Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr | Hacker News Reader

Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

nytimes.com

192 pointsjbredeche195 comments

Stanford's last major foray into this area was "The Global Climate and Energy Project"... a major sponsor was ExxonMobil. As you might guess, that didn't really do much in the way of producing renewable energy alternatives to fossil fuels... more like a green PR initiative. Somehow I don't think oil companies are thrilled about everyone driving EVs and seeing their market share collapse.

https://gcep.stanford.edu/about/exxonmobil.html

I rather doubt this one will be any better. A better option would just be to put $1 billion into a company dedicated to catching up to China on mass-scale monocrystalline PV wafer production for durable, high-efficiency PV panels for both rooftop solar and large-scale installations. Unfortunately neither California's natural gas industry nor the investor-owned utilities are thrilled about that either. Rooftop cuts directly into utility revenue, and replacing natural gas power plants with solar + storage plants makes Sempra and friends very sad.

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2018/04/21/the-weekend...

The United States is more of a petro-state than most people realize, and a rapid transition to renewables (i.e. 3% reduction in fossil fuel production per year, matched by an equivalent increase in renewable energy production per year) is too much economic disruption to contemplate, it seems - although that is what is needed if you wanted to address the climate problem. American academics are not going to do anything on their own about this, as they don't control the funding.

> The United States is more of a petro-state than most people realize

or energy independent, depending on how you want to look at it.

This is one people get a bit confused about:

1) In 2021, the United States imported about 8.47 million barrels per day (b/d) of petroleum from 73 countries. (EIA)

2) In 2021, the United States exported about 8.63 million b/d of petroleum to 176 countries and 4 U.S. territories.

The reasons you can't just say, halt exports and halt imports and be 'energy independent' are varied: there's regional demand (oil produced in the Dakotas can't easily get to Los Angeles, etc.) and there's the fact that refineries are built to distill specific grades of crude, you can't just mix-and-match.

Nevertheless, the fact that Obama & Biden, with Republican support, lifted the 1970s era ban on crude oil exports from the USA in 2015 is certainly a major factor in the gas price inflation, a fact neither party nor industry likes to see discussed in the corporate media.

Real 'energy independence' would come from using sunlight and wind, which cannot be embargoed or manipulated by OPEC etc, as the primary energy source.

“Energy independence” just means that energy does not give other nations significant leverage over us.

Isolated self-sufficiency is one way to achieve that, but so is a balanced book of imports and production.

The U.S. today is more energy independent than in the past. To be specific, OPEC cannot do to the U.S. today what it did in the 1970s because they have far less pricing power. As they cut supply to raise prices, domestic fracking projects go back into the black and we increase supply.

I fully support transitioning to renewable energy sources, but it’s not necessary for energy independence. That is one of the least compelling reasons to change.

> A better option would just be to put $1 billion into a company dedicated to catching up to China on mass-scale monocrystalline PV wafer production

I don't know the parent commenter (though their name stands out), but on HN, isn't this essentially saying, 'give money to me/us'?

Doesn't petro-state imply heavy economic dependence on energy sources for government tax revenue? I don't think that's the case in America and if it were we'd see far more federal involvement in the sector even with state run companies and far fewer tax breaks for the industry.

It's an interesting question. Saudi Arabia alone owns at least USD100bn of US Treasury debt (before custodial holdings via tax havens) [0]. Other Petro states own more

The petrodollar system is based on international trade in oil being denominated in USD. This finances the US deficit (in lieu of taxes) when oil exporters use dollar revenues to buy Treasuries

Not a traditional Petro state... Concepts like fiscal breakeven prices aren't in play. But some shades of gray perhaps

[0] https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...

> A better option would just be to put $1 billion into a company dedicated to catching up to China on mass-scale monocrystalline PV wafer production for durable, high-efficiency PV panels for both rooftop solar and large-scale installations.

I'm with you on increasing domestic PV production at scale, but residential rooftop solar is not where you are going to get the most impact in terms of increased renewable generation. Residential rooftop LCOE is always 2-4x the cost of utility scale solar because of the sheer variety of roof types, more inverters per panel, and much higher per-watt soft costs (marketing, site analysis, permitting, etc).

Rooftop solar is good for reducing individual customer bills in many places though. In CA my PV array, which cost about $12k, reduces my annual electric bill by $1700/year, thanks to the rooftop solar-friendly net-metering system. If net metering incentives were reduced, the value proposition in pure $ would go down. These days, the main incentive to get solar PV in CA appears to be:

- Adding it to lower bills before net-metering is phased out (as has been proposed)

- Generating power for an EV

- Pairing with battery backup for power outage preparation

All new construction in California has to have solar panels. So the long term end game is set.

I call this the lazy philanthropy. Dump a bunch of money on well known names and it ends up sloshing around the system going into unrelated stuff.

On the other end is the active philanthropy (like what Bill Gates does) which is a lot more effective and shows results faster.

What Gate has done also seems largely a tax avoidance scheme that supports his BioTech and other investments. If you have a foundation which does investments and invest yourself I am sure there are really well worked out ways of avoiding capital gains tax indefinitely, while not giving up control on where any of your money really goes.

One thing that I don't get - if I was in the enviable position to make such donations, the one thing that I'd do is fund a company/foundation with a single goal - capture the maximum amount of carbon (+equivalents, +research into other ways to fixing climate change).

There must be something I'm missing because I don't get eg what Bill Gates is doing. He says he wants to give away most his fortune to fix the biggest problems facing humanity - great. And then he's going for Malaria. Not that that's not a great goal too, but climate change really seems like the obvious one to me. I don't get it, climate change doesn't even appear on their list of top causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat... The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation endowment is larger than Harvard's (and slightly more than Musk spent on buying Twitter), with that kind of money they could have moved a lot of things already.

Look up breakthrough energy. He's investing a lot into climate.

Ok, thanks, I didn't know about that. 2B is a very decent amount of money. But it sounds more a VC that invests in highly risky, but ultimately profitable ventures. Carbon capture doesn't even feature in their wikipedia description (It invests in a variety of startup companies that are attempting to commercialize new concepts such as nuclear fusion, large-capacity batteries to store renewable energy, and microbe-generated biofuels).

My point is, if you're already willing to donate in the billions, why not use that money to literally pay people to find ways to capture the most amount of carbon, regardless of whether that's ever going to be profitable? 2 billion, let alone 50, will pay a lot of smart people's salaries plus expensive equipment for quite some time.

I mean dive deeper, they are funding carbon capture and currently no carbon capture anywhere close to profitability.

The ROI on this donation to stanford will be very similar to investing in carbon capture technology. I'll let you estimate that ROI.

