來源 : 比爾蓋茲
(The final 10% is a sixth, miscellaneous category that includes things like the energy it takes to extract oil and gas.)
I think these grand challenges are a helpful way to think about climate change. They show how energy isn't just what runs your house and your car. It's core to nearly every part of your life: the food you eat, the clothes you wear , the home you live in, the products you use. To stop the planet from getting substantially warmer, we need breakthroughs in how we make things, grow food, and move people and goods —not just how we power our homes and cars.
These challenges are only getting more urgent. The world's middle class has been growing at an unprecedented rate, and as you move up the income ladder, your carbon footprint expands. Instead of walking everywhere, you can afford a bicycle (which doesn't use gas but is likely made with energy-intensive metal and gets to you via cargo ships and trucks that run on fossil fuels). Eventually you get a motorbike so you can travel farther from home to work a better job and afford to send your kids to school. Your family eats more eggs, meat, and dairy, so they get better nutrition. You're in the market for a refrigerator, electric lights so your kids can study at night, and a sturdy home built with metal and concrete.
All of that new consumption translates into tangible improvements in people's lives. It is good for the world overall—but it will be very bad for the climate, unless we find ways to do it without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
This is undoubtedly a tough problem. It is not obvious what the big breakthroughs will look like. Most likely we will need several solutions to each challenge. That is why we need to invest in lots of research and development, across all five areas, now .
Fortunately, governments and the private sector are stepping up. Since the 2015 launch of Mission Innovation—two dozen governments that committed to doubling their spending on clean-energy R&D—the amount of funding available has gone up by more than $3 billion a year.
Personally, I'm part of a group of investors in a private fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), which is putting more than $1 billion into helping promising companies take great ideas from the lab to market at scale. We're using the five grand challenges I mentioned above as the framework for our investments. Every idea we're supporting is designed to solve one of them—and our mission is about to get a big boost from a new partnership in Europe.
We're still working out the details, but here's what I can tell you today: I'll be in Brussels this week to sign an agreement between Breakthrough Energy and the European Commission. Our goal is to create a joint investment vehicle called Breakthrough Energy Europe, which will serve as a pilot fund investing in European companies working on the grand challenges. The partners will commit €100 million, half from the European Commission and half from BEV.
But this isn't only about funding. We're creating a new way of putting that money to work.
Because energy research can take years—even decades—to come to fruition, companies need patient investors who are willing to work with them over the long term. Governments could in theory provide that kind of investing, but in reality, they aren't great at identifying promising companies and staying nimble to help those companies grow.
That's where this partnership can shine. It allows the European Commission, which is funding cutting-edge research and development, to partner with investors who know how to build companies well. Because the fund will be privately managed, it can avoid some of the bureaucracy that slows things down and makes it hard to support new companies. We'll have the resources to make a meaningful difference, and the flexibility to move quickly. That's a rare combination.
I hope this partnership is just the beginning. We need many more like this one around the world.