Google's Larry Brilliant calls himself an optimist
The swooning stock market slashed the value of 401Ks and mutual funds, leaving Americans with less wealth.
It has done the same for charitable foundations with endowments invested in stocks and bonds, said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org, the search engines philanthropic arm.
The collapse of portfolios that could be down 20 percent to 30 percent will fall most heavily on the poorest of the world. And it will create a greater need for corporations to step up their giving, Brilliant said Tuesday at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
Nevertheless Brilliant described himself as an optimist. Organizations from across the world are coming together to fight global warming and to eradicate diseases, such as polio and smallpox.
But the challenges are huge. “The world is on a precipice of new diseases,” such as SARS, the West Nile virus and AIDS, which were brought to humans from the animal community, he said.
Meanwhile, with new coal plants going up every 10 days or more rapidly, the battle against global warming will be lost before it is begun, he said.