My point is, see it as a donation, not an investment. You probably won't get richer by funding carbon capture, but you also won't get richer from having your name on a building on the Stanford campus.

Take a look at the current carbon capture tech and the potential carbon capture rates from existing technologies. We are orders of magnitudes off from what is needed. You will require a fusion (something Gates is already invested in) level advance to achieve meaningful carbon capture. 1B isn't nearly enough.

Ok, 1B isn't going to go very far there, but that's why I mentioned the Gates Foundation. That sort of money (50B+) could get us somewhere, and might inspire guys like John Doerr to chip in some more as well.

I think malaria is absolutely worthy of the investment. Malaria is one of those issues that isn't top of the mind for much of the Western world, but is one of the absolute major killers worldwide, right now. It's also relatively a low hanging fruit in terms of return for money spent vs improvements in human well being. Climate Change is a big deal, but is it killing as many people on an annual basis as malaria, with a solution that benefits the majority of people affected for a few billion dollars?

In fact, one might say that the easiest bang for the Gates buck in terms of addressing climate change is pulling their anti-malaria funding. ;-)

As glib as that option might be, the people most affected by malaria are disproportionately the ones least contributing to Climate Change in the first place, and tend to live in regions most affected by CC. I'd imagine the Gates could get far more bang for their CC bucks by lobbying for revoking the EPA/FDA/OSHA/VA. A few billions in the right super PACs and CC might be reversed ;-)

> I'd imagine the Gates could get far more bang for their CC bucks by lobbying for revoking the EPA/FDA/OSHA/VA. A few billions in the right super PACs and CC might be reversed.

So, your claim is that if we didn't have the FDA or EPA, then we wouldn't have climate change? I haven't such a ridiculous claim in awhile. What's the logic here? Even disregarding the other Federal agencies that you seem to dislike, how does the end of the Environmental Protection Agency hinder climate change in any capacity whatsoever? Is this just sarcasm implying that if more people die due to the absence of these agencies, then there will be less of a collective carbon footprint?

> Is this just sarcasm implying that if more people die due to the absence of these agencies, then there will be less of a collective carbon footprint?

Yes - see the parent comment I was replying to.

Ah, I misunderstood. I apologize.

Gates has talked about what has motivated him to donate the way he has, its no mystery. He says he was gobsmacked by how little money was devoted to the health problems experienced by poor countries and that comparatively small investments could have enormous impact.

Also, I think you are underestimating how terrible malaria is

> Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that in 2020, 241 million clinical cases of malaria occurred, and 627,000 people died of malaria, most of them children in Africa. Because malaria causes so much illness and death, the disease is a great drain on many national economies. Since many countries with malaria are already among the poorer nations, the disease maintains a vicious cycle of disease and poverty.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/faqs.html

I mean, that's bad, but those numbers aren't anything compared to what climate change is going to do. If the population of Earth drops by a billion over the next hundred years, that's 10M a year, on average. (I recognize that I'm not differentiating between premature deaths and a lack of replacement births, but still.)

Why do you think climate change will kill a billion people over the next century? Not saying you're wrong, just bewildered that you are able to make any kind of prediction on this at all.

Not sure where they got the number from, but every year the climates have become a tad more warmer with summer temperatures routinely being closer to 50C in India.

I've been hearing nearly all my life that coastal areas like Bangladesh, Mumbai, Kolkata, orissa etc are at a severe risk of drowning due to rising sea levels.

I've experienced first hand water scarcity in many parts of the country, but more prominently near the Deccan plateau due to rainfall failures and lakes, rivers drying up as a consequence of exploitation leading to crop failures.

Their 1 billion number doesn't seem too far off though if we take into account not many hospitable places have measures controlling resource usage and exploitation.

I mean we should also recognize the effect it's currently having. Not just what the immediate future holds in the form of many climate catastrophes. I've noticed that, in general, the younger someone is the more concerned they are about this immediate present and future of climate problems.

He's using capitalism rather than philanthropy on climate, and there's not really a shortage of capital in the climate space, its an incentives problem. Capitalism is of more limited use in the health of poor people, which is why he has focused his philanthropy there.

Look up the Copenhagen Consensus, which is a project that tried to rank interventions: what would you do if you had $75bn to spend on a good cause?

The founder is a controversial figure with niche views on climate science, but the judging panel was solid (lots of Nobel Prizes etc). Global warming barely made the list. It's the biggest priority for us in the west, but billions of poorer people are more interested in tropical diseases, HIV, education, etc.

I wouldn't allocate money solely on the scale of the problem faced. I'd allocate it according to where it has the best utility. And several billion towards malaria is likely a much better outcome for humanity than a few billion towards climate change. It will move the needle more for on malaria than for climate change.

I guess it's a matter of personal preference. If I was rich to the point that I could focus entirely on having an impact instead of making money, I'd basically ask myself a variation of Hamming's questions (originally meant as advice for academic researchers: 1. What are the most important problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not?).

To maximize impact you again should spend money not on the hardest problems, but on those where the money has the biggest impact. It's the definition :)

Consider two problems: one makes everyone's life 5% better and costs $100 to solve. One makes lives 20% better and costs $1 trillion. You have $100. Where does your money have the biggest impact?

This is malaria and climate change.

The US government is already investing billions in carbon capture. Oil companies are also investing in this area. Coal companies are probably doing the same. I would guess Saudi Arabia is very interested in this area as well.

I don't think any rich companies or rich countries are spending much money on malaria. So Bill Gates probably feels like he can make a bigger difference there.

How many people die per year from natural disasters and where does that fit in the overall picture of human suffering? Take that figure and deduct by whatever amount is the natural baseline (since eliminating inclement weather is impossible). Fewer people die from natural disasters today than ever in human history and despite world population being at all time highs.

You can believe the hype about a particular issue being "the biggest problem facing humanity" or you can look at it with a sober analysis.

Absolutely! I think there's a group of people who get sucked into the narrative of X being the world's largest problem, and then get really exasperated when people are working on anything other than X. They see inattention to X as almost an affront.

Substitute for X "climate change", "AI risk", "Nuclear risk", "Energy depletion". And interestingly the X's are mutually exclusive. So climate change maximalists and AI risk maximalists can be mutually exasperated at each other.

BTW, this is not to say one of the narratives is not true. But they can't all be the unique #1 problem.

From your comment, I get the sense that you believe climate change isn't a top priority for humans.

I disagree, I hold the opinion that we humans are on course, and hold responsibility, for the sixth (current) mass extinction event. And that the cause of this has been human activity and our consumption habits [0].

