Published on Nov 29, 2015
French riot police at the Place de la Republique in central Paris fire tear gas at about 200 climate change protesters some of whom wear masks and fought with police. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).
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Published on Dec 14, 2015
We had climate talks in Paris, which have now reached a conclusion. We have a deal. Is it a good deal? It depends who you ask… Cenk Uygur, host of the The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
“After two weeks of tense talks, word-wrangling and marathon overnight meetings, diplomats in Paris agreed to a global climate change accord on Saturday evening
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Published on Nov 30, 2015
Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and pretty much every other crazy rich tech leader you can imagine have announced that they’re banding together to combat climate change with a new partnership called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. Through the partnership, the group’s members have committed to use a substantial portion of their hundreds of billions of dollars in collective net worth to invest in early stage clean energy companies. Zuckerberg wrote a Facebook post Sunday night announcing the partnership. The timing of the announcement coincides with the global climate conference, COP21, taking place in Paris this week, where world leaders including President Barack Obama will convene to discuss their plans to deal with climate change.
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Published on Nov 27, 2015
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced in June that he would invest $1 billion in clean energy tech over the next five years Now, Gates is reportedly making good on that promise by launching a multi-billion dollar fund focused on clean energy research and development. The fund, reportedly scheduled to be unveiled Monday in Paris, during the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be funded by Gates and other billionaires to a multibillion tune, though exact figures are unknown at this point.
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Published on Nov 29, 2015
President Obama will join with the leaders of 18 other countries as well as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on Monday at the United Nations Climate Summit in Paris to launch a historic expansion in clean energy research and development funding. This funding will come both in the form of public sector financing and private sector backing, and together they are likely to constitute the biggest investments in clean energy technologies in history. Under the public sector program, which is known as Mission Innovation, each participating country will commit to a doubling of its respective research and development funding within the next five years.
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Published on Dec 10, 2015
Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, says his nation faces being consumed by rising sea levels no matter what happens in Paris.
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Published on Nov 30, 2015
Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates tells Nature why he’s attending the UN climate talks in Paris.
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Published on Nov 30, 2015
At the United Nations climate change conference in Paris, President Obama joins world leaders from 19 other countries to launch “Mission Innovation,” a new initiative aimed at dramatically accelerating public and private global clean energy research and development.
Partial transcript:
Good afternoon. Prime Minister Modi and I apologize for being late but, I can assure you, we were working and hopefully helping to advance President Hollande’s agenda and a successful Paris summit. I want to thank François, my fellow leaders, Prime Minister Modi, and Bill Gates — two of the driving forces behind today’s announcement.
We’re here because we recognize the urgency of climate change and we believe that there’s something that we can all do about it as long as we work together. And while the agreement that we seek in Paris will be forged by governments, the ambitious targets that we set for ourselves are going to be reached in large part by the efforts of our scientists, our businesses, our workers, our investors. And that’s why the private sector — from inventors to investors – will have a seat at the table throughout this process.
Helping developing nations skip the dirty phase of development is vital to meeting this challenge. One of the things that Prime Minister Modi and I discussed is you’ve got 300 million people in India who still don’t have electricity. We cannot forge a climate agreement that says they are permanently resigned to not having electricity. That’s not an option. So we have to make sure that the same process of development is taking place but using a whole new set of technologies and arrangements so that we don’t have a conflict between development and solving this climate crisis.
But the leap forward is going to take much more than pledges for development assistance from governments. It’s going to take private sector efforts and a commitment to innovation, and the capital to keep driving down the cost of clean energy all around the world.
And that why, today, we’re announcing Mission Innovation. And I believe this is going to be one of the most significant public-private partnerships ever forged to accelerate energy innovation on a global scale.
First of all, the 20 participating nations, representing more than 80 percent of global clean energy innovation dollars, we’re going to seek to double our R&D budget over the next five years.
Second, a coalition of 28 leading private investors from all over the world, including both Democrats and Republicans from the United States — some folks who support me and some folks who haven’t always in the past on politics but do support the climate change agenda — are committing to invest unprecedented resources to bring those technologies to the market.
And we know that this kind of partnership works. I’ll give you an example. Shortly after I took office, the United States made the single biggest federal investment in clean energy in our history. And those investments helped drive down the cost of clean energy faster than anyone thought possible, including me at the time. There are now thousands of private sector renewable energy projects nationwide — projects that employ tens of thousands of Americans, and help drive down our carbon emissions.
Thanks in part to these investments, America now generates 20 times as much solar power as we did in 2008. Last year was solar’s biggest year ever — prices fell by 10 percent, installations climbed by 30 percent, and the solar industry added jobs more than 10 times faster than the rest of the economy.
Now, Bill has pointed out and he’s absolutely right that we’re also going to have to just invent some entirely new technologies. I mean, the truth is, if we adapt existing technologies and make them cheaper and faster and more readily available, if we improve energy efficiency, we’re still only going to get part of the way there and there’s still going to be a big gap to fill. And that’s where these research dollars become so important. Because we don’t yet know exactly what’s going to work best. But we know that if we put our best minds behind it and we have the dollars behind it, we’ll discover what works. We always have in the past, and we will this time as well.
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Published on Nov 27, 2015
Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates has pledged $2bn to an international clean energy initiative to be announced at the upcoming UN Climate Change Summit.
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Published on Dec 1, 2015
Innovation needed in energy to solve climate change issues:Bill Gates
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, called on countries across the world to put more efforts in research and innovation to solve the climate change issues which are under heat discussions at the ongoing COP21 (the 21st annual Conference of the Parties) meetings in Paris.
“Well, innovation is always the biggest thing.The innovation in cellphone help them get communications. The innovation in vaccines is helping them improve their health. The innovation in better seeds is helping their farming productivity. So we need to do the same in energy,” he said.
On Monday, Bill Gates and other entrepreneurs, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, jointly announced a global plan for promoting private investment in clean energy, the new multibillion-dollar “Breakthrough Energy Coalition” and he called on developed countries to help developing countries to solve climate change problems by scientific researches and innovation. More on: http://news.cctvplus.tv/NewJsp/news.j…
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