BILLIONAIRE GEORGE Soros, looking to address the “political problem” of climate change, said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy technology and create an organisation to advise policy makers on environmental issues.
Mr Soros, the founder of hedge fund Soros Fund Management LLC, announced the investment in Copenhagen on Saturday at a meeting on climate change sponsored by Project Syndicate.
The group is an international association made up of 430 newspapers from 150 countries.
“I want to apply rather stringent criteria to the investments,” said Mr Soros in an e-mail.
“They should be profitable but should also actually make a contribution to solving the problem.”
Mr Soros, whose own wealth accounts for much of the approximately $24 billion his New York-based money-management firm oversees, did not provide any details in his speech on the type or scope of investments he might make.
Mr Soros (79), also will establish the Climate Policy Initiative, a San Francisco-based organisation to which he will donate $10 million a year for 10 years.
“It will be part advisory service, part policy developer and part watchdog,” said Thomas Heller, who is heading the initiative. Heller is a professor at Stanford University Law School whose expertise is in energy law and regulation and environmental law.
Its goal is to look after the public interest as policies and programs are created to address climate change. The group will work in the US, Europe, China, India and Brazil, he said.
“The problem of global warming is primarily a political problem at this point,” Mr Soros said.
“The science is beyond dispute, but how do we achieve the objectives we all know are necessary? That is a political problem.”
– Bloomberg
