Feeling optimistic
How Microsoft founder Bill Gates is fighting climate change.
It can be difficult to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change. Particularly when the stakes are high and the goals seem unattainable and not everyone agrees on what needs to be done.
Bill Gates is optimistic. But there’s one thing he wants to be clear about. We need to get our greenhouse gas emissions from 51 billion tons a year down to zero. And we need to do it fast — by 2050. And it’s going to be hard. But, with a plan, he thinks — he hopes — it’s doable.
“Some people think this is going to be easy. So, they need to be educated that it’s not,” says Gates during an exclusive video call with the Star (using the Microsoft Teams platform). “Some think it’s impossible.”
We’re talking about his new book, “How To Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have And The Breakthroughs We Need,” which comes out Tuesday.
“We have a lot of interest in the cause, particularly among young people, so what we need now is a plan,” says Gates.
That’s where the book comes in. His plan began in 1997 — although the Microsoft cofounder and billionaire didn’t know it at the time — when he and his wife set up and funded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on global health and development.
“I came to focus on climate change in an indirect way — through the problem of energy poverty,” he writes in his introduction. “I learned that about a billion people didn’t have reliable access to electricity and that half of them lived in subSaharan Africa,” he writes.
It’s impossible to build an economy without electricity — income and energy go hand in hand. So lifting people out of poverty means ensuring they have reliable electricity. Right now, the cheapest electricity is dirty which adds even more carbon emissions to an already disastrous global output.
That, he says, is what started him thinking about climate change and realizing an integrated, international approach, led by innovation, was needed.
Remember this number: 27 per cent. That is the portion of greenhouse gas emissions caused by making electricity.
“If you quizzed even academics, the percentage that would actually be able to say what the source of emissions are would be very few,” Gates says. He, too, was surprised when he learned that number.
The book — aimed at both those academics and the general public — explains the science, what we’re dealing with and what Gates thinks we need to do, in clear language and chapters.
Breaking down that other 70 per cent looks like this: making things (cement, steel, plastic), 31 per cent; growing things (plants, animals), 18 per cent; moving around (planes, trucks, cargo ships), 16 per cent; keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration), six per cent; other, two per cent.
Another surprise: passenger cars, “represent less than half of all the emissions from transportation, which in turn is 16 per cent of all emissions worldwide,” Gates writes in the book.
While focusing resources on renewable energy such as solar and wind power and on driving electric cars instead of gas guzzlers is great — it all adds to the reduction of carbon emissions — if we’re not focusing on the other 70 per cent, we’re missing the point.
Gates is afraid a lot of people don’t realize that.
And when we look at popular policies, that’s where the energy is focused. How to handle the bigger things, the things that are going to take big ideas and commitment? Make them the best choice for consumers, investors, government.
Green Premiums are at the core of Gates’ plan. Basically, a Green Premium is the difference between the cost of the cheapest choice and the greenest choice.
Let’s take jet fuel as an example. The average retail price per gallon is $2.22. Advanced biofuels cost $5.35. So, the Green Premium for the zero-carbon fuel is $3.13 or 140 per cent.
What we need to do through innovation, Gates asserts, is bring that Green Premium down so the zero-carbon choice is also the cheapest choice.
“We have to ... really start to say to the rich world, ‘Hey, you’ve got to drive these Green Premiums down by at least 95 per cent, (so that) in 2050, the world will buy green,’ ” he says. And that means co-operating and investing in research and development.
One of the first things U.S. President Joe Biden said he was going to do when he took office Jan. 20, 2021, was rejoin the Paris Agreement.
While Gates says no agreement is enough, “it’s a good thing that it exists because it’s an acknowledgment that we have to co-operate.”
There is also the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Conference of Parties meetings that came out of that. The “nationally determined commitments” of the metrics mean that nations, he says, “go for the easy stuff, the short-term stuff.” That’s still “super-good” because it means they are still “on the hook” for things such as electric cars and buses and different electricity generation.
While awareness is good, that particular kind of structure isn’t going to save us — it doesn’t encourage doing something about steel or cement or aviation fuel.
