Did Bill Gates Just Give the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year?
When we talk about zero climate emissions, we sound crazy. When Bill Gates does it, bankers pick up the phone.
When we talk about zero climate emissions, we sound crazy. When Bill Gates does it, bankers pick up the phone.
February 16, 2010 |
On Friday, the world's most successful businessperson and most powerful philanthropist did something outstandingly bold, that went almost unremarked: Bill Gates <http://www.thegatesnotes.com/> announced that his top priority is getting the world to zero climate emissions.
And Friday, Gates predicted extraordinary climate action: zero <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007879.html> . Not small steps, not incremental progress, not doing less bad: zero. In fact, he stood in front of a slide with nothing but the planet Earth and the number zero. That moment was the most important thing that has happened at TED.
What, exactly, did he say, and why is it so important?
Gates spoke about his commitment to using his massive philanthropic resources (the Gates Foundation is the world's largest) to make life better for people through public health and poverty alleviation ("vaccines and seeds" as he put it). Then he said something he's never said before: that is it because he's committed to improving life for the world's vulnerable people that he now believes that climate change is the most important challenge on the planet.
Even more importantly, he acknowledged the only sensible goal, when it comes to climate emissions, is to eliminate them: we should be aiming for a civilization that produces no net emissions, and we should be aiming to live in that civilization here in the developed world by 2050.
Obviously, that's a big goal. Because he is the world's biggest geek, to explain how he plans to achieve that goal, Gates put up a slide with a formula (which we can call the Gates Climate Equation):
CO2 = P x S x E x C
Meaning this: the climate emissions of human civilization are the result of four driving forces:
* Population: the total number of people on the planet (which is still increasing because we are not yet at peak population <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009107.html> ).
* Services: the things that provide prosperity (and because billions of people are still rising out of poverty <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002197.html> and because no global system will work unless it's fair <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007122.html> , we can expect a massively increased demand for the services that provide prosperity).
* Energy: the amount of energy it takes to produce and provide the goods and services that our peaking population uses as it grows more prosperous (what some might call the energy intensity of goods and services). Gates believes it's likely cutting two-thirds of our energy waste is about as good as we can do.
* Carbon: the amount of climate emissions generated in order to produce the energy it takes to fuel prosperity.
Those four, he says, essentially define our emissions (more on that later). In order to reach zero emissions, then, at least one of these values has to fall to zero. But which one? He reckons that because population is going to continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy.
To do that, we need an "energy miracle." We need energy solutions that don't yet exist, released through a global push for clean energy innovation. That, in turn, demands that a generation of entrepreneurs push forward new ideas for renewable energy, unleashing "1,000 promising ideas." He described one of his own investments, but went on to note that we need hundreds of other ambitious companies as well, and he plans to put his own efforts into this arena.
Why is this important? The news stories focused largely on the clean energy aspect of the speech, and certainly the world's most successful businessman announcing that clean energy is the next frontier is a big headline. However, I think though that the real breakthrough was not Gates' answer to the problem, but his definition of success: zero.
Bright green advocates understand that we need prosperity without planetary impact <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010070.html> . In many of the circles I run in, this is an uncontroversial idea, and, indeed, the conversation has moved on, to discussing how we decouple better lives from ecological footprints <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006650.html> (or even go beyond, and build a society that restores the ecosystems on which it depends <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004509.html> ).
To say, however, that the standard of zero impact is not widely understood and endorsed would be a whopping understatement. Most people rarely see the things they do, buy and use as directly part of the living systems of the planet. Few people who do think of their connection to nature have ever conceived their lives designed to have no impact at all. For most people, a ten percent or twenty percent improvement sounds like a big deal -- in large part because the improvements they're most familiar with involve giving things up. When they do encounter it, the idea of "zero" looms like a giant wall of deprivation in front of them. The idea that zero might not be the end of the good life, but in fact the beginning of a much better way of life, is simply inconceivable to the vast, vast majority of them. When we talk zero, we sound crazy.
But when Bill Gates talks zero, he sounds visionary. Gates, whatever else he did Friday, just made the most important idea on the planet mainstream credible. That's a big, big deal.
