
A critical step to reduce climate change - mhandley
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/A-critical-step-to-reduce-climate-change?WT.mc_id=20190515000825_Energy-Storage_BG-TW&WT.tsrc=BGTW&linkId=67393850
======
skrap
Hello Bill Gates (who will never read this). You are a solutions guy, and a
technology guy. Unsurprisingly, your blog lists lots of good technologies and
solutions.

But climate change has shifted from a technological problem to a policy
problem. We can solve climate change with a cocktail of existing tech, but we
need public policy to make it happen. The biggest thing _you_ (Mr Gates) can
do is get directly involved in policy-making. US politics only empowers the
ultra-rich, and you are sitting on the sidelines.

Get your face on TV, in front of Congress, and in the Oval Office. The rest of
us can't, so you have to.

[edit for clarity]

~~~
ekianjo
Technological progress will solve any policy problem. If you make it so that
wind, solar, and next generation nuclear power is cheaper than other
alternatives and more desirable, the market will progressively switch. Most
technological improvements did not wait for a policy to change to induce
revolutions in their respective fields. Now everyone is investing in Energy,
and there's hardly any need for policy when the market is already full steam
in investment mode.

~~~
Uehreka
> If you make it so that wind, solar, and next generation nuclear power is
> cheaper than other alternatives and more desirable, the market will
> progressively switch.

Not necessarily. Lots of people have jobs in coal, oil and gas production, and
those constituencies will often vote for politicians who promise to keep those
jobs around. They can do this through heavily subsidizing the cost of fossil
fuels (which they currently do) in order to reduce the extent to which the
economic benefits of clean energy can influence the market.

In the long term, they probably can't keep this up, but we don't really have a
"long term" anymore.

~~~
burfog
We don't really subsidize fossil fuels. I thought that your comment was
interesting, so I looked it up. These "subsidies" are just completely normal
stuff that ordinary American businesses get.

Mostly it is tax deductions. Everybody is getting tax deductions. Everybody
from your local hair salon to Microsoft is taking tax deductions. For the fuel
companies this includes income tax, fees for shipping, and royalties for
extracting the resources. The only really offensive one is a deduction for
BP's punishment, which sort of undoes the punishment... though that is fair if
the tobacco companies got to do likewise for their punishment.

The rest is just the unpaid share of the cost of running various government
agencies. First of all this isn't generally something the companies feel they
benefit from; ditching OSHA/EPA/etc. would probably please them. Second of
all, again it is something we do for all American businesses.

As with any other American businesses, wind and solar providers get the
subsidies. They also get special environmental subsidies, which are huge.

I think this dispute started because the abnormal subsidies being provided to
wind/solar providers have become a political issue. The wind/solar providers
respond by pushing the narrative that fossil fuels get subsidies, but that
just isn't a reasonable conclusion. The supposed subsidies are just normal
things provided to American businesses, unlike what wind and solar are
getting.

~~~
mceachen
Perhaps this could be dismissed as semantics, but saying that we don't
subsidize fossil fuels seems to not jibe with the reality that the only
countries that have lower gasoline prices in world are countries whose
economies are predominantly fossil-fuel based. See
[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/gas-
prices/#20184:United-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/gas-
prices/#20184:United-States:USD:g)

If the US gasoline costs were even close to EU levels, (say, 2x what we pay),
there'd be an inversion in household energy consumption economics (and it'd be
the difference between 2% and 5% of household incomes). EVs wouldn't be just
for tree-huggers. Buying from 100% clean electrical sources might be cheaper
than "standard" sources.

~~~
burfog
The US has a large well-unified market with good transportation and local
sources of fuel. That cuts costs.

Other places, like the EU, don't have all that. They also apply some really
extreme taxes. Lack of punitive taxes isn't a subsidy. If the taxes are never
imposed in the first place, it isn't even a tax credit.

The average gasoline tax in the US is $0.53 per gallon total, combining all
taxes. Just the excise tax in Turkey is $4.32 per gallon!!! The average
gasoline-specific tax in the 34 advanced economies is $2.62 per gallon, but
then a VAT is applied on top of that.

------
cies
> electricity generation is the single biggest contributor to climate
> change—responsible for 25 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and
> growing every day

To put it in perspective: livestock clocks in at 18% and transportation at
13%. [1]

But greenhouse gas emissions is not all that counts, there's also
acidification, eutrophicatoin (phosphor pollution) and land use. Livestock
clock in very high on all these points. [2]

We need land for forest: reduce footprint while re-creating habitats.

Good to know Bill also invests on that side of the picture. [3]

[1] [http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts](http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts) [2]
[https://phys.org/news/2018-05-reveals-foods-markedly-
environ...](https://phys.org/news/2018-05-reveals-foods-markedly-
environmental-impacts.html) [3] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/21/how-bill-
gates-backed-vegan-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/21/how-bill-gates-backed-
vegan-beyond-meat-is-winning-over-meat-eaters.html)

~~~
paganel
We need a change in culinary habits, eating meat each day for seven days a
week isn’t pheasible on the long run. And I don’t think people will flock to
eating artificial meat, I don’t think real milk has been replaced by soy milk.