Mass extinction, sounds sober, sounds like it might have an effect on humanity and human suffering on a global level, no? It may not be a concern if you are of the belief that humans _will not_ be among those included in this extinction event (and are wholly species-centered). I don't believe we will dodge the bullet of our own creation - it seems clear to me too few individuals are willing to change their habits to do. Let alone take the time to educate themselves on the topic.

Here are a collection of quotes in support of my argument, accompanied with citation:

"The overarching driver of species extinction is human population growth and increasing per capita consumption." [0]

"In the past 500 years, humans have triggered a wave of extinction, threat, and local population declines that may be comparable in both rate and magnitude with the five previous mass extinctions of Earth’s history." [1]

"Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century." [2]

"Our review lays out arguments clearly demonstrating that there is a biodiversity crisis, quite probably the start of the Sixth Mass Extinction." [3]

Does this sound to you like one of the biggest problems facing humanity? If not, according to your rigorous and sober analysis, what is?

Lastly, I'd like to know, where are you pulling "Fewer people die from natural disasters today than ever in human history" from?

-----

[0] "The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection". Science. 344 (6187): 1246752. [1] "Defaunation in the Anthropocene". Science. 345 (6195): 401–406. (2014). [2] "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice". BioScience. 67 (12): 1026–1028.(2017) [3] "The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?." Biological Reviews (2022).

if you were in that position i would hope that you would do some napkin math about the necessary scale of carbon capture. last i checked the most efficient process would require about 1000x the annual energy output of the world just to keep up with emissions.

it's an understudied area, research funding has the potential to go a long ways. eg coccolitophores are sparsely studied but have the potential for carbon capture at a scale not achievable by industrial facilities

Goodluck convincing wealthy industrialized countries to do anything impactful when most of that wealth comes from exploiting the environment (or exporting it somewhere easier to exploit.)

Even a billionare will find himself running against trillion dollar interests trying to make real progress.

Eradicating malaria is a problem able to be sovlved.

I think Gates is interested in low hanging fruit where he knows his money can make an immediate and measurable impact at a large scale. Malaria is a good target because we know how to prevent Malaria. And realistically a lot of deaths can be saved with a relatively small amount of money, attention and coordination.

Energy is complicated and will take a lot more money to solve then he has.

The most encouraging signal on climate to me is that the “money” seems to finally be waking up.

ESG policies - backed by data monitoring requirements to combat greenwashing from sovereign wealth funds are real, arduous, and creating business and capital incentives with environmental alignment.

Early stage climate tech funds - of which their are many today where there were few even a few years ago - are giving a new generation of entrepreneurs something to focus on beyond monetization efforts.

And of course both company and billionaire branding is shifting to the importance of climate, carbon neutral solutions.

I take this all much less as a sign of altruism but of market efficiency - a shift towards making “saving the planet”profitable is the only model I believe will ever move the needle.

So to that end I applaud this effort - Just signaling viability of a career in the space is a great step in the right direction

ESG is a joke. Chevron has a higher ESG score than Tesla. How can anybody argue this is a fair assessment?

ESG scoring agreed is a work in progress currently gameable with greenwashing strategies (carbon credits)

What I am referencing is ESG for fundraising at institutional level which is the money that actually drives the world

Major pensions are prioritizing selecting managers with legit, objectively good esg policies and road maps with hard and enforceable targets that are tied to compensation

This is precisely the reason ESG should be abolished. It’s driving a huge amount of investment into companies that don’t deserve it

Why is that not plausible? climate change is not just about emissions. the full life cycle of a battery is pretty brutal on the environment

ESG stands apart from the various agencies that provide a score. Just because they do a bad job, it doesn't mean ESG is a joke, it just means the scores are a joke.

ESG seems to be a way to launder reputations, seeming to appear good is not doing good.

As it stands stakeholder capitalism is a scam perpetrated by the professional-managerial class on everyone else.

ESG offers a viable career path for people who don't actually like finance but want the money it pays. Plus, you get to tell yourself you're Making the world a better place. What's not to like?

That sounds like the right incentives and outcomes?

> Early stage climate tech funds

An interesting fact in this vein is that by some estimates 14% of all venture capital is going towards climate tech [0]. Its a pretty broad category and really a hard number to pin down but it is still encouraging. They define "climate tech" as something that:

1. Directly mitigate or remove emissions

2. Help us to adapt to the impacts of climate change

3. Enhance our understanding of the climate.

[0] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/sustainability/publicatio...

They/you forgot:

0: Establish venture-funded "marketplaces" for various climate-facing tokens to skim value while providing no real value-add.

I am concerned about the incredible concentration of money and resources into a few academic institutions. Obviously Stanford is an incredible school, but I am not sure Stanford will do more with $1B than 10 2nd tier schools would do with $100M each.

> I am not sure Stanford will do more with $1B than 10 2nd tier schools would do with $100M each

Absent data, it's difficult to say. There are economies of scale, even if just in experience administering such projects.

I haven't checked the numbers lately, so I could be wrong by now. But while I was a student there and for some years after (administrators / (students + researchers + educators)) got worse at a rapid pace. It's hard for me to imagine that Stanford is the best marginal bang for more bucks.

In order to have an economy of scale, first you need scale. But Stanford does not stand out in terms of the size of its faculty or enrollment, certainly not to the degree it does in terms of money. In fact, Stanford has fewer tenured faculty members (832) than UC Davis (1,126):

https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/stanford-university/...

https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-califo...

There are diseconomies of scale too. My experience is mostly of UK higher education, but my feeling is that most universities are a bit too large for their governing structures, and are poorly run as a result.

This is a very fair concern. First off, most of this funding will go to a building. The rest will go mostly to an endowment.

The concentration of mega-gifts at the top has very perverse impacts.

Harvard built a $100M building a few years ago that is used by a total of 100 people a year.

Philanthropy combines prestige, PR, and “legacy” in a way that massively overvalued those three vs. any kind of measurable impact.

The alternative you are suggesting is badly, badly needed in the non-profit world.

But the “brand” game has won vs the execution game, esp. in higher Ed.

> Harvard built a $100M building a few years ago that is used by a total of 100 people a year.

Which building is that? Not doubting you, just curious.

John wanted his name on the Doerr.

Words cannot describe, should have sent a poet.

Ho Doerr?

> First off, most of this funding will go to a building.

What a waste.

Some time back I read a line in article "Government has deluded itself into thinking that building institutions is same as institution buildings"

This seems to apply here.

Link?

Upvoted because I agree but it's not always this cut and dry. I can't speak for climate research (I imagine it's mostly computer sims so maybe a building is a waste), but for bio research lab space is nearly as important as personnel.

The waste is they hire architects to build elaborate buildings with plenty of affectations that make universities and donors feel important, but that often put functionality far behind form. While the inside of lab space is quite functional and "luxury" in lab space goes is actually lab equipment, sq. ft, and having a window that looks out on something pleasant. Much less impressive looking buildings could be built which facilitated far more science.