Was his articulation ideal? No. In fact, I think it has some big flaws. The biggest flaw is that the Gates Climate Equation could lead to carbon blindness <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008064.html> , a self-defeating willingness to destroy critical environmental systems in the name of saving the planet from climate change. Climate is not the only absolutely vital planetary boundary <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010551.html> we're straining. The biosphere transcends the climate crisis.
What's more, protecting and healing the biosphere is essential to meeting the climate crisis itself. Logging our forests <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009545.html> , over-burdening our oceans <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009389.html> , converting land for agriculture and grazing <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010586.html> , all these are huge contributors to our climate problem, and restoring the capacities of natural systems to absorb carbon dioxide is a critical part of the solution.
In order to truly succeed, we need to improve the quality of our natural systems at about the same rate at which we're converting the economy to clean energy. Properly, Gates' Equation would include a value for nature:
CO2 = P x S x E x C ÷ N
There's another big gap here, though: the prosperity represented by S.
Now we might start with the energy use to deliver those services (E in the Equation). The energy intensity of any given form of prosperity can, I believe, be improved quite a bit; but the idea that E can be dramatically improved without improving the kind of prosperity we're attempting to provide is the very definition of what I call The Swap <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010947.html> . The Swap doesn't work.
And we don't need it to. The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.
We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving efficiency.
The answer to the problem of cars and automotive emissions, for instance, isn't designing a better car, it's designing a better city <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007800.html> . The answer to the problem of overconsumption isn't recycling cans or green shopping, it's changing our relationship to stuff, so that everything we use and live with is designed for zero waste <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008176.html> , and either meant to last ("heirloom design" and "durability") or to be shared ("product service systems") or both. The best living we've ever had is waiting beyond zero. What looks like a wall to many people from this side of zero, looks to like a trellis from the other side, a foundation on which new thinking <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006915.html> can flourish.
Cities are the tools we need for reinventing prosperity. We can build zero-impact cities <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010941.html> , and we need to. Any answer to the problem of climate change needs to be as focused on reinventing the future as powering it.
(Photo: Nancy Duarte <http://blog.duarte.com/2010/02/news-alert-bill-gates-is-officially-redeemed-from-presentation-purgatory/> . Make her famous.)
Alex Steffen is the executive editor of Worldchanging <http://www.worldchanging.com/> .
2)
New York Times article on Global Weirding:
Op-Ed Columnist - Global Weirding Is Here - NYTimes.com
February 17, 2010
Op-Ed ColumnistGlobal Weirding Is Here By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics,
surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a
particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and,
therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable
energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill.
When you see lawmakers like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina tweeting that
“it is going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’ ” or news that the
grandchildren of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma are building an igloo next to
the Capitol with a big sign that says “Al Gore’s New Home,” you really wonder if
we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore.
The climate-science community is not blameless. It knew it was up against
formidable forces — from the oil and coal companies that finance the studies
skeptical of climate change to conservatives who hate anything that will lead to
more government regulations to the Chamber of Commerce that will resist any
energy taxes. Therefore, climate experts can’t leave themselves vulnerable by
citing non-peer-reviewed research or failing to respond to legitimate questions,
some of which happened with both the Climatic Research Unit at the University of
East Anglia and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Although there remains a mountain of research from multiple institutions about
the reality of climate change, the public has grown uneasy. What’s real? In my
view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places
like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met
Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it
“What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in
language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed
footnotes.
At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild
exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding.
It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist
Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site,
climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every
aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.
Here are the points I like to stress:
1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because
that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate
changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets
wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.
The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at
the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year
drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change
predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation
than ever; others will become drier than ever.
2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going
from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s
orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What
the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and
thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more
heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree
that could lead to dangerous disruptions.
3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans
are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance
— by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because
this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will
import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars
overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are
sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists
and the schools that nurture them.
4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world
that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and
2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable
energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next
great global industry.
China, of course, understands that, which is why it is investing heavily in
clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail. It sees the future trends and is
betting on them. Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now.
And Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other.
Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming confused
about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move toward clean-tech
and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to oil. Yes, sir, it is morning
in Saudi Arabia.
Maureen Dowd is off today.
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