Also, a fact left unsaid by most of the people commenting on this, we need to
reverse the engines of economic growth, this planet doesn’t have the resources
of providing a middle-class lifestyle for 7 or 8 billion people. In essence,
I’m saying that Malthus was right, and the longer we fight against his ideas
the longer it will take for us to complain about stuff that I’m afraid is
already outside of our control.

I’m not really sure what sort of event will bring the next environmental state
of equilibrium, we used to rely on wars and lack of antibiotics for that in
centuries past, but I’m sure it won’t be pretty.

~~~
antepodius
People have been prophesizing collapse and mass death for decades. They were
wrong every time (obviously).

Do you have the numbers to back up your claim about middle-class lifestyles?

~~~
paganel
We do currently witness mass death for insects, which had managed to survive
through quite a few geological revolutions but which apparently cannot survive
the humans’ need for industrialized agriculture (and you cannot feed 8 billion
people without industrialized agriculture). And the extinctions among the
mammal genre are already pretty well known.

------
jabl
Bill Gates gets it. We need to step on the gas and deploy boatloads of wind,
solar, nuclear, batteries, pumped hydro, long-distance transmission, energy
efficiency measures, CCS, demand response, and whatnot.

Yes, it will cost a lot. But leaving our children with an increasingly hostile
planet isn't a tenable option either (and one which will be even more
expensive as well).

~~~
rooam-dev
How could be people convinced about importance of this if it doesn't or won't
impact them enough?

Yes, "think about our children" is good, but in the end people are still
selfish and will think that it's not their problem.

~~~
Ma8ee
I meet much more people that use “other people won’t care” as an excuse for
not doing anything themselves than I meet people who actually don’t care.

If we just started doing our parts and didn’t worry so much about other people
doing theirs we wouldn’t in this mess.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yes, saw recently on HN (and often IRL) "no point recycling when industry
...", and "we'll never best 10% domestic recycling, why bother".

In UK councils quote 50% recycling rates. And that's with most supermarkets
still producing food in unrecyclable packaging.

~~~
TeMPOraL
At the risk of injecting extra negativity into the thread: what about the
recent revelations that a lot of (if not most) recycling is really shipping
the trash to poorer nations to be dumped there?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>"councils quote"

Yeah ... I've not investigated that yet. But I have seen some of our local
recycling facilities and they seem to be operating rather than secretly
filling shipping containers.

It does trouble me visiting my town's rubbish dump, there is so much usable
stuff in the skips, so much waste.

Presumably China now refusing other country's trash is shedding new light on
these issues.

I think we have to fix our entire economic systems in order to solve this, and
I don't think that's going to work readily because people will always exploit
others for financial/political gain at the expense of the environment. We're
going to have to seriously curtail individual freedoms that allow people to
make excessive use of resources. We can't do that under our current market-
based systems.

Take a simple example, fleece fabric is great, cheap, used widely but is a
massive source of microplastic pollution - we're going to have to make it
expensive, and stop people from throwing it away, and use the income to do
proper filtration and recycling.

We're going to need to start treating fraud wrt environmental issues as akin
to manslaughter - actually put businessmen in jail who are responsible
(knowingly, or unknowingly through negligence) for things like shipping
recycling abroad and not confirming it is recycled, or lying about car MPGs,
or failing to filter effluent, or allowing runoff to poison water sources,
....

We probably need something akin to a global one-child policy as well. We can't
go on increasing population and just expect resources to stretch. Things are
going to break much harder with population rates left as they are.

I better stop ... /rant

~~~
TeMPOraL
Hah, don't worry about /rant, I agree with you. In particular wrt. treating
environmental fraud issues akin to manslaughter, or at least intentionally
causing bodily harm. Because that's what it is, except stretched over time and
applying to more people. We have an issue like this close to home - apparently
in Poland there are people who offer very cheap disposal of toxic waste. They
take that waste and just dump it illegally. I'd like to see them - and those
who in full knowledge use their services - to be dragged in front of the
courts and jailed.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Yes, in UK too. AIUI we've implemented a system of tracking the waste to the
originators, who can't use the excuse "I paid someone" as they are jointly
responsible for safe disposal. Waste disposal operatives have therefore to
have licenses and domestic users must check the license so they can be assured
the waste will be disposed of, use unlicensed operators, get fined. It seems
to be working to some extent but as costs for proper disposal increase the
"benefits" of fraud for the waste operatives increase too.