Universities have degenerated somewhat into being professional sports teams and professional fundraisers.

"Attracting top talent" is nonsense, universities are already full of people so desperate for positions they work nearly for free.

If I had a billion dollars I'd build a university out the best equipment, the cheapest buildings, and a minimum wage for anyone doing academic work of $100k and see how far that got me.

>But the “brand” game has won vs the execution game, esp. in higher Ed.

I can remember seeing this in action at Stanford. Companies will fall over themselves and pay anything to have their name associated with absolutely anything that has the name Stanford on it. And the students know this, so they play the game. Every student group, organization, club, etc. no matter how small or meaningless is heavily sponsored by relevant corporate donors as a result.

I worked in the Broad building at Caltech (Eli Broad), and I watched for 2 years as they demoed the parking lot outside my office to build the 200 million dollar Chen neuroscience building. It is a complete and total waste of money, and I say that cognizant of arguments like 'attracting talent'...etc. At one point we calculated the number of neuroscience postdocs we could hire for that money and easily came to the conclusion that we could have pulled off a Manhattan project of neuroscience with that kind of money. It's pathetic that donors delude themselves into thinking that projects like this do ANY good.

Edit: link: https://www.henselphelps.com/project/chen-neuroscience-resea...

wait, is the 200 million just for the building, or for the entire facility (new equipment, etc)? Building a new facility in itself seems a worthwhile enterprise - though as a postdoc myself I'd rather have pay bumps for the postdocs :)

I believe at least 170 million was slated initially for construction costs, which may have run over. I don't know how much was for new equipment, but I can't imagine it was a significant fraction (and likely it was an additional expense over those numbers).

170+ million for a BUILDING?! That doesn't make sense to me at all - as someone who spends his waking hours in research laboratories in a newish building of comparable size to the Chen building, I can't see where the money would go.

here's a guess, our fancy new stem cell research building has 3 pieces of chihuly glass about each about the size of a mini cooper...

Well....for starters there is the monkey tunnel that leads from Broad to the Chen building because....you guessed it....the vivarium was in the basement (and still is) of Broad. Many neuroscience labs were in Broad (a VERY nice building in and of itself).

I chuckled when they demolished the nearby Mead undergrad chem lab to make way for another such building, then I realized that the department graduating 5 undergrads a year might have something to do with it. I already missed the sculpture where the bagpipe guy used to play that got taken out for some ChemE building.

> easily came to the conclusion that we could have pulled off a Manhattan project of neuroscience with that kind of money.

In general I wish people spent more time looking at alternatives when these huge projects are proposed. For instance, it drives me nuts thinking of all the alternatives when I see making bids to pay billions for the Olympics. That's the kind of money that could turn the whole area into a science Mecca in several different, with a whole host of positive downstream effects locally.

Donor behavior such as this comes down to human psychology and neuroscience.

* Tribalism: Humans like people who "are like them", it's easier to relate. Thus, IME, Stanford grads prefer other Stanford-branded people. Or at least crême de la creme Ivy. Especially compared to the plebs and the proles.

* Vanity: Donors find it appealing that the structure will be around for a long time, prominently and proudly emblazoned with the donor's own name. Yes, external validation does feel good. Especially among certain (insecure) types. A truly altruistic and self-assured person makes donations anonymously.

Empire building is a popular pastime among the human species, especially those with power. The rest of us settle for something like Civ, SimCity, or sand castles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Pompey

Not the first by a long shot.

(Ahem, pyramids ...)

People should invest local. I just handed a check to our sons martial arts center. It is used for scholarships for kids that can't afford monthly dues. Every dollar is treasured.

Yea but it won’t raise your prestige, I mean giving charity to Stanford, one of the top schools in the world, shows everyone how baller you are, and maybe the next 20 generations of Doerrs will get guaranteed admission too

>First off, most of this funding will go to a building.

Gross.

> Harvard built a $100M building a few years ago that is used by a total of 100 people a year.

Which building is this?

>First off, most of this funding will go to a building. The rest will go mostly to an endowment.

Academic institutions are also tax-exempt, therefore don't pay any tax on the profits of any endowment or real-estate investment gains. The rise of the ivy-league schools becoming glorified tax-free holding companies, with education side-gigs, corresponds with the bloat in academic administration.

https://observer.com/2006/05/nyu-columbia-make-a-mint-on-rea...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...

Stanford is really a real estate venture masquerading as an academic institution.

Why? For tax purposes.

Upon first hearing this I was shocked and disappointed. Over time I've lowered my hopes and expectations, and come to accept it for what it is:

Old, elite, uber-wealthy white men at the top, who want it to stay that way.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Stanford+president

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marc_Tessier-Lavigne_at...

References:

"The Stanford Empire", by Mercury News

> Stanford's vast holdings. Stanford, Silicon Valley's largest property owner, controls more than 5,000 acres in Palo Alto and unincorporated Santa Clara County. On that land are the university's sprawling campus, a shopping center, tech offices, apartment buildings and entire residential neighborhoods.

> The value of Stanford’s empire is larger than those of Google, Apple and Intel combined.

https://extras.mercurynews.com/whoowns/stanford.html

"How Stanford Came to Dominate the Landscape in Silicon Valley", by KQED

> The value of Stanford's real estate empire is greater than the holdings of Google, Apple and Cisco combined.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11781771/how-stanford-became-the-l...

Isn't there a tax deduction aspect to a lot of these donations?

Anyways, 100 more Nature-level articles about climate change is not going to change the situation if there is no political will (or if it seesaws every 4-8 years at best).

Indeed.

It probably would have been much better to plant $1B worth of trees, or buy $1B of the Brazilian Rain Forest. But for similar reasons that Robert Moses loved bridges and hated tunnels, putting your name on a building at Stanford wins.

There are some loopholes with donations, mostly regarding difficult-to-value benefits and also around donating dificult-to-value things rather than cash, stocks, and/or bonds.

But, if you donate $1.1 billion to an eligible charity (and claim to have gotten nothing in return), then the US government basically pretends that you never made that money, and your tax bill goes down by roughly your marginal tax rate times the size of the donation. There are limits and caveats, but in general, it's a pretty fair treatment. I'm pretty sure big donors generally under-report the value of having their name on a building, etc. However, I believe it's nearly impossible to wind up with more money in your pocket post-tax by donating cash instead of keeping the cash. (I'm not an accountant. This isn't tax advice.)

