Sorry, solar panels won’t stop California’s fires

The decision by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan to use 99% of their Facebook shares to fund charitable initiatives over their lives is an overwhelming statement of generosity. The massive challenge for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be how to achieve the most good with this money.

Individual philanthropists play a vital role in development, not least because – unlike political initiatives or groups dependent on fundraising – billionaires can afford to ignore lobby groups and popular attention.

CBC news, Thursday, August 14, 2008 If Bill Gates, say, offered you $10 billion to solve the big problems of the world, what would you spend it on? Counterterrorism? Global warming? World hunger? What about on the three great plagues of the modern era: HIV, malaria, TB? Where do you think you would get the most bang for your buck? These are exactly the questions a think-tank called the Copenhagen Consensus has been asking, on three occasions now, over the past four years, with the support of such influential publications as The Economist magazine and, this year, the Wall Street Journal.

On the sidelines of the 2015 Paris climate summit, then-UK prime minister David Cameron and 19 other world leaders made a promise to double green energy research and development by 2020.

The United Kingdom is on course to break that promise. As a percentage of GDP, spending on low-carbon energy R&D has stayed sluggishly around 0.02 per cent since 2015, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).