Eric Toone, Breakthrough Energy's chief technical officer, gave this assessment in his keynote address at the recent Energizing@MIT, the annual research conference of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Toone oversees the technological roadmap and evaluation at Breakthrough, which is a network of organizations founded by Microsoft's Bill Gates to accelerate clean energy innovation. Toone also serves as a managing partner of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the venture capital arm of Breakthrough Energy. 'This correlation between energy use and prosperity persists across a huge group of countries, and importantly, there are no high-wealth/low energy-use countries,' said Toone. Worldwide income parallels electricity consumption as they both climb, according to data shared by Toone. And in the past five decades, the middle class has been expanding worldwide, so prosperity has been increasing. Given that 80 percent of global energy use is energy from fossil fuels and 35 percent of...
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