I don't think climate change is a research problem. The key solutions to it are known but just require political will to do what needs to be done and bear the short-term disadvantages; but that doesn't seem plausible (and, arguably, if politicians just went ahead with major sacrifices to fight climate change, their voters would throw them out and replace with other politicians who keep the current policies), and research isn't going to change that.
New emergencies generally offer more low hanging fruit.
I am doubtful that ~50M split into 260 grants would have any measurable impact on climate change. Just as this didn’t have any large wins. Arguably rather than research leveraging that into solar panels or other infrastructure would be a better use of funds.
In the end it’s a real gamble. One or more of those 4,000 applications was likely a great use of funds, but finding and funding it is hard especially if you’re trying to keep overhead low. Up the amount to say 1B/year and the tradeoffs become even harder between research and action.
We don’t need new science at this point. 0 CO2 from cars + 0 CO2 from electricity + 0 CO2 from heating is a monumental improvement and we don’t need to tech to get there just building infrastructure is enough. Few people will want an ICE when 80+% of gas stations close down, that’s a huge tipping point.
Any discovery that take 20 years to go from a lab to production isn’t fast enough to make real change. Avoiding CO2 pollution today on the other hand gives us time to find better solutions.
I'm not Patrick Collison, but if I were then I might say that there are already a bunch of impressively plausible-looking carbon capture and sequestration technologies, they look like our best bet on the margin, and what they mostly need is a large enough early customer base to let them scale up and reduce cost.
As it happens, there's a program called Stripe Climate which aims to do exactly this! Money comes from Stripe and from businesses that would like to be able to truthfully say that they donate a percentage of purchases to fight climate change. It looks well thought-out and credible, at least to my eye. They elaborate more on the rationale here: