What Do Gates, Zuckerberg and Company Have in Common? An Obsession with “Breakthroughs”

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Bill Gates started one. Melinda French Gates is funding one. Mark Zuckerberg co-founded one. Russian tech investor Yuri Milner started a whole bunch. Eco-modernists launched one early on, drawing some big donors. Big climate philanthropy, not to be left out, came together recently to create one of their own.

What the hell am I talking about? Breakthroughs. Or to be more exact, organizations seeking breakthroughs — and named accordingly. It seems you cannot turn around in philanthropy without bumping into yet another group whose name promises exactly that. 

They span many categories. Melinda French Gates backs the computing diversity group Break Through Tech. Milner founded a suite of such initiatives, from Breakthrough Listen, which seeks signs of life on other planets, to Breakthrough Prizes, which shower A-list scientists with millions. Facebook’s CEO cofounded the latter, alongside Google’s Sergey Brin and Jack Ma of Alibaba.

The concept seems especially appealing to donors who made their riches in tech, and it’s no surprise that the breakthrough nomenclature has been popular in the expanding world of climate philanthropy. 

One of the oldest of the bunch is the Breakthrough Institute, founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, which favors new technology over policy reform, with a particular fondness for nuclear energy. In 2015, Gates created the climate-tech investing and philanthropy outfit Breakthrough Energy, an extension of his personal crusade to convince the world that innovation is the most important ingredient in solving the climate crisis. Most recently, some of the biggest institutional climate funders on the planet launched the Climate Breakthrough Project, which gives large sums to “extraordinary strategists.” 

Names aside, there are many other climate and non-climate programs out there seeking to bankroll breakthroughs of their own, or perhaps audacious solutions, or the ever-popular big bets. The most recent example: Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr’s $1.1 billion gift to Stanford University.

Amid so many seemingly intractable problems, the idea appears to have become irresistible to a certain class of donor. Not mere progress or even a substantial push in the right direction, but a breakthrough. A sudden and dramatic leap forward that will change everything, and perhaps even solve a problem once thought insurmountable. 

I can understand the appeal. We’re running out of names for hurricanes. We’re running in the wrong direction on oil, gas, coal, etc. We’re running low on food. We’re running out of time. Science tells us the catastrophes and chaos multiply if we pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. The chances of averting that look slim to none.

It makes you want to break something. Or pray for a breakthrough. And if you’re a billionaire, those invocations can come with a nice drop in the collection basket: a few million dollars, or even a billion or more. Call it selfless investment or guilty atonement. 

So why draw attention to this trend? Yes, as a journalist, a tiny part of me wishes to see a creative breakthrough — in the naming of new organizations. At times, it takes a moment to tell the latest “breakthrough” group from the last. But such concerns are the least of my worries. No, I’m troubled by what it says about where philanthropic dollars from some of the world’s richest people are going to address this emergency.

To be fair, we do need breakthroughs, desperately. The best science says a livable future absolutely requires carbon removal, and existing methods are still not close to viable at the needed scale. We need carbon-free ways to create the basic ingredients of modern society, like concrete and steel. How we currently raise and grow what’s on our plates — and how it gets there — is killing the planet.

But this repetition in naming feels indicative of a still narrow conception of the task at hand among many in the private-jet set. As a word, “breakthrough” is relatively neutral. It could happen in the lab or in the popular consciousness. But most of these organizations and their backers seem focused on science and tech innovations. That’s especially the case with Gates’ outfit, which is becoming a goliath in the philanthropic and impact investing space, and has drawn several other tech billionaires to jump on board, including Jeff Bezos. 

The Climate Breakthrough Project is a welcome exception, in that its focus is on individual leaders offering innovative strategies in social, behavioral, economic and policy change. At least it’s not pouring millions into the hunt for the next perpetual motion machine, and funding a diversity of strategies is a worthy pursuit for philanthropy.

But too many of the rest are heavily invested in finding something new and magnificent to do what we’ve not been able to — fix this crisis we find ourselves in. We have plenty of solutions ready to go. And as many others before me have said, that attitude overlooks an inescapable reality of the climate crisis that is not new at all — the deep opposition of vested interests.

The latest report from the U.N.-managed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes this abundantly clear. “The IPCC tells us that we have the knowledge and technology to get this done through a rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewables and alternative fuels,” said Inger Andersen, under-secretary-general of the U.N. and executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, at a press conference. Yet the report is clear that the entrenched power of big oil companies and other fossil fuel producers is blocking that transition, including pushing its mention from the report’s summary all together. 

Some have funded needed pushback. The Climate Breakthrough Project has supported leaders battling fossil fuel producers, such as Kathrin Gutmann, who has helped to shutter or secure the planned retirement of 166 coal plants across Europe. But such support is the exception, and mega-donors enamored with the power of markets and growth rarely support efforts to block any kind of economic activity, no matter its harm. But all the innovative ideas in the world will not help us, so long as powerful interests are fighting to extract and burn more fossil fuels. 

We need to break the stranglehold these fossil fuel producers have over politics. We need to break the myth that life will be worse as we transition to a green economy. We need to break the addiction to more and bigger automobiles, wider roads, and unsustainable levels of meat consumption, sold to us by corporate fictions. 

To my mind, true “breakthrough” funding would not only look forward in search of new ideas, but also look inward at what our societies and economies have valued and devalued, examine the powers and structures that have put us in this situation, and chart a new course that ensures new innovations can actually take hold and make a difference. 

Philanthropy, of course, is not the only avenue to pursue such goals. Politics might well be a better one. Yet this billionaire’s club mostly shows little public inclination in that direction. Gates, for instance, put “breakthroughs” in the subtitle of his book on climate, but scarcely discussed political considerations, including fossil fuel industry sway, Republican intransigence on climate, or the global threat of fossil-fuel-friendly authoritarianism.

But if they wanted to, there’s no reason these billionaires cannot do all of the above. Most are worth many times more than the entire field receives annually from philanthropy. And they are spoiled for choices of people, organizations and movements that — despite exceedingly limited resources — are responsible for notable progress. Look to Indigenous peoples’ critical role in conservation, or to the many shoestring organizing victories against new oil and gas pipelines, or to the shift in public debate brought about by a dedicated group of activists backing the Green New Deal.

Perhaps it’s fruitless to expect those who have most benefited over the past 30 years — a period in which humanity has emitted more CO2 than during all of the rest of human history combined — to fund challenges to some of the assumptions that made that desecration possible. Billionaires tend to turn to markets, not the people. Winners tend to believe the rules are fair.

None of this is really about the names of these outfits, which is nothing more than branding. It’s about where the money goes. And right now, these mega-donors’ dollars are headed overwhelmingly to one type of progress. A necessary one, but insufficient on its own.

One can only hope for a breakthrough.