Bill Gates et. al. launch massive clean-energy fund to fight climate change

Potentially, but there has already been a lot of meddling with the budget that the NSF director gets to put to use. Basically every year congress tries to ensure that the NSF stops spending money on climate change and 'social sciences'. There has been broad pressure to cede to congress's demands that the stop funding anything that they disagree with as well as general budget cuts.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/battle-over-scien...

The NIH/CDC have been repeatedly denied funding for Zika and Ebola research.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cdc-and-niaid-offici...

NASA will definitely have all of their climate research gutted, and given Trump's relationship with Lamar Smith and Jeff Sessions, I'd expect decent funding toward big projects that favor Alabama and Texas sites.

The dramatic reduction in PV costs, for example, were caused by the volumes created mostly by European feed-in tariffs, plus the manufacturing determination in China.

Im sure DoE has some big wins, and people who hear about them are more likely to drive support.

While I support science funding, this is a good time to remind people that politicized science is fat from exclusive to the right[0] (excellent article, don't just skim). A recent example is this paper [1]funded by a $400k NSF grant which tried to "analyze how power, domination, colonialism, and control—undergirded by and coincident with masculinist ideologies—have shaped glacier-related sciences and knowledges over time".

Also, for those reading about the "Trump questionnaire" who might not have heard it elsewhere, here is the NYT story about this[2], which much more comprehensive and slightly more balanced than the parent makes it out to be.

Among other things, it hints towards "significant shifts of the agency [DOE] towards nuclear power", and a "push to commercialize the research of the Energy Department's laboratories, long considered the crown jewels of federal science."

BTW, the downsizing of federal departments has been planned by Trump for a long time, and brought up by him during the campaign, when he said several months ago that he wants to reduce the federal workforce and institute "hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health)". This was in his "Contract With The America Voter", and is nothing to be surprised about.

[0]: http://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html

[1]: http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/07/this-university-of-oregon-...

[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/politics/climate-change...

There have been a handful of ideas to reduce or reverse the effects of global warming using engineered solutions. Examples include such ideas as taking Sulphur Dioxide and putting it into the upper atmosphere (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-p...). Another idea, that was invented by Bill Gates' friend Paul Allen, includes building ultra tall chimneys in order to vent opaque soot into the upper atmosphere.

The other side of this is that there is a belief we can come up with technologies that are significantly greener without a significant downside in price or performance.

Good but expensive technical solutions do exist, namely carbon capture and storage, together with more renewables, nuclear and fusion power, perhaps some hydrogen production etc. But the financial requirements are unfortunately more towards OPEX than CAPEX. This means even if some uber-billionaire pays for the CAPEX, us regular people will shoulder the largest cost.

A proper solution would be a functioning carbon tax that negates the currently externalised cost of emissions. But in simple terms that means "making everything more expensive", on the order of $0.5 more per gallon of gasoline overnight, large increases in taxes on new cars, everything made from plastic 50% more expensive, cement and steel prices increasing by at least 20% so new houses are 30-50% more expensive to build, etc. In short, political suicide for anyone who enacts it.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I'd expect these investors to pick places to invest where government policies will not work against their objectives, which probably is China and EU, not US.

  >One thesis driving the fund is that only governments have the resources 
  to invest in fundamental [clean energy] research, through government labs and 
  funding for university research, at a scale that is needed for breakthrough advances.
  Government funding in areas such as battery technology and materials used 
  for solar power, for example, has seeded the growth of those areas, with 
  their commercialization subsequently funded by private investors.

> which Gates and his fellow investors describe as a market failure that large-scale, long-term private investments can address.

A lot of the hard part of the development in geothermal is fighting with problems that aren't very solved scientifically, particularly understanding the dynamics of stress and temperature in the upper several km of the earth's crust near active volcanoes. I was working with AltaRock on these issues, which are chewy enough that NSF doesn't consider the baseline levels of knowledge good enough to fund research in, as NSF wants science to be at a point where some sort of obvious scientific outcome is highly probable before they will fund it.

I assume that this is pretty widespread in cutting-edge R&D: Those involved find themselves working at the ragged edge of the known universe, even if both academic scientists and the general public think of the topic as pretty mundane.

So I view a fund like this one as quite complimentary to public funding: At some level, venture-type funding that has a high risk tolerance can help get projects off the ground to the point where they can get funding from both more conservative government funds and more typical institutional investors.

(Full disclosure: I also own a private geoscience research company that solicits a lot of public funding as well as doing consulting and non-fundable research, but it's really just a shell for me to try to get paid to do cool science, rather than a nascent company focused on growth.)

In this view, there are more dollars in the public coffers. But they are more politically entangled. If your project is a political darling, e.g. a clean-energy company with a need for lots of factories in lots of districts and a cap table of retired Senators, this is close to frictionless capital.

If you live in reality, however, there are costs and political risk attached to this capital. The private pot is smaller, but faster-moving and less unpredictably politicized.

A balance between the two would be good, if only to encourage the public coffers to become more efficient.

Tri Alpha has gotten over $500 million for a more-ambitious but riskier approach, so hopefully ARC has a shot at getting funded.

Climate change was discussed during the presidential debates for precisely 82 seconds. If climate change can be considered an issue of this election, then the "people that made climate change such an enormous political issue" are the people who made the following ridiculous, attention-getting statements about climate change:

https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/54o7o1/donald_trum...

in other words... outlook grim

"Gates had last year announced his intention to personally invest an additional $1 billion in clean energy technology. He was also among the 28 wealthy individuals and families signed on to the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group broadly committed to investing in this area. The new fund, which includes many of them, is a next, concrete step toward actually deploying their capital."