The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Can Bill Gates green the world?
see an image of Neanderthal sexist manhood being promoted by the BBC, by Hollywood or by the advertising industry. Razor blade companies lecture men about how to be sensitive to women. TV adverts increasingly portray men cooking, cleaning or caring – which is of course a good thing.
No-one writes books promoting “white male supremacy”, and if any celebrity or teacher even hints at it, they lose their jobs. Instead, comedians like Robert Webb tell men “How Not To Be A Boy”. Sportsmen like Andy Murray and Freddie Flintoff tear up at the drop of a hat, or a ball. All good. But it raises the question of where this objectionable image is actually coming from.
Robinson points the finger at Nigel Farage and the so-called ‘gammons’: “the red-faced old gits in blazers”. But who seriously regards them as role models? Most of the hyper-masculine men he speaks to in this amusing, insightful and well-informed book don’t fit the toxic bill. Robinson says he is writing about the evils of patriarchy, but he labours with the ontological question of what patriarchy is.
Where is it? Who is it? He ends up saying that it’s really the bosses: “It’s the top 1% of men,” he concludes, “who are really reaping the rewards [of patriarchy]”. This ignores the fact that Britain’s best paid executive in 2020 was a woman, Denise Coates of Bet365.
Anyway, the doctrine of heteronormative cis patriarchy does not give white male millennials a get-out-ofjail-free card because they don’t wear blazers or run companies. If he truly believes that history is driven by an irreconcilable conflict between men and women, then he was simply born on the wrong side. It’s like predestination in the Protestant religion. Academic feminists largely stopped referring to patriarchy in the 1990s precisely because it obscured divisions of social class which have little to do with gender. It was Twitter and #MeToo that rehabilitated it.
I feel sympathy for Robinson. Feminists I grew up with rather liked men, even laddish ones, and saw them as allies so long as they supported equality and didn’t behave like creeps or male chauvinists. That door has been closed to millennial men, whose principal role in the sex war is to apologise for themselves. Sorry Martin, you can cry all you like, but you won’t be excused.
HOW TO AVOID A CLIMATE DISASTER: THE SOLUTIONS WE HAVE AND THE BREAKTHROUGHS WE NEED
Bill Gates
Allen Lane, £17.99
IT’S hard to take anything Bill Gates says about climate change seriously. Through his trust, the Microsoft co-founder owns around $10 billion worth of shares in Warren Buffet’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, which invests heavily in natural gas and other polluting utilities.
According to Lund University professor Stefan Gössling, he is, along with other celebrities, responsible for 10,000 times more carbon emissions, annually, than the average person. In January, he tried to buy the world’s largest private jet operator, Signature. (Gates has described using a private jet as his chief “guilty pleasure”.) But even if the Seattle-based billionaire didn’t have a vast carbon footprint, the solutions to global warming he outlines would lack credibility.
How To Avoid A Climate Disaster tells us nothing we didn’t know about environmental break-down. An average rise of two degrees Celsius in Earth’s temperature will decimate crop yields in developing countries. A hotter planet means more intense and protracted wildfires. By 2100, major urban centres like Miami will likely be underwater. Gates’s solution? Market-driven innovation. With the right combination of state and private support, companies can slash the costs of renewable energy, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and dragging the global economy across that all-important zerocarbon threshold.
The problem with this hyperoptimistic green capitalism is that it doesn’t work. Scientists have been warning corporate elites about the consequences of unchecked oil, gas, and coal production since at least the late 1970s. Yet, half a century later, global emissions are still going up and the planet is still heating at an apocalyptic rate. Gates believes that we can complete the necessary shift away from extractive industries within the next 30 years, assuming investors are willing to embrace controversial initiatives like geo-engineering and nuclear power. The consensus among climate activists, on the other hand, is that humanity has less than a decade to ditch its addiction to carbon – and that market forces aren’t moving anywhere near fast enough to make that happen.
Gates is an incrementalist by the standards of the modern environmental movement, firmly lodged on the conservative wing of the green ideological spectrum. Unsurprisingly, given his Silicon Valley origins, he all but disavows politics as a mechanism for tackling climate change. Left-wing demands for a Green New Deal are notably absent from his narrative, and he makes no attempt to reckon with the vast, obstructive lobbying power of oil and gas executives. Instead,
Gates places a huge amount of faith in the capacity of new technology to mitigate the effects of global warming and argues that business leaders should be free to channel the world’s “scientific IQ” into a dynamic, competitive campaign against rising emissions. Governments, he says, should regulate and incentivise innovators, not smother them. Where possible, politicians should simply “stay out of the way”.
Gates is a pedestrian writer who uses technocratic language to convey conventional ideas with a billionaire’s confidence. His advice is often doled out in list form, with sections explaining how consumers can “sign up for green pricing programs”, employers can “connect with government-funded research” and policy-makers can “change the rules so new technologies can compete”. Even applied in full, these recommendations wouldn’t help us avoid a climate disaster. They might help us delay one. But that’s not what Gates is advertising. “I am aware that I’m an imperfect messenger on climate change,” the 65-year-old philanthropist concedes early in the text. If only he had stopped there.