Bill Gates’ compelling plan for zero carbon
It’s 20 years since I had my one and only fleeting conversation with Bill Gates, at a press conference at Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters. I asked the co-founder of the world’s largest software company what he thought the next game-changing technology would be. ‘‘Artificial intelligence,’’ he responded, explaining how AI would change software, entire industries and the face of society.
AI has indeed been a game changer, in everything from the algorithms dictating what appears in social media news feeds to the software used to detect tumours in mammogram images.
But these days Gates is thinking bigger, devoting his time and many of his billions to the complex task of getting the world’s wealthy countries to emit zero net carbon emissions by 2050, and helping the middle-income countries do the same shortly thereafter.
Gates seems an unlikely climate crusader. He was widely considered a ruthless businessman who built and aggressively defended a monopoly in software for running personal computers.
In his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Gates presents a compelling plan for how to have a decent crack at reaching the 2050 goal. He advocates more use of wind and solar, better energy efficiency, incentives to go green and putting a price on carbon.
All of those things are being pursued now. But Gates argues that a scientific revolution to fuel innovation in clean energy is also required and the building blocks need to be in place by the end of this decade.
The breakthroughs must come in green hydrogen, grid-scale electricity storage, zerocarbon cement, steel and fertiliser, next generation nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, carbon capture and storage, pumped hydro and drought- and flood-resistant crops. We aren’t far along in some of those areas because we’ve relied for more than 100 years on cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Now, the focus needs to be on reducing what Gates calls the ‘‘green premium’’.
A gallon of gasoline in the United States costs about US$2.43. A zero carbon option using advanced biofuels costs US$5 a gallon, more than double the price. Reducing that gap is everything.
Gates calls for a five-fold increase in renewable energy research in the United States and a reorganisation of basic and applied research around the zero emissions goal. It requires every country to do the same and get the resulting innovations working as soon as possible.
That’s an almighty task. But I admire the clarity of Gates’ thinking. Science and innovation are central to us solving this problem we’ve created for ourselves.
Science and innovation are central to us solving this problem we’ve created for ourselves.