Climate Change and Security

Less than a month after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, leaders from 150 nations have convened in the French capital to discuss ways to reduce the effects of climate change on a global scale. The conference is the largest gathering ever of world leaders. The goal of the historic, two-week long forum is to enact new policies that would commit nearly every country on the planet to legally binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The immediacy of the effects of climate change has spurred private investors to join forces with governments. Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, has formed a group called The Clean Energy Coalition, in coordination with the White House, to work with 19 governments and 27 other billionaires from around the world to create a public-private coalition to fund research for clean and renewable energy.  “Given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths, and that means we also need to invent new approaches,” Gates said in a statement about the initiative.  U.S. President Barack Obama joined Gates at the announcement in Paris saying, “We don’t know exactly what’s going to work best, but we know if we put our best minds behind it and put our dollars behind it, we’ll discover what works.”