This week, the United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place in Paris, where over 150 world leaders will try to come to policy agreements to curb greenhouse emissions.

At the same time, tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates -- along with a handful of other incredibly wealthy executives like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, George Soros and Alibaba's Jack Ma -- have announced their own plan to boost the private sector's development of clean energy technologies.

Some of the richest in the world have partnered together to form the "Breakthrough Energy Coalition," which will be, by all accounts, a huge fund for investing in clean energy companies and startups.

A Call For Private, High Risk Investment

The timing and tone of the announcement hints that the titans of capitalism do not believe political leadership is enough to solve climate change. For example, in his Facebook post introducing the partnership, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the slow progress made toward clean energy so far.

"Solving the clean energy problem is an essential part of building a better world. We won't be able to make meaningful progress on other challenges -- like educating or connecting the world -- without secure energy and a stable climate," wrote Zuckerberg. "Yet progress towards a sustainable energy system is too slow, and the current system doesn't encourage the kind of innovation that will get us there faster."

As is the Silicon Valley tradition, the Breakthrough Energy Coalition is positioning itself as a catalyst for disrupting the status quo, in which world leaders have made halting progress toward solving the climate problem through the past few decades.

"The Breakthrough Energy Coalition will invest in ideas that have the potential to transform the way we all produce and consume energy," Zuckerberg said. "As leaders prepare for the U.N. Climate Change Conference: In Paris this week, we hope this will encourage more partners to make innovation a priority in the fight against climate change. "

Bill Gates, who was in Paris when the partnership was announced on Sunday, mirrored Zuckerberg's emphasis on private investing.

"If you look at where we've had huge success in the past, the government's been there to fund the basic research. That was true for the digital revolution, where government contracts led to the Internet," Gates said in his video announcing the coalition.

"But we have to pair that with people who are willing to fund high risk, breakthrough energy companies," he continued. "Accelerate the risk taking. That's what gives us a chance of having a solution."

Challenges and Possible Solutions

Still, Gates believes the role of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition must be cooperative with governments.

"Private companies will ultimately develop these energy breakthroughs, but their work will rely on the kind of basic research that only governments can fund," wrote Gates on his website. "Both have a role to play."

The challenge presented by the future of energy use and climate change is immense. According to Gates, the world will be using 50 percent more energy by the middle of the 21st century than it does currently.

While that's good news for the developing world, allowing people to escape poverty through basic services, infrastructure and the necessities of modern life like home refrigerators, it's bad news for the environment -- if new methods of energy production aren't invented and established.

In a research paper published on Monday giving a detailed case for investing in high risk, privately run clean-energy companies, Gates shows that more than 80 percent of the energy we use currently comes from carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

But even in the U.S., where the federal government's spending on energy research and development is the highest in the world, the proportion of total R&D spending compared to other priorities is striking. For example, in 2013 while defense-related research topped out at 11 percent, energy research received a total of 0.4 percent of investment.

"To make the point in another way," Gates says in the coalition's whitepaper, "in the United States, consumers spend more on gasoline in a week than the government spends on clean-energy research in a year."

It's unclear how much of the combined fortunes represented by the Breakthrough Energy Coalition will be invested in disruptive clean energy technologies. The group did not disclose any specific amount, but according to Wired, it's a "substantial portion of their hundreds of billions of dollars."

The group has also yet to disclose any specific companies that will receive the first round of funds, but in the coalition's whitepaper, Gates gave some examples of next-generation technologies that may eventually play a role in a future where clean energy is abundant and cheap.

Emerging technologies on the group's radar include "solar chemical", which imitates photosynthesis to directly create fuel that can be stored more easily than electricity from sunlight. Another possibility identified by Gates is "flow batteries," which could hold an electric charge than conventional lithium-ion batteries and could scale to sizes large enough for industrial uses. The very futuristic idea of "solar paint," which as the name implies may be able to produce cheap solar energy just by applying it on almost any surface, was also mentioned.

All of these technologies present challenges, both technologically and from a production and profitability standpoint, which is where the coalition comes in.

According to Gizmodo, on the same day that the Breakthrough Energy Coalition was announced, Gates also launched his own program that could act as a short-term kickstart for the long term goals of the coalition. Called Mission Innovation, Gates is working to bring together 20 countries with the goal of doubling public investment in energy research in the next five years.