I'm not saying you in particular are claiming people are donating cash out of greed, but the way I hear some people talk about tax write-offs is very misleading. It seems many Americans believe that donating $1.1 billion in cash can result in a $1.1 billion reduction in tax owed (assuming a marginal tax rate under 100%). Presumably, someone that wealthy gets their marginal tax rate down around the long-term capital gains rate, so they're probably getting about $165 million in tax reduction in exchange for that $1.1 billion donation. (Again, I'm not an accountant. This isn't tax advice.)

(Now, one could buy $1 million in art, get it appraised for $4 million, and if your marginal tax rate is under 25%, get more than $1 million knocked off your tax bill. Like I said, there are some loopholes in valuation, but not for cash and marketable securities.)

That being said, it would be nice to see something where getting your name on a building or an event in your honor would come with some automatic accounting assumption that the value of the publicity is worth at least 25% of the donation. If you want the full write-off, take your name off the building.

> But, if you donate $1.1 billion to an eligible charity (and claim to have gotten nothing in return), then the US government basically pretends that you never made that money, and your tax bill goes down by roughly your marginal tax rate times the size of the donation. There are limits and caveats, but in general, it's a pretty fair treatment.

I think it's highly unfair in that it shifts decisions on social spending from the democratically made decisions of the people to a few wealthy individuals.

The US government gets $0.16B less that it can control in social spending. But in return, a regulated non-profit institution gets $1.1B more in its budget. That's a pretty good tradeoff for the social good.

For an alternative way of looking at things - almost any economist would tell you that it is wise to tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. This is one of the most foundational insights from microeconomics. And charitable giving is the closest to an ideal positive externality that you will find. Person spends money to a cause because it makes him feel good to do so. That transaction ends up helping other 3rd parties as well. Textbook positive externality.

https://www.economicshelp.org/micro-economic-essays/marketfa...

> The US government gets $0.16B less that it can control in social spending. But in return, a regulated non-profit institution gets $1.1B more in its budget.

There's no reason to think the non-profit accomplishes anything or doesn't accomplish negative things. And there is an opportunity cost to the non-profit getting that money rather than, for example, schools.

> There's no reason to think the non-profit accomplishes anything or doesn't accomplish negative things

You could say the exact same thing about how the federal government spends its money.

> And there is an opportunity cost to the non-profit getting that money rather than, for example, schools.

There's also an opportunity cost to the government getting that money, rather than, for example, educational non-profits.

Overall, do I think the federal government would do more good with the same amount of money? Probably. But would the federal government do more good with $0.16B, as opposed to the non-profit sector with $1.1B? I highly doubt it.

> it shifts decisions on social spending from the democratically made decisions of the people to a few wealthy individuals.

To the degree that it's possible to amass wealth in this country without having to coerce people (a la crony capitalism), the money from those few wealthy individuals are a time-delayed, indirect sum of the democratically-made decisions of the people to spend their hard-earned dollars on the products and services those wealth individuals have offered.

Philosophically, it's not all that different from the people's will being indirectly expressed via their elected representatives in government.

And therefore we should just make the richest person the president, because he’s been elected democratically by our spending! Genius

This is very inaccurate.

I dont really know where to start.

There are circumstances where you cant get your name on a building from a donation, there are circumstances that circumvent that requirement. There are circumstances where there is no tax deduction because the donation already occurred from another non profit.

These wealthy people are going to run circles around the the general understanding for another 100 years. Bite the bullet and pay a nonprofit lawyer to understand whats possible.

There are things you can do with asset valuations it just isnt that relevant

To be clear, you're asserting that by donating $1.1 billion in cash, they're likely getting more than that sum multiplied by their marginal tax rate in tax reduction?

I'm honestly curious what the loopholes would be.

To be clear, I'm not asserting that.

Not a donation to a university.

However, rich people set up their own 501(c)(3) organizations to which they are boards of to get free flights, hotels, meals, etc from. Basically, instead of spending that money directly, they "spend" it via donations to their 501c3, and their 501c3 sends them on trips

much closer!

they donate to their own 501c3, and that 501c3 can donate to the next thing that makes the actual headlines. But the important thing for the conversations had here is that their own 501c3 can also invest and grow money. It can have lots and lots of capital firepower. When it uses that, there is no tax deduction for the owner. And in an article or headline, there is no information to extrapolate whether they were motivated by a tax deduction. thats my main point.

From my perspective, People are so desperate to find an issue with a large money movement that it is clouding their ability to understand what to even look at whether there is an abuse, advantage or not.

> 100 more Nature-level articles about climate change is not going to change the situation if there is no political will

All the political will does nothing without research. We need both.

Getting back to the above comment, then perhaps donating to a politically influential, ivy league school makes sense.

Not necessarily

The flaw with this logic is assuming the money came from their personal balance sheet this year, as opposed to growing in a tax deferred or tax exempt account for decades already

Even Mackenzie Bezos’ donations are not giving her current year tax deductions (some additional ones could, its just not what she's been doing and she's been doing a lot and her methods are very common)

the understanding of what ultrawealthy are doing and why is very far from reality. I think its not productive to grasp for a tax/financial ulterior motive

There's an old Malcolm Gladwell podcast where he interviews (and attempts to skewer) then President of Stanford University John L. Hennessy precisely on the topic of Stanford continuing to solicit donations and increase its ambitions despite having a very large amount of money. I actually think Gladwell's arguments are mostly ridiculous, especially his "accusation" that Hennessy is a "strong link" thinker. But the topic and the interview are interesting.

That podcast episode:

https://omny.fm/shows/revisionist-history/my-little-hundred-...

I found a partial transcript of the episode:

https://www.simonsays.ai/blog/my-little-hundred-million-with...

It would be great to repurpose the majority of endowment funds to repay student loan debt.

idk what exactly a "good school" is. I wasn't exactly impressed with the last set of lectures I watched from Stanford.

I think it's important to divide elite schools into undergrad and research.

During undergrad, the benefits are plenty. Brand name, excellent on-campus recruitment, bright and/or highly driven peer students, valuable networking opportunities, challenging coursework if you want it.

But with that said, taking Calc 1 at most elite schools isn't too different from taking calc 1 at some random school way down the (ranking) list. The syllabus will be the same, quality of your lecturer could go either way. At the undergrad level, there's really not much as far as "cutting edge" goes - after all, you're there to learn the fundamentals.

I'd say that it is at the research level that you'll start to see real payoffs. Mostly because these schools tend to attract top talent in the different fields, and have the funds to pay for them. And there's a pipeline between elite academia, and elite private (industry) research groups.

Yes, even 10M for 100 Univ's and make Stanford one of them and then give more to which ever Univ makes most progress to the cause. One would think he would know how to hedge his money across since he is a VC.

