The march is on top gears as the world leaders are busy doing all they could to minimize the impact of climate change on the world. Twenty countries spearheaded by the United States of America are said to launch an initiative to increase their clean energy research and development budget over the next five years.
This is in a bid to have something done over the global climate challenges. Some USD 20 billion of which half of it is expected from the US White House, would be invested to tackle the challenges.
A formal announcement with regard to this will be made later today in a meeting with the US President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President F. Hollande with other leaders from both private and public sector.
It is expected that these additional resources are going to be of an immense help in combating and fixing this challenge that has held the world down for a long time now. As planned, according to a White House official, this new technologies will define a future global power mix that is totally clean, different from what is presently obtainable and will be both cleaner, more affordable, and reliable too.
A top Obama adviser, Brian Deese also said: “This is an effort designed to accelerate clean energy innovation and address global climate change, provide affordable clean energy to consumers with a special focus on the developing world in creating commercial opportunities for creating clean energy in developing countries”.
The countries participating on this huge project are: Denmark, Indonesia, Italy, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, France, Chile, Brazil, South Korea, UAE, Mexico,UK., USA, India among others.
These top 20 countries participating in the project are said to account for over 80 percent of global clean energy R&D. Deese was also quoted as adding this: “One thing that we know clearly is that the investment in basic research in clean energy technologies needs to be connected to private capital that’s willing to deploy against the most promising of those technologies and help bring them to scale.”
Each individual country will focus on clean energy efforts that best address their needs, this was highly commented on by the US Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz who said that in the US’ increase in funding, about 15 percent per year come 2017, would be the sole decision of the Congress.
He also added that, some other breakthroughs Energy Coalitions will follow simultaneously.
One of the heavy weights that are to be found in this enormous project is Bill Gates, who is to spearhead the global group of private investors that will supervise the research programmes of the Mission Innovation.
In a statement concerning the project, Bill Gates critically analyzed the whole situation and gave the following facts and figures about the project:
“The renewable technologies we have today, like wind and solar, have made a lot of progress and could be one path to a zero-carbon energy future,”
“But given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths—and that means we also need to invent new approaches. Private companies will ultimately develop these energy breakthroughs, but their work will rely on the kind of basic research that only governments can fund. Both have a role to play,” Gates said.
Another challenge he noted was the growing demand for energy, which he called a big problem because most that comes from hydrocarbons- which emit greenhouse and drive climate change in (question).
“So we need to move to sources of energy that are affordable and reliable, and don’t produce any carbon,” he said.
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