“I’m not crazy to be optimistic”: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates this week urged investors to back climate technologies that he says are profitable and could lead to a “green industrial revolution.”
Over three days, in a chic London venue, the American billionaire philanthropist, at his Breakthrough Energy summit, highlighted more than 100 companies that are working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the most carbon-intensive sectors, such as manufacturing, energy and transport, which are the main culprits of climate change.
A majority investor in a fund he established in 2015 that has invested about $2.2 billion in emerging technologies such as low-carbon cement, emissions-free aviation and sustainable building materials, Mr. Gates strongly believes in the power of innovation.
Even though many of these technologies are still in their infancy, the American entrepreneur knows that the key to success is also money.
It therefore seeks to broaden the investor base (risk capital, pension funds, sovereign funds), and to convince them of the profitability of green technologies.
“If you help solve the climate problem, you will have the opportunity to create very large and very profitable businesses,” he assured them.
Costly distraction?
Green innovation has come under heavy criticism as a costly distraction that takes priority over radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions and funding developing countries for their energy transition and adaptation to climate change.
Bill Gates is aware that innovation is not necessarily the answer to all ills, but that it can make a contribution.
“I think things can move forward through human ingenuity,” he told reporters after the summit.
“I am convinced that we can provide all the services that humanity needs with zero emissions without increasing the cost of those services… I don’t think I’m crazy to be optimistic,” Bill Gates insisted.
Growing interest
Less than ten years ago, investor interest in climate technologies was very limited, he recalls.
After raising a first billion dollars with other fortunes, including Jeff Bezos from Amazon and Jack Ma from Alibaba, the first edition of Breakthrough Energy, in 2022, only attracted a few hundred participants.
But since then, other investors have begun to take an interest in the sector’s young shoots, long considered too risky a bet.
This year, about 1,500 executives from banks, state-backed investment funds and major corporations gathered to peer closely at hydrogen-powered aircraft engines from ZeroAvia, low-carbon steel from Boston Metal and a huge magnet used by Commonwealth Fusion Systems to test nuclear fusion.
Growing investor interest is understandable, noted Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir, a Bill Gates-backed company that studies high-temperature conduction of electricity. “They have the possibility of creating some of the biggest companies on the planet,” he told AFP, during an evening with cocktails with evocative names, such as “elixir of electricity”.
“I think what you see […]”These are the foundations of a green industrial revolution,” Gates said in his opening remarks, after entering to the sound of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”
Question of life or death
A fervour that contrasts sharply with the first diplomatic meetings on climate organised by the United Nations in view of COP29, which ended in a bitter disagreement on the amount that the richest states should pay to support the poorest countries in the face of climate change.
Former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry says the private sector, rather than governments, should be the ones to mobilize the trillions of dollars needed each year to meet this challenge. And innovation could help.
“We are not talking about a mission with a random technological aim. It is a matter of life or death,” he said Thursday.
For Julia Reinaud, Europe manager of the Breakthrough Energy summit, it is time to “redouble efforts” to move green technologies from the prototype stage to operational elements of the electricity grid.
“We do not have 30 years ahead of us, as we may have had to develop solar energy,” she warned.