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To Hit Climate Goals, Bill Gates and His Billionaire Friends Are Betting on Energy Storage (qz.com)
Akshat Rathi, writing for Quartz: The world needs radical new energy technologies to fight climate change. In 2016, Quartz reported that a group of billionaires -- including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson -- launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) to invest at least $1 billion in creating those technologies. Now, 18 months later, Quartz can reveal the first two startups that BEV will be investing in: Form Energy and Quidnet Energy. Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
Ugly problem: Billionaires must spend time deciding what to do with their money.
Who has a better life? A surfer who pays his parents $500 per month to live in their basement, or a billionaire? A serious investigation of all the associated details may sometimes indicate that the surfer has a better life.
Maybe the surfer is not doing anything that is destructive to other people.
Bill Gates said he still manages Microsoft: "I'm there about 15 percent of the time." Even though he is rich, Bill Gates spends his time managing a company that took advantage of technical limits (People can't change operating systems easily.) to abuse people.
Examples of abuse by Microsoft and Bill Gates:
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you.
Microsoft again forced upgrades on Win10 machines specifically set to block updates (March 12, 2018)
Abusing people is a really, really ugly life.
I'm picturing a fire at a "grid-scale" lithium-ion battery farm...
And I'm picturing the worldwide marshmallow** shortage and massive increase in average obesity levels among the local population to follow...
Strat :)
**(Lithium-roasted marshmallows might be a way to increase prescribed lithium-based medication compliance among mentally ill "street people". :) )
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.