The real innovative climate financing resource that everybody is looking for might have a name. It 
could be Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, George Soros or Oprah Winfrey. Forget about carbon taxes, airline levies and cruise line surcharges which a UN High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing – including billionaire George Soros — is currently mulling over in an increasingly desperate search to find new finance sources to pay for mitigation and adaptation effort in developing countries. They are controversial and politically hard to implement. For the real feel-good and quick solution, the 20-member expert panel should look no further than, lets say Seattle, Omaha or New York. 
Especially now that both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are appealing to their fellow US billionnaires to follow their lead and to donate at least half of their wealth for good causes. It could be done with a simple stroke of a pen (or keyboard, nowadays). In fact, this is probably exactly how those enormous fortunes have ballooned in the age of unfettered financial speculation…
In a letter to Fortune Magazine, Warren Buffett acknowledges the irrationalities of today’s global economy and the way it rewards its participants unevenly and unfairly, creating loser — and winners, such as himself:
My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well… I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.
Warren Buffett has already pledged 99% of his fortune of close to US$ 47 billion for charitable purposes, mostly via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world. And Bill Gates is committing at least half of his estimated US$ 50 billion wealth, as are supposedly some other mega-rich billionaire couples, who signed already up. Just those two initiators (admittedly the two richest men on earth) can raise more than US$ 90 billion. The two (social) entrepreneurs, who are now placing speculative bets on US philanthropy, follow in the mold of the Carnegies and Rockefellers, the forebears of modern charitable giving. Both have set up a website for their appeal, givingpledge, estimating that if those US billionaires on the Forbes 400 list would follow their lead, they could collect a total of US$ 600 billion.
In comparison: the combined efforts of the richest countries on Earth to mobilize funds for a “fast start” in financing adaptation and mitigation in developing countries, as promised in Copenhagen, will likely yield roughly US$ 30 billion over the next three years (if one does not mind double-counting and fund recycling by industrial countries). And the new Adaptation Fund under the Kyoto Protocol, favored by developing countries because it allows direct access of poor states and non-state actors to grant financing for national adaptation efforts, just started its first commitment period with only roughly US$ 67 million in pledges.
In a way, this would be the closing of a circle, although I hesitate to call it ‘virtuous’: the men and women who have made their money by (or inherited their money from those) screwdly exploiting the opportunities and weaknesses of the global markets in the age of globalization would give back the fruits of their exploits to those globalized markets exploit, the real losers of globalization, such as the poorest people in developing countries and the environment. Those who haven’t factored in the costs of globalization to the poor and mother nature in their economic actions now want to act as benefactors to them. Of course, the costly fight to stem and adapt to climate change, whose anthropogenic causes are doubted only by the worst of ignorant air-heads nowadays, should be among the top items of the list Buffet, Gates & Co. compile of for causes worth their funding. Talk about a true realization of the meaning of the ‘polluter-pays-principle’….
As flippant as those remarks may seem, they contain a real possibility. In the provision of health care and medication to developing countries, the financial might of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationand its philanthropic engagement with big money (their US$ 800 million for health campaigns is almost as much funding as the annual budget of the UN World Heath Organisation) has shook up the world of public sector giving and provided the impetus for a ‘fast start’ on global efforts on vaccinations and immunizations. The campaign for a ‘second green revolution’, taking organizational shape in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – with its focus on false solutions such as GMOs to combat food insecurity –, was likewise kick-started by large private US Foundations, including the Gates Foundation. A similar campaign of large private US philanthropists — notwithstanding the public debate about issues of public accountability and transparency such an engagement should raise — could be the boost especially adaptation financing needs, where a reliance on carbon markets, or ODA at current levels for that matter, will not provide the funding solution.
Will the ’givingpledge’ challenge be discussed as opportunity at the UN’s High Level Advisory Panel on Climate Change Financing? Panel member George Soros should make a go at it. Then US billionaires could be pursued as the third private sector focus of the panel, besides carbon markets and global feed-in tariffs — and, honestly, this third proposal would probably be more realistic to deliver than the original two.
Photo Warren Buffett: sirenmedia with Creative Commons License
Photo Bill Gates: TEDizen with Creative Commons License
Tags: adaptation, climate finance, Fast Track Finance, philantrophy, USA
