I believe a lot of the money from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is farmed out to various other parties, who are then meticulously scrutinised to work out which mechanisms give the best outcomes for the money spent. Basically applying business capital allocation principles to doing things that aren't normally economically viable.
Cheers Ken -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of silky Sent: Sunday, 21 February 2010 9:18 PM To: ausDotNet Subject: Re: [OT] Bill gates on our energy futures - some tech miracles needed On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 8:33 PM, Ian Thomas <[email protected]> wrote: > Sunday OT - way off track for .NET, but there is a 28-minute talk by > Bill Gates given recently at TED 2010 called "Gates on energy: > Innovating to zero!" I thought that some may be interested in Bill Gates' > perspective. > > Summary: At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's > energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary > catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different > type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally > by 2050. I find it fairly annoying that this would be called a "miracle"; it makes the word itself kind of useless, but anyway, that's probably just the hype of having to do a public talk on it. I do think it's good if a significant amount of money is spent in this area; and he certainly has that capacity (as well as encouraging others) so that's nice to see. What would really be nice if he not only funded his own ideas, but others, to hedge the bets, so to speak. But maybe he's already doine that (I certainly don't plan to watch the video to find out).
