Happy Nice Mall

Still, some question whether these philanthropic investments can make a difference when it comes to a planetary crisis.

“I don’t see how giving a billion dollars to a wealthy university would set the needle in motion in the short term,” said David Callahan, author of The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy. A New Gilded Age.” “It’s good that he left his money, but this billion dollars could be better spent moving it up on a public scale. Unless the public sees this as a high-level issue, politicians will not act.”

Arun Majumdar, who has been appointed inaugural dean of the school and has advised the Obama and Biden administrations on energy issues, said the school will provide context and analysis on climate change issues, but will hold back from advocacy. “We will not enter the political arena,” he said. “It’s a very slippery slope for us.”

Mr Majumdar, who currently holds a chair at Stanford named after Jay Precourt, a businessman who has made a name for himself in the oil industry, also said the new school will work with fossil fuel companies and accept donations from them.

“Not all oil and gas industries are on board, but there are those that are under pressure to diversify, otherwise they won’t be able to survive,” said Mr Majumdar. “Those who want to diversify and be part of solutions and those who want to interact with us are welcome.”

Mr. Doerr said he was first inspired to address climate change in 2006 after watching Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” with his family. At dinner after the movie, his daughter told him, “Your generation created this problem. You better fix it.” The following year, Mr. Gore Kleiner joined PerkinsMr. Doerr’s venture capital firm.

In the years that followed, Kleiner Perkins made several major investments in clean energy companies, and Mr. Doerr gave a TED Talk titled “Liberation (and Profit) at Greentech.” But during the 2008 financial crisis, when the cost of natural gas plummeted due to the crackdown, many of these clean energy companies failed.