is filled with bold-face names from Silicon Valley, but it’s more than an all-star team of American high-tech executives. The 28 board members come from 10 countries and four continents.

The statements, verbal and financial, from some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs won’t silence climate change skeptics, and they probably won’t satisfy political conservatives who say too much public money is subsidizing clean-energy research.

But the signs of climate change are unambiguous - rising sea levels, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, record temperatures, erratic weather patterns. Most reputable scientists agree that burning fossil fuels contributes to the problem, yet a binding international accord has proven elusive for almost two decades. Paris might change that. And it might not.

The conference will be remembered for the pledge from some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs to use their combined wealth and skills to develop new sources of clean energy to meet a worldwide demand that is expected to increase 50 percent by 2050.

It’s an enormous challenge and an enormous opportunity for those who answer it. “These investors will certainly be motivated partly by the possibility of making big returns over the long-term,” the group says, “but also by the criticality of an energy transition.”