------
Illniyar
That graph is quite misleading, it should be a percentage of total usage, if
we wanted to show progress. Global energy consumption could have grown just as
much, making progress zero.

This graph shows things more accurately:
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-
energy](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy)

From 2000 energy consumption has increased by 50%. Every type of energy usage
has increased except traditional biofules (wood basically).

I think the key thing to take from this graph is that renewable energies
aren't replacing older methods, simply new demand is proportionally being
supplied by newer method (and even that by a minuscule amount).

~~~
Dumblydorr
Good point, bill's graph suffers from numerator analysis, only showing
production but not the overall percentage based on the total.

The graph you posted is sobering. Looking at coal, there is a tiny dip in it,
wow that's all the death of coal we hear about. Its still going to be phased
out for 20 years globally, nevermind the phaseouts of oil and natural gas
which will take even longer.

We have a long way to go, let's keep striving!

------
stinos
_But because the world must balance the need to eliminate carbon emissions
with economic growth_

I read this often, and everytime can't help but wonder: must the world really
strive for economic growth? Is just stability not enough? Isn't unbridled
growth a major cause of the situation we're in now (and not just with respect
to climate, but also the wealth of other environmental problesm, even
disasters, the earth faces)? Note: these are honest questions. I don't know
how econmics really work. Maybe I'm naive, and I perfectly get for some 'more
more more' is the key aspect in life. But is that really required?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yes. As others pointed out: without economic growth, population growth makes
everyone poorer.

Also, economic growth _is not our enemy here_ (nor is growing energy usage).
In fact, properly applied, they're our friends in this problem. The trick is
doing more of the helping stuff, and less of the damaging stuff.

I've argued this two days ago, so to not repeat myself:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19897547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19897547).

~~~
rc_kas
Economic growth is not required for the survival of humanity. Economic growth
is just something that wealthy people want so that the can keep or increase
their wealth. Again, wealth itself not being vital to the survival of humanity
(and many species of animals).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Not many people care about "survival of humanity" in the abstract. What we all
care about is not suffering, not dying, and not seeing others suffer and die.
And then other things on the Maslov's pyramid. Economic growth is absolutely
necessary to achieve that; the default, natural state of humanity is pain and
death.

~~~
abyssin
I think the abstraction of humanity as a group of which every human being is
part of is something that many people understand. People care about the
messages they hear, and most of them still hear a message that says there's no
real issue and it's possible to keep living the way they live, and it's
possible for everyone to keep living the way they live.

Many people would be okay if the message was: we are all going to have to
change the way we live, including the rich.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's fair. I do too subscribe to the abstraction of humanity as a group.

I guess what I'm saying is that even with climate change, _survival of
humanity_ is not at stake. We're unlikely to collapse the climate to the point
where no humans can survive anywhere on the planet. What's under threat is
survival of our technological civilization, of our ways of life, of our
grandchildren. The danger is that a lot of people will suffer greatly and die
prematurely, and that the future will only contain more suffering.

------
hairytrog
Nuclear startup companies need more than words of support. They need financial
backing and they need it now. There are on the order of 50 startups in North
America trying to commercialize new nuclear technologies. A few have
billionaire backers, a few others are receiving government grants. All are
under funded.

In a world where a web service can be prototyped in weeks and complex hardware
can be prototyped in months, the investment community is not taking nuclear
startup proposals seriously. We get it - you want to make money as fast as
possible.

If we want to see operational Generation IV nuclear power in the next decade,
investors need to recalibrate their investment timeframes. This means we have
to wait longer and make larger bets. The human mind is tuned to yearly
seasonal cycles which is fine if projects can be tested on that time scale.
But for something as complex and risky as nuclear power, we need to think in
five or ten year cycles.

To all the people with money advocating for climate protection and low cost
power for the developing world - enough talk - nuclear startups want to get to
work, and they need financial backing. Next time you fund a company focused on
fintech, weed, or low-paying gig economy jobs, consider that you could be
investing in Generation IV safe nuclear. The contrast is stark between
companies that shuffle money around or capitalize on addiction versus
companies that produce the most basic resource of energy.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
The long view is gone. Let's just imagine we cannot stop climate change. Who's
working on _that_ problem?

------
mhandley
One thing I don't hear discussed much is that we really need enough renewables
installed so that on good days for solar and wind, we're actually generating
much more than 100% of demand. This then substantially reduces the fraction of
the time we depend on expensive storage. This only works though if we have
additional variable demand that can kick in when things are going well, both
to stabilize the grid and to provide a profitable market for energy. This is
where technologies like Prometheus are developing could fit in really well -
generating carbon-neutral aviation fuel from atmospheric CO2 and electricity,
so we can decarbonize those parts of the economy that cannot switch directly
to electric power.