Well, there are 300 million of us. With $3 each, we could do what this guy did. So, fine, I'll have a friend give $5 on my behalf to a 2nd tier school. Your turn.

https://imgur.com/a/H6vEUsY

Post here when each of you who are concerned have shown your concern through your own action.

$100M to the University of the South Pacific would have a massive, massive impact.

I read a great article about Catalytic Philanthropy many years ago. For the irony, I submitted a Stanford hosted copy to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31265490

Read the first three paragraphs, and then you won't be able to stop.

Is that true though? There's the idea of the 10x programmer, and from looking at academia, such thing as a 10x researcher as well.

In biology, the median 100th-ranked university professor is making incredibly incremental contributions (like applying a well known technique to the 300th gene). The average top university professor is making groundbreaking achievements.

I almost view it as the opposite -- if you gave the Watson and Crick lab (back in its heyday) $100, much more real impactful science would result compared to giving 100 me-too scientists $1.

A good programmer doesn’t take suck their talent from other programmers around them. Giving so much to a handful of establishments sucks up the best researchers and projects

Or even better, Rosalind Franklin.

But if we compare it to the stock market - it's almost always better to buy the index instead of picking individual stocks.

With hindsight, yes. It is difficult to predict which field/researcher may become the 10x and which may not. Even an expert panel may have difficulty in judging the prospect of completely novel research. Giving funds only to 10x researchers is akin to investing in stocks that only go up; it sounds appealing, but in reality, how could a funder like NIH or NSF tell who is the 10x?

This comparison is misleading, because it is based on a wrong perspective of how research works:

In programming, if everyone would "just" be good enough, everyone could the elusive 10x programmer. In research, even if everyone would be the equivalent of the 10x programmer, there is simply often a lot of "boring" work to be done, such as what you dismissed as incredibly incremental contribution, to prepare the foundation for the next breakthrough. That means that "10x researchers" could, for various reasons including luck, end up in the 100th percentile because they have chosen a field that is not yet ready for a breakthrough (think, e.g. ML researchers slogging through the AI winter, wo didn't stick with ML until hardware became fast enough). Being the person making the groundbraking achievements means standing "on the shoulder of giants" as someone said a few centuries ago.

I wouldn't be surprised if today there are more "10x researchers" out there than there are breakthroughs waiting to be made.

We are burning incredible amounts of coal 40 years after we started talking about climate change. I believe around 40% of global electricity is from coal.

We keep waiting for the windmills and batteries to solve the problem, while kicking the can down the road

https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/03/more-tha...

The amount of energy we use is expected to increase in 30 years. The percentage of that from coal is expected to go down. Great, right?

No, we are basically on a path to burn the same amount of coal in the future (but a larger percentage of our energy will come from other sources).

I’m not a doomer but we aren’t taking this issue seriously at all. The policy solutions exist but the political power isn’t there. I’m starting to think our best chance is a technological leap in carbon capture.

> kicking the can down the road

When I was a kid, I remember my uncle introduced me to a guy he worked for who had made his initial fortune way back. It turns out that he bought a company that sold inner tubes for car tires, and when the automakers first moved to tubeless tires, the business owner wanted to sell. So, my uncle's friend bought him out cheap, and then targeted all the buyers of the new cars with tubeless tires. Apparently, the new car buyers didn't trust the tubeless tires yet, and the first place then went was to my uncle's friend to get tubes for their tubeless tires.

The lesson here is that change is hard, and as humans, we aren't very good at it. My guess is that humanity will be kicking the can down the road for quite awhile.

They don't even have a nuclear engineering department! They might as well endow a theology seminary; it's the same category of problem-solving.

This is mainly prestige signalling, isn't it? He's a Silicon Valley oligarch, and this is the elite Silicon Valley school. If there's some additional, meritocratic factor specific to Stanford, for this type of billion-dollar gift... what is it?

edit: Perhaps it's synergies with their Natural Gas Initiative [0].

[0] https://ngi.stanford.edu/

edit 2: That's $1.98 million/year in oil & gas industry funding (adding up the tiers on this pricelist [1]).

[1] https://ngi.stanford.edu/content/corporate-affiliates-progra...

- "The NGI Industrial Affiliate Program offers three levels of membership:"

- "Sustaining Member ($250,000 per year), Corporate Member ($75,000 per year), and Basic Member ($35,000 per year, available to non Fortune 500 companies)"

99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies.

What I see here is lots of money for talks, articles, conferences, and “awareness.”

Climate conferences are always held in nice places that you have to fly to. They’d do more for the environment by taking that money and paying people to pick up trash on the side of the highway. Of course, that’s why “climate” is the problem nowadays and not “the environment.” The former is a problem for other people to solve, the latter is a problem you can do something about yourself but requires getting off the couch.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2021/11/05/118-...

> 99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies.

China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran combined produce about four times the GHG emissions of the US (and nearly half of all world emissions). Move forward in time 30 years and add in countries with large populations like Pakistan, and it's clear that making alternatives to fossil fuels cheaper is a big deal for climate change. That's not to say the US political situation is of trivial importance, but it's not accurate to say we should ignore everything else.

Why could any of those countries not make the same argument, saying all other countries + the US pollute a lot more than them therefore thats not really their business ?

Not sure if you replied to the wrong person, but that's certainly not anything I said. I was responding to someone that wrote "99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies". If you make green technology cheaper, then those technologies will be adopted in the countries I listed. And the most effective way to reduce them in those countries is to make green alternatives cheaper. You're not going to accomplish much if you focus exclusively on reducing US GHG emissions.

If someone is willing to talk about nuclear as option. I know their serious and have done some basic research and maybe willing to negotiate viable solutions.

Most everyone else is either ignorantly repeating what they are told, or trying to make money off them.

> China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran combined produce about four times GHG emissions of the US

And? These countries combined have ten times the population of US and still only emit four times that of US. The per capita emissions of West are staggeringly high. Not to forget the west has already developed while these are all developing countries who will pollute more due to their growth phase. The responsibility of dealing with climate change primarily lies with the west only.

I'm not telling you not to hold these beliefs. I fully understand that some people do not believe GHG emissions or climate change are a problem. As a matter of "what the data says", most emissions do not come from the US, and with realistic projections for the next 30 years, a much smaller percentage will come from the US. You're absolutely free to hold the belief that China, India, and other countries should not have to do anything to curtail their emissions.

Thats simply not true. Engineering 'solutions' to climate change like more efficient or cleaner technologies, or things like direct air capture are also social signaling, although more veiled and perhaps self delusional. These solutions are the equivalent of building more lanes on a highway instead of going with public transportation solutions. If anything many of these technologies may end up making climate change demonstrably worse through increased consumption.

