No lecture, but here’s my climate book
BILL Gates is worth $US122bn ($157bn), so he’s not as rich as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
But unlike them, he’s ready to apologise for his contribution to climate change.
Mr Gates admits that his carbon footprint is “absurdly high”. He owns big houses, he flies in private jets – “so who am I to lecture anyone on the environment?”
But Mr Gates said he went to great lengths to mitigate these excesses – using sustainable jet fuel, buying carbon offsets.
Speaking ahead of the release of his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Mr Gates said that his approach to the “climate catastrophe” did not mean that he simply bought into every green idea in circulation.
Planting billions of trees, for example, would not work – if you left the land untouched, trees would grow there anyway, and to absorb the emissions of the US alone, you would have to cover half the landmass of the world in trees.
Part of the solution could lie in going nuclear, he said.
It kills far fewer people than fossil fuel extraction and it is reliable.
No serious decarbonising strategy exists that does not include more nuclear power.
Also we really have to do something about cow burps and farts. Cattle emit high emissions of methane, the worst greenhouse gas – the equivalent of two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and 4 per cent of global emissions.
Mr Gates said that the challenge was not apocalyptic – if we do nothing, climate change will be as deadly as COVID-19 by 2050.