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Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

nytimes.com

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Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#31

Post by Invictus0 »

supersync wrote: post #20
daterdots wrote: post #11

I 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.

This is a very fair concern. First off, most of this funding will go to a building. The rest will go mostly to an endowment. The concentration of mega-gifts at the top has very perverse impacts. Harvard built a $100M building a few years ago that is used by a total of 100 people a year. Philanthropy combines prestige, PR, and “legacy” in a way that massively overvalued those three vs. any kind of measurable impact. T…

> Harvard built a $100M building a few years ago that is used by a total of 100 people a year.

Which building is that? Not doubting you, just curious.

Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#32

Post by sixQuarks »

aresant wrote: post #13

The most encouraging signal on climate to me is that the “money” seems to finally be waking up. ESG policies - backed by data monitoring requirements to combat greenwashing from sovereign wealth funds are real, arduous, and creating business and capital incentives with environmental alignment. Early stage climate tech funds - of which their are many today where there were few even a few years ago - are giving a new g…

ESG is a joke. Chevron has a higher ESG score than Tesla. How can anybody argue this is a fair assessment?

Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#33

Post by perihelions »

They 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 with their Natural Gas Initiative [0].

[0] https://ngi.stanford.edu/

edit 2: That's $1.98 million/year in oil & gas industry funding (adding up the tiers on this pricelist [1]).

[1] https://ngi.stanford.edu/content/corporate-affiliates-progra...

- "The NGI Industrial Affiliate Program offers three levels of membership:"

- "Sustaining Member ($250,000 per year), Corporate Member ($75,000 per year), and Basic Member ($35,000 per year, available to non Fortune 500 companies)"

Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#34

Post by newsclues »

aresant wrote: post #13

The most encouraging signal on climate to me is that the “money” seems to finally be waking up. ESG policies - backed by data monitoring requirements to combat greenwashing from sovereign wealth funds are real, arduous, and creating business and capital incentives with environmental alignment. Early stage climate tech funds - of which their are many today where there were few even a few years ago - are giving a new g…

ESG seems to be a way to launder reputations, seeming to appear good is not doing good.

Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#37

Post by elpakal »

rdtwo wrote: post #5

What do your do with a degree in climatology? It’s not a good idea to get these odd degrees as they are not good for signaling to potential employers.

In grad school I pursued (at the time it was considered experimental) a minor in "Sustainability Management". This was like 10 years ago and there was nowhere near the amount of stuff happening in the space then as there is now - it was basically "how do we get corporations to reduce their emissions? LOL good luck" and "how do large scale renewable energy projects make it? Only gonna happen with government help". I was a little disappointed with it at the time but I'm really happy that the field has awoken and that tech is getting involved - I would love to see how "higher" education in that space has changed.

> What do your do with a degree in climatology?

I write code, ironically. I'm in the camp that believes degrees aren't _totally_ about what you learn but more about advancing your reasoning and thinking skills and learning how to interact with people (not to say you don't learn anything in school, you definitely do but IMHO it largely depends on what you study).

Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#38

Post by scythe »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15
daterdots wrote: post #11

I 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.

> I am not sure Stanford will do more with $1B than 10 2nd tier schools would do with $100M each Absent data, it's difficult to say. There are economies of scale, even if just in experience administering such projects.

In order to have an economy of scale, first you need scale. But Stanford does not stand out in terms of the size of its faculty or enrollment, certainly not to the degree it does in terms of money. In fact, Stanford has fewer tenured faculty members (832) than UC Davis (1,126):

https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/stanford-university/...

https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-califo...

Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#39

Post by aresant »

sixQuarks wrote: post #32
aresant wrote: post #13

The most encouraging signal on climate to me is that the “money” seems to finally be waking up. ESG policies - backed by data monitoring requirements to combat greenwashing from sovereign wealth funds are real, arduous, and creating business and capital incentives with environmental alignment. Early stage climate tech funds - of which their are many today where there were few even a few years ago - are giving a new g…

ESG is a joke. Chevron has a higher ESG score than Tesla. How can anybody argue this is a fair assessment?

ESG scoring agreed is a work in progress currently gameable with greenwashing strategies (carbon credits)

What I am referencing is ESG for fundraising at institutional level which is the money that actually drives the world

Major pensions are prioritizing selecting managers with legit, objectively good esg policies and road maps with hard and enforceable targets that are tied to compensation

Re: Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr

#40

Post by photochemsyn »

Stanford'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/about/exxonmobil.html

I rather doubt this one will be any better. 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 for durable, high-efficiency PV panels for both rooftop solar and large-scale installations. Unfortunately neither California's natural gas industry nor the investor-owned utilities are thrilled about that either. Rooftop cuts directly into utility revenue, and replacing natural gas power plants with solar + storage plants makes Sempra and friends very sad.

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2018/04/21/the-weekend...

The United States is more of a petro-state than most people realize, and a rapid transition to renewables (i.e. 3% reduction in fossil fuel production per year, matched by an equivalent increase in renewable energy production per year) is too much economic disruption to contemplate, it seems - although that is what is needed if you wanted to address the climate problem. American academics are not going to do anything on their own about this, as they don't control the funding.

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