Updated at 8:32 a.m., Monday, April 9, 2007
Doris Duke foundation gives $100M for global warming
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A $100 million fund is being set up by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to pay for five years of research into global warming.The aim of the foundation's Climate Change Initiative is to look at policies that can speed the use of new technologies — and broaden use of existing ones — to reduce carbon dioxide, methane and other industrial gases that scientists blame for heating the atmosphere like a greenhouse.
Up to $100 million is to be awarded to nonprofit groups, research institutions and universities. They would be expected to study which policies and technologies will be the best to help build a "clean-energy economy," the foundation said in a statement yesterday.
Joan Spero, the foundation's president, said there are things people can do now, and keep options open for dealing with climate change, rather than continuing to build inefficient buildings and polluting power plants that "will lock ourselves into years of high carbon emissions."
"The foundation's goal," said Andrew Bowman, who will direct the $100 million fund, "is to keep us from losing the game in the first quarter so that we will still be in a position to win in the fourth quarter."
The $1.8-billion foundation was set up in 1996 and is named after the only child and heiress of tobacco and utility industrialist James Buchanan Duke.
Based in New York, the foundation also maintains three Duke family estates in New Jersey, Hawai'i and Rhode Island and awards grants in performing arts, wildlife conservation, medical research and child abuse prevention.
The estate in Honolulu, called Shangri La, was built in 1937 after Doris Duke visited the Islands on her honeymoon. It overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Diamond Head and houses her collection of Islamic art. The former seasonal home was the only property Duke built from the ground up, according to the foundation's Web site.
