More evidence that those who know how to make money do not know what do with it.
Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
71–80 of 214 posts
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#72Why does stanford need a billion dollars to do something. Whats the purpose of their endowment?
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies. What I see here is lots of money for talks, articles, conferences, and “awareness.” Climate conferences are always held in nice places that you have to fly to. They’d do more for the environment by taking that money and paying people to pick up trash on the side of the highway. O…
> 99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies. China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran combined produce about four times the GHG emissions of the US (and nearly half of all world emissions). Move forward in time 30 years and add in countries with large populations like Pakistan, and it's clear that making alternat…
Why could any of those countries not make the same argument, saying all other countries + the US pollute a lot more than them therefore thats not really their business ?
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#74I am concerned about the incredible concentration of money and resources into a few academic institutions. Obviously Stanford is an incredible school, but I am not sure Stanford will do more with $1B than 10 2nd tier schools would do with $100M each.
It would be great to repurpose the majority of endowment funds to repay student loan debt.
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#75They don't even have a nuclear engineering department! They might as well endow a theology seminary; it's the same category of problem-solving. This is mainly prestige signalling, isn't it? He's a Silicon Valley oligarch, and this is the elite Silicon Valley school. If there's some additional, meritocratic factor specific to Stanford, for this type of billion-dollar gift... what is it? edit: Perhaps it's synergies wi…
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Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies. What I see here is lots of money for talks, articles, conferences, and “awareness.” Climate conferences are always held in nice places that you have to fly to. They’d do more for the environment by taking that money and paying people to pick up trash on the side of the highway. O…
> 99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies. China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Iran combined produce about four times the GHG emissions of the US (and nearly half of all world emissions). Move forward in time 30 years and add in countries with large populations like Pakistan, and it's clear that making alternat…
If someone is willing to talk about nuclear as option. I know their serious and have done some basic research and maybe willing to negotiate viable solutions.
Most everyone else is either ignorantly repeating what they are told, or trying to make money off them.
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#77I am concerned about the incredible concentration of money and resources into a few academic institutions. Obviously Stanford is an incredible school, but I am not sure Stanford will do more with $1B than 10 2nd tier schools would do with $100M each.
Isn't there a tax deduction aspect to a lot of these donations? Anyways, 100 more Nature-level articles about climate change is not going to change the situation if there is no political will (or if it seesaws every 4-8 years at best).
> 100 more Nature-level articles about climate change is not going to change the situation if there is no political will
All the political will does nothing without research. We need both.
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't there a tax deduction aspect to a lot of these donations? Anyways, 100 more Nature-level articles about climate change is not going to change the situation if there is no political will (or if it seesaws every 4-8 years at best).
There are some loopholes with donations, mostly regarding difficult-to-value benefits and also around donating dificult-to-value things rather than cash, stocks, and/or bonds. But, if you donate $1.1 billion to an eligible charity (and claim to have gotten nothing in return), then the US government basically pretends that you never made that money, and your tax bill goes down by roughly your marginal tax rate times t…
> But, if you donate $1.1 billion to an eligible charity (and claim to have gotten nothing in return), then the US government basically pretends that you never made that money, and your tax bill goes down by roughly your marginal tax rate times the size of the donation. There are limits and caveats, but in general, it's a pretty fair treatment.
I think it's highly unfair in that it shifts decisions on social spending from the democratically made decisions of the people to a few wealthy individuals.
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#79'Mr. Doerr joins a growing list of ultrawealthy men donating huge sums of money to the fight against global warming. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in 2020 said he was committing $10 billion of his own money to a new initiative he called the Bezos Earth Fund, and last year detailed how some of the money would be spent. Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, said in 2019 he would spend $500 million to help close co…
Bill Gates also has a $500M short bet against Tesla. Exactly how big are all those efforts he's allegedly making to do something about climate change?
Tesla is overvalued, if it wasn't Musk wouldn't have sold 8 billion US in Tesla stock to buy Twitter.
Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
#80Stanford's last major foray into this area was "The Global Climate and Energy Project"... a major sponsor was ExxonMobil. As you might guess, that didn't really do much in the way of producing renewable energy alternatives to fossil fuels... more like a green PR initiative. Somehow I don't think oil companies are thrilled about everyone driving EVs and seeing their market share collapse. https://gcep.stanford.edu/abo…
> A better option would just be to put $1 billion into a company dedicated to catching up to China on mass-scale monocrystalline PV wafer production
I don't know the parent commenter (though their name stands out), but on HN, isn't this essentially saying, 'give money to me/us'?