Israel is uniquely positioned to help combat the climate crisis, according to Michael Sonnenfeldt.
The serial entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist – who has donated $20 million with his wife, Katja Goldman, to Americans for Ben-Gurion University (A4BGU) to establish the university's Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change – was in Israel last week for the Israel Climate Change Conference. He’s been investing in climate for more than 15 years and said he looks to Israel to help solve what he believes is an existential crisis.
The Jewish people and the climate crisis
“There are no people on the face of the planet who have survived more existential crises over their 5,000 years [of existence] than the Jewish people,” Sonnenfeldt told The Jerusalem Post, “and climate change is the existential crisis of all crises.”
Moreover, although “the science is settled” on climate change, according to Sonnenfeldt, solving it will take ingenuity and new technology. Israel “has the capacity to be one of the world’s most innovative centers for fighting climate,” he said, adding that solving the climate crisis will require coordination among the human community at an unprecedented level.
“You could say that the Abraham Accords defied imagination,” Sonnenfeldt said, explaining that Israel could lead a regional effort, with some Abraham Accords countries collaborating with the Jewish state or buying Israeli climate technology.
Sonnenfeldt founded TIGER 21, a peer membership group for high-net-worth entrepreneurs, investors and executives, and has been a supporter of BGU for around 30 years, with his focus on climate change starting in 2007.
“I had cancer in 2007 and had about six months to think about the world,” the climate-change entrepreneur shared. “I was in treatment, and I came to believe that climate would become the defining issue of our time. So I wanted to combine philanthropy, investment and politics around climate to make a difference.”
Before naming the climate school, he established BGU’s Sonnenfeldt-Goldman Career Development Chair in Desert Research. In addition, he named the Joya Claire Sonnenfeldt Auditorium and the Forest Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Building for Solar Energy and Environmental Physics.
The successful businessman is also co-chair of the MIT Climate Pathways Project, which developed the En-ROADS freely available online simulator that “provides policymakers, educators, businesses, the media and the public with the ability to test and explore cross-sector climate solutions,” its website describes. The model informs the investing that Sonnenfeldt does through his venture fund and provides him with a better sense of the breadth of the issues and where the policy areas are.
“I’m part of a small but growing group that feels that climate is so urgent that you have to marshal resources in all three sectors. It turns out that once you start doing that, there are many ways that each one reinforces the next,” Sonnenfeldt explained.
“The sad truth is that there will be no silver-bullet solution” for climate change, which will take a lot of coordinated effort.
But “we are not doomed,” he said: “The problem is solvable.”
The Environment and Climate Change portal is produced in cooperation with the Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The Jerusalem Post maintains all editorial decisions related to the content.
