Gates, Bezos, and 18 others commit $1B to new cleantech fund | Hacker News Reader

Gates, Bezos, and 18 others commit $1B to new cleantech fund

techcrunch.com

This was posted 12 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155146

I've become intrigued recently by this technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification and its potential applications in the energy/cleantech space. From what I can tell, at least in the US, people equate it to "burning trash" and frown upon it, but it seems like a great technology space we should be investing more into because no matter what we do, we will always have trash to process/deal with.

It would be cool to see some startups attack this space. But maybe it's a high cost of entry space to work in which deters startups?

The argument I've heard against "burning trash" isn't that it's unclean or anything but that, to the extent stuff in trash is made from oil, still amounts to burning hydrocarbons. From an energy yield perspective, my impression is that it's more favorable to e.g. compost organic matter and recycle plastics.

Why not just start building solar plants(or windmills) and energy storage system?

If we spent billions of dollars on this couldn't we make a serious dent in carbon emissions quickly?

Because these people understand that there are experts in these fields that can do it better than they can. Usually there is always someone who can do it much better, but is really only limited by money.

We already spend billions a year installing solar panels and windmills.

https://about.bnef.com/press-releases/clean-energy-investmen...

that's like 0.2% of their cumulative net worths.

And a fraction of what a taxi company raised recently. Oh the irony of the world we live in.

Why the glass half empty view? $1 Billion is still $1 Billion.

Because trump is the us president-elect.

So a billion would be a lot if Hillary was the president-elect? Not sure how this is relevant.

It directly answers why a person might have a glass-half-empty perspective about piecemeal environmental efforts, like a billion dollars won't begin to undo the damage of Trump's appointments. Sounds relevant to me.

in my opinion people get too absorbed by hearing others that they donated X amount of money and then they make them like they are some kind of God's amongst us for doing so.

My whole life I've been hearing by colleagues etc that Bill Gates is an amazing human being and he has donated all his money and he has done so many things for humanity.

I am sorry but I just don't feel the same way and although I think I shouldn't force my thoughts on others I just feel the need of reminding them that this person still owns a yacht costing half a billion, he is still the richest man in the world, and no matter what he donates in my mind he will still be one of the "humans" that felt the need of having a 400m $ yacht while there are people out there starving to death.

Please and Thank you.

P.S I know am gonna get down-voted to hell and prolly shadow-banned cause of my opinion, but doesn't matter no matter what I say or what happens to me will change the way the world works (there will always be people that see goodness in people and others like my that are seeing the bad side in people).

A lot of my friends have the same view but refuse to discuss about it (I have THE EXACT opposite view).

In my opinion, he didn't owe the world anything - yet he's donating quiet a bit (clean water, anti-malaria etc.) - Sure he's got luxuries that most of us would probably dream about - yatches, jets etc., but he's also done net positive to the world and that's great.

Usually people who share my view generally counter with "so what have you done?" and imo that's a wrong way to think about it - everyone's level of contribution will be different.

If I were in his position, I too would have spent on luxuries (maybe more so than him) but the end goal is never lost - he's still helping people all over the world.

---

My political view on the topic: in a way, your comment reminds me of the previous election - moral policing of "oh, Trump's against X" and that's terrible and if you support him for Y, you are still a terrible person because he supports X lead to the result - people who supported him for Y were unable to ever get Y discussed and every time they did, X was always brought up, dismissing Y - so they never bothered discussing/learning etc and instead did the only thing in their power - look after their self interest of Y.

> In my opinion, he didn't owe the world anything

Maybe you're familiar with the social contract? The guy has made billions in the business world, he doesn't deserve to be lauded for donating a small fraction of the wealth he'll never need to survive.

It's the equivalent of a grocery store clerk donating $10 to the salvation army. I don't see news articles written about them. Hell, the poor consistently donate a greater portion of their wealth than the rich.

But it's not equivalent, because there's this thing about wealth:

Scenario A: Let's say he donates all he's worth today, minus what he needs to live out his days and provide for his family. Call it $80B. Awesome. Potential downsides: giant influx of cash invites corruption/skimming etc, and it also doesn't promote self-sustainability (from the recipients' cash flow perspective).

Scenario B: He leaves the bulk of his money invested, accruing 5% annually. (But since Ray Dalio is mentioned as a partner, it might be closer to 10% or 15%) That's at least $3.5B annually (after 15% capital gains tax). He's 61 years old; call it 25 years of life left. So now we're at 3.5B * 25y = 87.5B. As a very conservative estimate (5%, no compound interest). AND, he's still got his original $80B investment "in the bank."

The choice is obvious.