The only real solution to climate change is to decrease the rate of consumption and the overall size of the human population. 'Technical' solutions to climate change aren't. They'll simply increase our bandwidth for pollution.

The answers to climate change aren't technical, they're social. Society needs to become comfortable with the idea that doing less, being less productive and less consumptive, are fine. UBI, socialized healthcare, a guarantee of a basic social safety net so people can be very unproductive and still live safe, reasonably comfortable lives is what we need to solve climate change.

> The only real solution to climate change is to decrease the overall size of the human population.

I would say reducing the US population would be more effective then reducing human population in an undefined way

I see a lot of people saying “society needs to be more comfortable with less.” I never see anyone saying “I need to be comfortable with less.”

Colleges should offer a Bachelor of Science in Social Engineering. It would consist of spending four years writing “social engineering does not work” on a blackboard over and over.

Public health has a history of social engineering, sometimes successful.

I think there’s room for debate about what “social engineering” means. I’m talking specifically about hoping to solve a problem by convincing people to do something they don’t want to do, whether that’s exercise and lose weight or turn down the heat and put on a sweater to fight climate change.

You can educate people and provide them with low cost, high benefit options. But you can’t change human nature or brow beat people into having different priorities than they do.

> I’m talking specifically about hoping to solve a problem by convincing people to do something they don’t want to do

Ironically, the social engineering project most impactful to global warming exists to give people what they (think they) want, not to force them to do something they don't want to do. They're called suburbs. We made a whole range of living arrangements flat-out illegal, because (most) people express a preference for low-density living. A social engineering project of historical proportions. You're right; we should eliminate it.

People should be allowed to build whatever kind of housing they want to build on property they own and we should eliminate the social engineering scheme that restricts developers to single-family homes in most areas.

> They don't even have a nuclear engineering department!

Why criticize that they're establishing something on the basis of not having something?

Are they establishing a nuclear engineering department? I don't see that in the article

The implication they are making is that nuclear power will solve the climate problem.

Donations are made because of relationships. The donor likely has a relationship with Stanford or leaders at Stanford and has had many conversations with them about what he might donate money for. This is what they came up with.

And, yes, donations are often vanity projects. He will likely get his name on a building, maybe an honorary degree. His name is now forever tied to Stanford.

'Mr. Doerr joins a growing list of ultrawealthy men donating huge sums of money to the fight against global warming. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in 2020 said he was committing $10 billion of his own money to a new initiative he called the Bezos Earth Fund, and last year detailed how some of the money would be spent.

Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, said in 2019 he would spend $500 million to help close coal-fired power plants. And Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has put billions of dollars to work on climate related issues through various efforts, including Breakthrough Energy and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Yet some question whether these philanthropic investments can make a difference when it comes to a 'planetary crisis'.

I can't help feeling v cynical and paranoid about motives here

I too feel somewhat skeptical & cynical... but given the political situation in the US, and specifically the deadlock in the US Senate (filibuster), the philanthropy of billionaires seems like one of the most viable ways towards making progress at this point. It's not ideal, but we don't seem to have a lot of other viable options at this point.

@uncleOxidant (great screen name!) Don't disagree but a weak deadlocked 'democracy'. with uberrich globalists making key decisions and funding them is not a good way forward either. The German National Socialists were great 'green' investors in the 1930's, that didn't end well...

https://www.amazon.com/Green-Tyranny-Exposing-Totalitarian-I...

> given the political situation in the US, and specifically the deadlock in the US Senate (filibuster), the philanthropy of billionaires seems like one of the most viable ways towards making progress at this point

It's probably not coincidence that the party that serves the power of the wealthy does things in the Senate to shift power to the wealthy.

For anyone wondering, this is not an accident. Billionaires greatly prefer it when they are seen by the public as the only viable solution to progress.

Bill Gates also has a $500M short bet against Tesla.

Exactly how big are all those efforts he's allegedly making to do something about climate change?

I wonder if he cashed that out in recent days now that his short position is in the money? If so then maybe he doubled (or better) his $500M and he can plow those profits into more philanthropy?

Bill entered the short position some time in 2020 (or earlier), so still not in the money.

You can think Tesla stock is overvalued AND want to do something about climate change. It looks like he wrote a book and donate 2 billion with another 2 billion promised[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/heres-bill-gates-not-help-figh...

He was trash talking Tesla for a long time because his friend Warren Buffet invested in Chinese copy cats. He could have helped Tesla in 2008 a lot, but now his opinion and money doesn't count that much actually, as there's a healthy clean energy investor base at this point.

Tesla is overvalued, if it wasn't Musk wouldn't have sold 8 billion US in Tesla stock to buy Twitter.

Tesla isn't going to solve climate change.

Taking private money and making it public for the purpose of combating a global crisis is objectively a good thing. Cynical paranoia is not helping.

> Cynical paranoia is not helping.

I agree.

> Taking private money and making it public for the purpose of combating a global crisis is objectively a good thing.

It doesn't necessarily work out that way. It can distort the market and consume resources. For example (and IIRC from a journal article about 10 years ago), in western Africa philanthropic funding from a foundation went toward treatment for a disease (AIDS?); their money bought up all the healthcare resources, including medical personnel, diverting them from where they could have saved more lives.

More broadly, that much money is not just economic activity but also power, and it can be misused even with the best intentions.

Is there any negative externality in this particular version? Opening a new school to educate future generations such that they contribute new solutions seems totally positive to me.

positive and thoughtful paranoia, not 'cynical'...capitalism...

> Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, said in 2019 he would spend $500 million to help close coal-fired power plants.

Did he, or was he just prepping his image for a presidential run? The website (https://www.beyondcarbon.org/) and associated social media accounts have not been updated since he launched his campaign two and a half years ago, and I can't find any specific actions or plans or people. There's quite a bit of information about Mike Bloomberg though. Seems like it was just an issue-specific campaign website.

Breakthrough Energy is venture capital, not philanthropy. It is intended to make a profit. The Gates Foundation doesn't appear to do any climate change work.

Bezos Earth Fund does seem to be actively donating real money to real projects, which is nice. Bezos earns a "could be worse" badge on this particular topic.

> Bezos Earth Fund

I assume this is to clean up all the trash Amazon sells?

The Xprize carbon removal is a $100m competition -- https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk

IMHO, all the competitors have something that can only make a difference at enormous scale. It's a huge risk to invest in anything that attempts to make a difference in the medium term.

[edit - I've also submitted this link to HN - https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk/articles/meet-the-com... ]

It's interesting that KPCB founder is on the climate school - they haven't managed to move the needle on climate. I'll give them their due they did put a fight in the original clean tech VC round but investors got hammered. Now I think they are working on climate tech (rebrand in the investor world) but can anyone correct me if I am wrong? Have they had any big impacts - happy to be corrected here.

