Billionaire Donates Billion To Stanford (Awash In Cash) For "Sustainability" - Big Oil Donations OK!

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Stanford University announced a $1.1 billion gift Wednesday to an ambitious new school designed to accelerate interdisciplinary scholarship on climate and sustainability issues. The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the university’s first new school in 70 years, is expected to launch in September and tackle urgent questions facing the planet. The scale of the initiative positions the university to catalyze efforts to combat climate change worldwide.

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In all, $1.69 billion in combined gifts for the school were announced by Stanford on Wednesday. The school will focus on eight academic fields including climate change, sustainable cities, energy technology, and human society and behavior. It will have interdisciplinary institutes to bridge those fields. Existing institutes focused on energy and the environment will be joined by a new Institute for Sustainable Societies. And it will have an accelerator giving grants to jump-start policy and technology initiatives — taking them “from idea to impact,” to allow an idea in the lab to be more swiftly prototyped than could typically happen in academia, Tessier-Lavigne said.

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Majumdar is professor of mechanical engineering, senior fellow and former co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford. He has also worked in the government and industry, serving as vice president for energy at Google, and said the school would combine the intellectual might of students and scholars with external organizations to craft innovative solutions. We do not inherit Earth from our ancestors, he said; we borrow it from our children. “We must create a future in which humans and nature thrive together.” The school won’t rule out gifts from fossil fuel companies, Majumdar said. “We will partner with those who want to be part of the solution.”

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The thing that attracted the Doerrs to Stanford was its combined focus on “policies, human behavior, environmental justice and technologies,” John Doerr said, because “we know this is a problem of not just invention, but deployment and adoption and adaptation,” and Stanford has a track record of bringing innovation to the world. “We’re in a hurry,” he said.

Ed. - No, you're not in a hurry. It's 2022, the year that we hit atmospheric CO2 50% above pre-Industrial Revolution levels. But, yeah, business incubator net-zero-something.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/04/john-doerr-stanford-climate-school/