It's disappointing to see colossal amounts of money like this isn't used to address demonstrable human suffering happening all over the world right now. Microsoft could take this money, set up shop in Haiti, and develop over the course of a generation a tech sector in a country whose main export is t-shirts. They might even eventually make enough return to reinvest in other areas and bring the rest of the world up to first world standards.
Instead, this money is going to pool in upper class first world green economies as they use it to buy expensive electric cars, install expensive solar panels, and fund expensive climate change activists. That their efforts might slightly reduce the number of hurricanes in a hundred years is little consolation to the thousands of lives lost every decade in that country to natural disasters and disease, otherwise be preventable if the population wasn't living in shanty towns.
> buy expensive electric cars, install expensive solar panels, and fund expensive climate change activists
Studies indicate that dealing with the effects of climate change is going to be far more expensive than averting it in the first place. This "expense" is an illusion.
> little consolation to the thousands of lives lost every decade in that country to natural disasters and disease
Climate change is also going to cause tremendous human misery in the form of floods, fires, increased temperatures, harvest failures, and so on. Places like Haiti are going to be the worst hit.
There is no reason philanthropy cannot be used to tackle multiple issues at once. I'm not sure there is a lot value in deriding one cause over another. We need to address both issues.
I just looked up the cost for my home for solar on Google's project Sunroof. It would cost me $14,000 upfront, after the personal tax incentives (tax $$) and some ungodly amount of tax-assisted R&D ($$$), and it will save me $8,000 over 20 years. It looks more like a dollar going into a dumpster fire to me.
You’re in the USA? If so, your permit and installation costs are the single largest part of the whole thing. The actual panels and inverters are cheap, utility-scale PV is cheap even in the USA, and even home solar is cheap when the government isn’t getting in your way — my parents and my in-laws in the UK (the entirety of which is north of the entire contiguous USA and which is not known for lacking building regulations) have PV systems which each cost about half your quote and which generate about £1,000/year each.
The cost of solar is now about half what they spent.
A well-done rooftop solar installation in 2020 will last you more like 30 years. That $8,000 comes after the payback period, meaning you end up with a 60% ROI.
Solar isn’t expensive any more. Prices have fallen so much it’s now one of the cheapest forms of electricity — the kind of thing someone living in a shanty town might want to install to replace a sooty diesel generator or an easily broken kerosene lamp.
And if nobody does anything, in a generation the main export will be refugees.
Batteries are also cheap now. Heck, if you’re talking about literal shanty towns, a bag of rocks on a chain attached to a dynamo bolted to the ceiling can store enough energy to be useful.
Could you have said the same thing about going to space many decades ago? Yet, with hindsight, we can see going to space had a huge return on investment.
Instead, this money is going to pool in upper class first world green economies as they use it to buy expensive electric cars, install expensive solar panels, and fund expensive climate change activists. That their efforts might slightly reduce the number of hurricanes in a hundred years is little consolation to the thousands of lives lost every decade in that country to natural disasters and disease, otherwise be preventable if the population wasn't living in shanty towns.