Can a private initiative keep us on track to move toward clean energy?

A group of 28 investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla, Jack Ma, John Doerr, Marc Benioff, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, Xavier Niel, George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg among others, have created a $1 billion investment fund, with a promise to raise it to $30 billion by 2020, to develop the means to produce clean energy, arguably the most important challenge facing the planet at the moment.

The initiative, called Breakthrough Energy, aims to foster the development of innovation associated with clean energy generation, which, along with nineteen other countries, Barack Obama committed to double investments as part of Mission Innovation, but now, with the imminent arrival at the White House of Donald Trump, seems unlikely to materialize.

Trump not only spent most of his election campaign ridiculing climate change, claiming it was “an invention of the Chinese” (provoking a reaction from the Chinese government), but has also appointed to his cabinet a former oil company executive as Secretary of State along with an outspoken climate change denier as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, with the explicit mission of reversing initiatives taken by the previous administration in this regard. Trump has already announced that the United States will violate international agreements it…