Uploaded October 2022 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Green Impact Fund for Technology
To secure the future of human civilization, we must urgently reduce emissions, fast. To achieve this, many kinds of effective green innovations must be rapidly developed and deployed worldwide. With their growing populations and increasing per-capita consumption, the developing countries are especially crucial for this required transformation.
For more information see (text available in several languages):
https://globaljustice.yale.edu/green-impact-fund-technology
Text of the speech:
Reversing the Tax on Deploying Greenovations
Thomas Pogge
New green technologies—greenovations—are everywhere rewarded with monopoly patents that enable originators to reap substantial markups or licensing fees from early users.
But such monopoly rents raise the price of innovative technologies and thereby impede their diffusion. The more affluent states offset this headwind through environmental regulations, levies on emissions, or green subsidies, all of which make green technologies more competitive with dirty ones. Poorer countries don’t do this. They find it unfair that they should be expected to slow their own economic development when today’s high-income countries emitted with abandon during similar developmental phases. And they anticipate that the increased use of greenovations in their territory would come with massive outflows of monopoly rents to green patentees, who are overwhelmingly located in richer countries. As a result, green technologies diffuse very poorly in poor countries, where cheaper, older, dirtier technologies continue to be deployed.
This is a big problem. In the remainder of our century, these countries will experience massive economic growth, intensified by large population increases. The technologies they will use, the practices and habits they will form, the roles they will be prepared to play in the fight for a livable planet will matter far more than any choices affluent nations will make within their own borders.
The richer countries should solve this problem by spending some of the annual $100 billion they promised the developing world for mitigation and adaptation on creating a Green Impact Fund for Technology—or GIFT—that would enable originators of greenovations to exchange their monopoly privileges for impact rewards. The invited exchange would apply only in the lower-income countries: an originator permanently forgoes, throughout this GIFT Zone, any monopoly rents it could earn from its registered technology; and the GIFT rewards this technology for emissions averted with it in the GIFT Zone through deployments completed within six years of market entry.
The GIFT would greatly improve diffusion in the Global South by inducing originators to waive licensing fees and monopoly markups, and by incentivizing them to promote the fast, wide and impactful deployment of their technologies. In addition, the GIFT would stimulate development of additional greenovations especially tailored to the GIFT Zone, thereby also contributing to capacity building there.
GIFT rewards might be paid through annual disbursements. Any registered greenovation would participate in six consecutive such disbursements, each divided among registered innovations according to emissions averted with them in the GIFT Zone in the preceding year.
Because participation is optional, the GIFT’s reward rate emerges endogenously. When originators find the going rate unattractive, registrations dry up and the reward rate rises as older innovations exit at the end of their reward period. When the reward rate is seen as generous, registrations multiply, and the reward rate declines. Such equilibration reassures participating originators and contributors that the reward rate will be fair between them, and stable over time.
The GIFT would organize a wide competition across the whole greenovation sector, including electricity generation, traffic, residential and office heating and cooling, construction, meat production, agriculture, forestry, industrial manufacture of steel, cement and other commodities. High-impact greenovations from all these areas would be competing on one GIFT-created market toward the single goal of averting emissions. In this competition, all can be winners, earning premiums in excess of their investments.
Highly compatible with Sustainable Development Goals 13 and 17, the GIFT model should urgently be piloted with a single reward pool over a two-year trial period.
There is no better way of reducing emissions than by ensuring that the best greenovations human ingenuity has devised are actually deployed: widely, rapidly and effectively. The GIFT would make that happen in the Global South.
Green Impact Fund for Technology
To secure the future of human civilization, we must urgently reduce emissions, fast. To achieve this, many kinds of effective green innovations must be rapidly developed and deployed worldwide. With their growing populations and increasing per-capita consumption, the developing countries are especially crucial for this required transformation.
For more information see (text available in several languages):
https://globaljustice.yale.edu/green-impact-fund-technology
Text of the speech:
Reversing the Tax on Deploying Greenovations
Thomas Pogge
New green technologies—greenovations—are everywhere rewarded with monopoly patents that enable originators to reap substantial markups or licensing fees from early users.
But such monopoly rents raise the price of innovative technologies and thereby impede their diffusion. The more affluent states offset this headwind through environmental regulations, levies on emissions, or green subsidies, all of which make green technologies more competitive with dirty ones. Poorer countries don’t do this. They find it unfair that they should be expected to slow their own economic development when today’s high-income countries emitted with abandon during similar developmental phases. And they anticipate that the increased use of greenovations in their territory would come with massive outflows of monopoly rents to green patentees, who are overwhelmingly located in richer countries. As a result, green technologies diffuse very poorly in poor countries, where cheaper, older, dirtier technologies continue to be deployed.
This is a big problem. In the remainder of our century, these countries will experience massive economic growth, intensified by large population increases. The technologies they will use, the practices and habits they will form, the roles they will be prepared to play in the fight for a livable planet will matter far more than any choices affluent nations will make within their own borders.
The richer countries should solve this problem by spending some of the annual $100 billion they promised the developing world for mitigation and adaptation on creating a Green Impact Fund for Technology—or GIFT—that would enable originators of greenovations to exchange their monopoly privileges for impact rewards. The invited exchange would apply only in the lower-income countries: an originator permanently forgoes, throughout this GIFT Zone, any monopoly rents it could earn from its registered technology; and the GIFT rewards this technology for emissions averted with it in the GIFT Zone through deployments completed within six years of market entry.
The GIFT would greatly improve diffusion in the Global South by inducing originators to waive licensing fees and monopoly markups, and by incentivizing them to promote the fast, wide and impactful deployment of their technologies. In addition, the GIFT would stimulate development of additional greenovations especially tailored to the GIFT Zone, thereby also contributing to capacity building there.
GIFT rewards might be paid through annual disbursements. Any registered greenovation would participate in six consecutive such disbursements, each divided among registered innovations according to emissions averted with them in the GIFT Zone in the preceding year.
Because participation is optional, the GIFT’s reward rate emerges endogenously. When originators find the going rate unattractive, registrations dry up and the reward rate rises as older innovations exit at the end of their reward period. When the reward rate is seen as generous, registrations multiply, and the reward rate declines. Such equilibration reassures participating originators and contributors that the reward rate will be fair between them, and stable over time.
The GIFT would organize a wide competition across the whole greenovation sector, including electricity generation, traffic, residential and office heating and cooling, construction, meat production, agriculture, forestry, industrial manufacture of steel, cement and other commodities. High-impact greenovations from all these areas would be competing on one GIFT-created market toward the single goal of averting emissions. In this competition, all can be winners, earning premiums in excess of their investments.
Highly compatible with Sustainable Development Goals 13 and 17, the GIFT model should urgently be piloted with a single reward pool over a two-year trial period.
There is no better way of reducing emissions than by ensuring that the best greenovations human ingenuity has devised are actually deployed: widely, rapidly and effectively. The GIFT would make that happen in the Global South.