Even if we accept the premise that he doesn't deserve any credit for his donations because it is his duty to society, I still find that it is more useful to admire and encourage this behavior from a practical standpoint. At the end of the day, after paying his taxes and nobody can legally lay claim to any of the money and wealth he possesses, he has no obligation to give any of that to anyone else or use it for any purpose whatsoever. So if admiring and applauding billionaires for donating even small portions of their wealth encourages billionaires to do so, that's a cost I'm sure society is willing to bear.

This completely sidesteps the fact that not donating all of his wealth immediately allows him to potentially grow his wealth in other ways while still donating an objectively large number of resources.

We all have similar luxuries (vacations, eating at restaurants, buying an XBOX) where we make fundamentally the same choices they make but at a smaller scale so I think having them give up everything is an unreasonable expectation. It might not be the largest sacrifice he could possibly make but it will end up having a large impact and I don't see the problem in celebrating that.

Solving world hunger is only a $30 billion problem:

http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

Americans spend $12 billion on bottled water:

http://www.businessinsider.com/bottled-water-costs-2000x-mor...

Criticizing someone for doing good in the world while still enjoying their lives is a bit immature. As you've mentioned, we all have luxuries with our large screen TV's, cars, homes, etc.

Americans spend $60 billion on their pets every year: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/americans-will-spen...

Rather than complaining that rich people aren't doing enough, perhaps a lot more people can make more of an effort.

The problem isn't total resources, it's effective resource allocation. Even if Americans spent $0 on bottled water next year, it still takes organization and effort to somehow divert all of those small bottled water purchases to a more noble task. That is why arguments about spending $X on one thing instead of another really only work if it is truly one entity spending that $X and could realistically divert it to a different goal.

Aren't there organizations that exist to solve all sorts of problems? Cancer, Parkinson's, world hunger, disaster relief, malaria, clean water.

The point is that there are plenty of resources and it's just a matter of building up good organizations.

I don't mean to disagree with the entirety of your point, only that distribution is itself a problem to be solved. And even the organizations that you list are only designed to take it from willing donations to the desired causes. Each one of the customers not buying bottled water would need to separately perform the task of contacting one of these orgs and donating that money instead, every single time they would otherwise buy bottled water. That's also not counting any time or effort spent auditing potential donation targets for their ability to perform the stated goal.

No one said that the solution is for someone to pay an organization every time you would buy a bottle of water.

And no one is overlooking the fact that distribution is important. No one said that it wasn't.

There's enough food produced to feed 10 billion people.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger...

My entire point wasn't to spell out how to solve world hunger, it was to illustrate that problems like this are within our reach. There's no need to ask "rich people" to solve every problem in the world.

You're free to think that, but the flip side is, of those few families who've got exorbitant wealth, the ones that donate to useful causes are in the minority. Furthermore, Gates got there by providing a useful good to a lot of people. I'm not a fan of any closed source software, but I still respect somebody like Gates a heck of a lot more than say, (2 of the 3) Koch brothers, who not only exploit nations' natural resources for their own benefit, but they then spend their wealth actively working to undermine democracy so they can further their wealth (under the guise of "charity" no less).[0]

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833614-dark-money

It's not clear to me where somebody draws the border on that line of thinking. I own a Honda Minivan. I could probably feed ten starving families for a year, for what that van cost me.

Is there anything you own, that you could do without, that costs more than say, $500? Do you therefore value that thing more than the lives of 100 vaccinated children?

If you dismiss that comparison as totally different, then why?

True. I'm merely reflecting upon the mindset of money. If Bill really owns a $1/2B yacht (which I don't know) then he values it the same as saving the oceans it sails on. And as to other example - Sean Parker's $250M fund to cure cancer. Just comparing that to $15B raise by Uber. It's just a sad commentary that's all.

Maybe it doesn't make sense to invest more than $1B for now. That's a lot of money, you don't want it to go it to waste. Heck I wouldn't even know where to start with a $1B grant to save the environment. I guess they are trying to use it for research and development and it makes sense not to just throw $100B at it for now. They'll start with smalls teams of smart people to try come up with great ideas, $1B may be enough for that. Great discovery in R&D usually happen by accident with smart people and not because of how much money you threw at it once you get to a big enough amount.

If something promising comes out of this initial investment, you don't think they'll be able to raise more?

Bill Gates and many other billionaires pledged half their wealth to charity.

The wrong billionaire won the election.

Hooray, a group of oligarchs will try to save us from another group of oligarchs!

This kind of comment does nothing to contribute to the conversation.

And this kind of measure only contributes to making the world a livable place up to a certain point. That is a troubling reality of the current political situation, and is a conversation worth having.

Meanwhile, Zuck'N Fuck is trying to figure out how we can click on more ads.

Edit: because at the end of the day, Facebook doesn't make the world a better place.

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