Divestment from fossil fuels would be ineffective on its own as a means of halting global warming, software billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates said on Friday.
Pulling money out of carbon-heavy industry must be coupled with large spending on alternative technologies to make any difference, Gates said.
The Microsoft mogul is under fire for his charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s reported US$1.4 billion investment in carbon-spewing companies such as BP PLC.
Photo: AFP
The Financial Times reported an announcement on Friday by Gates that he would invest US$2 billion in green energy, but would not pull his money out of companies that pump out carbon dioxide emissions blamed for climate change.
“I think the solution is investment,” Gates said later in Paris on the sidelines of the Solidays anti-AIDS-themed concert, which he backs.
“My concern is that I love the fact that students and people care about climate change, and I do not want to make them think that if they get people to divest that they have solved climate change,” he added.
Gates, who speaks of climate change as a major threat to the planet, said he was “not really against divestment,” as long as it was coupled with “some serious investments in breakthrough technology.”
People might become cynical “if we do not tell them which actions really make a difference and which ones do not,” Gates said.
In response to a grassroots movement modeled on 1980s opposition to apartheid in South Africa, companies, banks and investment funds, primarily European, have in recent weeks announced that they would halt investments in coal and other carbon-emitting industries.
High-profile examples include the Church of England, the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Stanford University in California.
The Norwegian legislature this month voted to pull its sovereign wealth fund — the world’s biggest — out of coal and French energy group Total SA has said it plans to end its coal activities.
The world’s nations are negotiating a new, global pact to be inked in Paris in December that would curb climate change through emission cuts.
The goal is to limit average global warming to 2?C over pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this would require annual emissions cuts of 40 to 70 percent by 2050, compared with levels in 2010 — and to zero or below by 2100.
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