“(With) that structure, you would take whatever finite money you have for climate change, and you’d put it into incentives to buy electric cars instead of working on the over 70 per cent of emissions that come from other areas,” Gates says. We’re looking, he says, at the whole industrial economy. “The people who know that definitely have days that they worry … Innovation, even though we know how to accelerate it, we don’t get a guaranteed result.”
It’s going to take a lot of investment — particularly research and development money. It’s also going to depend on international co-operation.
“You do worry that co-operation won’t be enough,” Gates says.
“A lot of the middle income countries, Brazil, Philippines, they’re not choosing to make it a priority. Certainly the U.S. over the last four years, did not make it a priority.
“Whether or not you need tariffs to incentivize people to do the right thing, that’s very complex,” Gates says. “You don’t want some dirty manufacturer who is being imported to outcompete the people who are dealing with the Green Premium. And yet, you still want the free trade system to be viewed as fair and work quite well. So, climate will complicate trade talks.”
Fossil fuels are still cheap, and they’re also a political minefield. Just look at the tension around the Keystone Pipeline, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is keen on and Biden cancelled as one of his first acts upon taking office. Gates is measured.
“Any particular project as a contribution to climate emissions is fairly modest. But you do need to establish the principle that you’re going to reduce that dependence. We still need gasoline to get to work; we still need steel to build our buildings. The idea is that we outcompete these things.”
The idea is we’ll all — even middle income countries — gravitate toward the green choice because they will be more affordable. We have to create choices that make going green the most sensible, particularly financially.
Renewables aren’t going to solve the problem entirely. The battery power necessary to store solar or wind energy so that it’s usable when seasonal supply is short or the weather’s bad simply isn’t there yet, for one. And others, hydroelectric, for instance, have already been mostly topped out.
In the U.S. and Canada both, fossil fuel industries aren’t going quietly into that good night. Neither are cement factories and steel plants.
“We’re not going to shut down some of these activities overnight,” Gates says.
The question becomes: which ones should be allowed to proceed? Investors will take care of some of it; government policy will take care of some of it; ordinary people will have to push for some of it.
“Are investors seeing that these assets won’t all be extracted because it contradicts the climate goals? And therefore, can we get the R&D money, instead of going into developing new oilfields, into developing ways of sequestering carbon or radioactive waste … can you shift the skill sets of the individual employees and of the company somewhat in a pro-climate direction? That’s a challenge we face.”
Just last week, a week or two after I spoke with Gates, Royal Dutch Shell vowed to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050, citing growing investor pressure. A report from Reuters noted “Shell last year laid out a plan to reach net zero by 2050, in line with the Paris climate agreement and European Union ambitions, but it said the goal depended on its customers.”
Strong government policy also has a role to play. I point out the resistance of the Ontario government to cap-and-trade and the federal carbon tax.
“In Canada and Australia, the voters are pretty committed to climate change. And yet, when you have specific taxes ... the voters often are concerned with short-term benefits but not the long-term negatives.”
Innovation, he says, will make those trade-offs a little less painful. In the automotive industry, for example, “hopefully we can make this transition to electric cars without massive job displacement.”
“Politics, sometimes it’s not good at short-term sacrifice for long-term benefit,” says Gates. “It takes good leadership, and it takes young people saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna be around for all these problems. We think it’s worth making some great sacrifice.’ ”
“Any particular project as a contribution to climate emissions is fairly modest. But you do need to establish the principle that you’re going to reduce that dependence.”
BILL GATES
Optimism is the one factor Gates says has informed him throughout his life — he links the trajectory of what he’s done, what he’s built in business and philanthropy: Microsoft has allowed him to do the global health work and the vaccination expertise he accrued has allowed him to help out “a bit” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2006, he founded TerraPower to develop advanced nuclear reactors to provide safe, carbon-free nuclear power. In 2015, Gates established Breakthrough Energy, a venture capital fund to invest in companies developing net-zero energy solutions. It’s invested in 40 companies and, a few weeks ago, it announced it had raised a further $1 billion to invest, and he’s hoping for another 40 companies.
“It’s very exciting … In the first one we got a lot in storage and food. In the second fund we’ll add a lot in, things like cheap, green hydrogen and direct air capture and aviation fuel because those are very tough things. We had some investments for those in the first but not as many as we’d like. So we’ll fill it out so that we’re touching all the different sources of emissions.”