Billionaire Bill Gates will announce at the Paris climate summit on Monday that he is pledging billions of his own money for clean energy research and development funding.
Gates will announce the Clean Tech Initiative with French President Francois Holland and President Obama at the start of the conference Monday, according to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change agenda.
Countries including the U.S. and India will agree to double their research and development budgets for clean energy. They also will work on projects together as part of a coalition, according to the United Nations and first reported by Greenwire Friday morning. Money from Gates and other private investors will help fund the efforts, although the exact amount of money is not clear.
It is being billed as the world’s largest clean energy research and development partnership.
Earlier this month, Gates told the Atlantic he’s planning to pledge $2 billion of his own money for clean energy research to help limit the effects of climate change. Most scientists blame greenhouse gases produced from burning fossil fuels for causing climate change and the warming of the globe.
“There’s dozens of those ideas, and there’s enabling technologies for those ideas,” Gates told the Atlantic. “That’s the kind of thing that we should be funding more of.”
Gates made his billions as the co-founder of Microsoft and, in recent years, has turned himself into one of the world’s biggest philanthropists. His Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the world’s leading charitable organizations by helping to fight against malaria in Africa, funding education around the world and, now, getting into clean energy.
More than 190 nations, accounting for 90 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, are sending delegations to Paris for the two-week summit. They hope to come together on a deal that would see each country agree to a plan to limit their carbon dioxide emissions to limit global warming.
President Obama is set to attend the talks on the first two days, and he’ll leave behind several top Cabinet secretaries to lead the American delegation.
While the administration is hopeful the talks will conclude with a concrete deal, many Republicans are opposed to the measures that are central to the American delegation’s emissions plans.
They’re also opposed to Obama’s efforts to avoid Congress voting on the deal, as Senate approval would be unlikely. A group of more than three dozen senators wrote a letter to Obama pressing him to tell foreign leaders that the ultimate say is with Congress and not the administration.