As I understand it - KPCB early VC gold standard company - made money off tech. I don't want to sound too harsh as KPCB have done some pretty impressive things in the investment world - feels like a green washing or something along those lines.

Is investing in a university endowment the best way to put $1.1B to work combating climate change? How about investing in companies developing clean energy technologies?

Probably not, but it probably is the best way to get a building/department named after you.

> Is investing in a university endowment the best way to put $1.1B to work combating climate change? How about investing in companies developing clean energy technologies?

Why is investing in research at a university less valuable than investing in research in the private sector? HN might have a bias toward the latter, effectively that people should invest more in the HN population.

What do your do with a degree in climatology? It’s not a good idea to get these odd degrees as they are not good for signaling to potential employers.

If it's from Stanford, pretty much whatever you want. So, basically, investment banking or data science (those are still two separate jobs right?).

"If it's from Stanford, pretty much whatever you want."

That not true at all. The name of the university can only get you so far. For example, if you have a climate-related degree, can you really compete with Stanford CS majors for a SDE job? Or with ME majors for a product design position?

IMO if you get into Stanford and can pay for the degree, it would be a waste to spend it in a major like that unless you're really passionate and have very specific goals.

"So, basically, investment banking or data science"

Well, those are definitely not "whatever you want".

> if you have a climate-related degree, can you really compete with Stanford CS majors for a SDE job

For this specifically: Yes, depending on your extra curricular activities and interests. And if it was a graduate degree, then yeah almost certainly.

> if you have a climate-related degree, can you really compete with Stanford CS majors for a SDE job?

Thankfully there are fewer Stanford CS majors graduating than there are SDE jobs available.

How would that be any different than the people who get a degree in Petroleum Engineering (aside from the audience they are signaling) ?

It’s a bad choice too better to generalize in chem e

Ironically, I suspect a lot of them might end up in fossil fuel companies and do greenwashing R&D.

It actually does make more sense to pursue a physics degree with an emphasis on fluid dynamics (atmospheric and oceanic circulation being of great interest to future climate forecasts), or a chemistry degree with an emphasis on analytical measurement and kinetics (global elemental cycling, particulate dynamics, oceanic and atmospheric chemistry all being similarly important), or a biology degree with an emphasis on ecology and biochemistry (changing species distribution, methane biochemistry etc.).

This all goes under the rubric of 'planetary sciences' of which 'earth system science' is a sort of special case. Also means you could work at NASA on Jupiter's moons etc.

Most people pursuing a degree in physics would be more interested in core physics problems (quantum computing, particle physics, cosmology, etc.) than in climate change. Perhaps it is more difficult to motivate physics majors to turn to climate science than to teach climate scientists physics (since only a subset of physics is needed, mostly fluid dynamics). Otherwise, universities would have climate science in a physics department.

In grad school I pursued (at the time it was considered experimental) a minor in "Sustainability Management". This was like 10 years ago and there was nowhere near the amount of stuff happening in the space then as there is now - it was basically "how do we get corporations to reduce their emissions? LOL good luck" and "how do large scale renewable energy projects make it? Only gonna happen with government help". I was a little disappointed with it at the time but I'm really happy that the field has awoken and that tech is getting involved - I would love to see how "higher" education in that space has changed.

> What do your do with a degree in climatology?

I write code, ironically. I'm in the camp that believes degrees aren't _totally_ about what you learn but more about advancing your reasoning and thinking skills and learning how to interact with people (not to say you don't learn anything in school, you definitely do but IMHO it largely depends on what you study).

Archived: https://archive.ph/2022.05.04-155800/https://www.nytimes.com...

Better to spend $1.1b lobbying for a $100/tonne Carbon Tax. Heck, for $1.1b you could probably just buy a US President or their children.

Honest, albeit very naive question:

Why not start a college? Does he not want the additional headaches and costs, is he playing status games, does he think Stanford could do a better job running this school than him, or some combination of the three

In addition to the reasons you have listed, it would probably be a big headache to jump through accreditation hurdles, hire staff, find a physical location, and any number of other problems that would distract from the goals he has in mind.

Much harder to start a new successful college than put money in one that's already successful. It takes a very long time to build a successful academic institution (Stanford is 136 years old, MIT 161, Harvard 385, etc.)

There's also the prestige aspect. Stanford carries weight in elite circles, so more bragging rights for the Doerr family I guess. It's why many rich people keep throwing money towards elite universities with tens of billions of dollars in their endowments already.

Tell me you care more about your legacy than actually helping the world without telling me you care more about your legacy than actually helping the world.

Why criticize someone for caring about their legacy when they're making an enormous contribution to the public good?

Wrong lens. Who cares about his ego when he's making a real impact?

A lot of people feel that the fact a single human can amass so much money is part of the problem. It incentivizes people to maximize profit and money over all else, sucking up all available cash they possibly can with little regard to how it's generated and what damage they do in the process. Profits are privatized while losses are socialized. Meaning when they start paying their profits back into the public good, are we talking about a net positive gain for society here, or is it just a form of restitution to atone for the damage they caused?

How is donating to Stanford, a private university, making an enormous contribution to the public good?

You can't see how improving educational programs specific to climate change benefits the public?

Very tenuous that this specific donation will do that. Most likely it will be used for a building (which requires concrete, a major CO2 contributor), and the rest will go to the university's endowment where it will sit.

We are going to need all the help in ensuring the planet is habitable for future souls.

At this point this is equivalent to Scott's Tots. There is not much time left and those who have been already educated need to take action now.

They'll build a building and mint degrees, this doesn't seem very Entrepreneurial to me, more legacy naming kind of thing.

Would be nice to see hard core innovators do hardcore things.

Like solar, nuclear, carbon sequestration etc..

How about a School for Ethical and Sustainable Geoengineering instead?

what a collasal waste of money

sure, it's mildly better than hoarding the money in his investment profile, and is the tiniest step in the right direction for the moral responsibility of billionaires, but nothing about this is effective by any measure against the timescale and enormity of the problem of global warming

did you know that the *entire* nsf budget for the year is only around $8 billion?

Why does stanford need a billion dollars to do something. Whats the purpose of their endowment?

More evidence that those who know how to make money do not know what do with it.

> "Climate and sustainability is going to be the new computer science"

This is nuts. I'd bet that, 10 years from now, this donation is likely to have returned less than 5% in value to society.

That are so many better ways to use this money to benefit climate and nature in general...

This is great news. We need to find a way to stop the runaway global cooling and warm the planet enough to melt the ice caps. A warmer earth will support a much more robust ecosystem, helping to ensure our survival as a species.

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