George Soros to Invest $1 Billion in Green Energy

The upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen are less than two months away, and everyone is looking to throw in his/her two cents. On Oct. 10, it was billionaire George Soros’ turn to get in on the act. Giving a speech in Denmark, the man who famously ‘broke the Bank of England’ in the early 1990s now plans to invest $1 billion in clean energy technology. Another $100 million — doled out in $10 million increments annually over ten years — will fund the newly-created Climate Policy Initiative, a foundation targeted at environmental policy.

That’s a sizeable amount of cash, though Soros didn’t specify where the $1 billion would be spent other than saying ‘stringent conditions’ will be used to evaluate potential investments. And in an ironic twist, Soros, who made a sizeable chunk of his fortune through currency speculation, put his support behind carbon taxes, not cap-and-trade systems. His reason? Financial investors can too easily manipulate carbon markets.