President Obama Joins World Leaders in Announcing 'Mission Innovation'

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In Paris, President Obama and French President Hollande, along with a wide range of other top global leaders, will announce “Mission Innovation,” an initiative to dramatically accelerate public and private global clean energy innovation to address global climate change, provide affordable clean energy to consumers, including in the developing world, and create additional commercial opportunities in clean energy. 

Through the initiative, 20 countries are committing to double their respective clean energy research and development (R&D) investment over five years. These countries include the top five most populous nations – China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. They stretch across five continents. And when you add all partner countries together, they represent 75 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions from electricity, and more than 80 percent of the world’s clean energy R&D investment.

They also represent the myriad ways we create and use energy. The Mission Innovation members include some of the largest oil and gas producers – the United States, Canada, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Norway and Indonesia – as well as many with high penetration of renewables in their power sectors, such as Canada, Norway, Denmark, Brazil and Chile.

We know that large scale penetration of clean energy technologies will require that smart investment by governments is followed by smart private-sector investments. That is why Mission Innovation is complemented by a separate private sector-led effort that has pledged to invest extraordinary levels of private capital in clean energy, focusing on early-stage innovations. This parallel initiative – spearheaded by Bill Gates – includes a coalition of over 28 significant private capital investors from 10 countries, and will be called Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

Members of these initiatives recognize a crucial reality: we need to accelerate the development of clean energy solutions to match the urgency of tackling climate change. We need an all-in, all-sector approach to transform global energy markets to address this challenge, and new technologies will play a critical role in this transformation.

Our climate imperatives, coupled with the world’s need for energy and electricity, mean that we don’t have the luxury of decades to develop and deploy new technologies.

Mission Innovation responds to the urgency of climate change, the opportunity of technological innovation, and the international imperative to tackle this problem in a global way. And we're stepping up our game through the initiatives announced today.

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