~~~
jabl
Problem with many of these schemes is that they are capital intensive, so if
you can run them only when there's an oversupply of renewables on the grid,
well, the economics are going to suck.

I do think that synthetic fuels is a likely solution for things like long
distance airplanes which are very hard to decarbonize otherwise.

------
kimar
One obvious step that seems to be missing is having governments acknowledge
this as a top priority. Make carbon-based energy production expensive enough
that these technological innovations are the only alternative.

It seems like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma[1]. We are so
economically dependent on carbon fuels that the incentives to develop and
adopt renewable energies are not yet strong enough. Shouldn't governments do
more to speed up that adoption curve?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

~~~
pif
> One obvious step that seems to be missing is having governments acknowledge
> this as a top priority.

It is missing because it's not possible!

Any government who doesn't have economy at its top priority will be
overthrown. Economy can at most be slightly slowed down in order to push green
policies, but that's it: anything more, and next government will be voted on
the promise to restart coal mines!

------
chriswarbo
It always interests me that lithium batteries are used in situations with such
different constraints: from mobile phones (lightweight, compact, frequent
irregular (dis)charging, etc.) to grid storage (controllable (dis)charging
patterns, weight and size are less important).

I wonder which other, less battery-oriented, chemical reactions have been
investigated for grid storage. For example, non-rechargable aluminium
batteries have been suggested for electric cars (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery)
); I could certainly imagine a substation topping up the grid by corroding a
huge heap of metal (aluminium is abundant, but heavier materials could be used
since they don't need to be mobile).

The interesting dynamic with such non-rechargable "batteries" is how they're
manufactured: they would come from surplus production at times of abundant
energy. AFAIK energy-intensive processes like aluminium smelting are already
used to balance the grid (either directly, with contracts between both
parties; or indirectly, by changing energy prices).

Are the round-trip efficiencies of such reactions too low? Are the energy
quantities too low? Would this just be an indirect (and hence less efficient)
form of the existing load balancing?

~~~
mlindner
The problem is "lithium batteries" is too wide category. There are vastly
different chemistries that just happen to have lithium in them that all get
grouped into "lithium batteries". All those applications you mention, for most
they each have their own dedicated chemistry.

This is a good approachable article that goes over all the common types of
lithium batteries.
[https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/types_of_lithium...](https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/types_of_lithium_ion)

------
D_Alex
The article lists three important solutions for transition to clean
electricity. But there is also a fourth important solution, one that I think
HN crowd can help with: demand side management systems. Essentially, this aims
to match energy utilisation to energy production.

One idea which needs implementing ASAP is a way to use EV batteries as a
flexible storage device, so that you charge the battery when there is a
surplus of power, and perhaps release a bit of energy when there is a deficit.
To do this in a user-friendly way is not trivial, but surely not that hard
either. And yet no current or planned EV seems to be offering this.

Can someone get onto this please :)

~~~
ljcn
> And yet no current or planned EV seems to be offering this.

In the UK, Ovo customers can do vehicle to grid transfers from their Nissan
Leaf, with an appropriate charger.

[https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-
char...](https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-charger)

~~~
D_Alex
Nice find! This is exactly what I had in mind!

It is curious that this system is only compatible with Nissan leaf though.
Perhaps we should work on a standard?

------
netwanderer3
These solutions are touching only the technical aspects and I believe most
experts probably know exactly what to do, but that doesn't mean they can
actually do it simply because its execution depends largely on politics.

We can have one country practicing it but another just doing the complete
opposite to ruin it for everyone, then realistically we don't really make any
progress at all no matter how much effort we put in.

For any climate change solutions to really become effective, it will
definitely require a joined global effort. That's where our root problem is,
until we can solve that the rest are just useless noises.

------
diegoholiveira
Bill forgot the only thing that can truly be a game changer: Nuclear Fusion.
In the long run, this is the only solution that can provide the amount of
energy required by our modern society.

~~~
votepaunchy
Fusion is also the only energy source which will allow us to reverse the worst
effects of climate change (melted ice caps in particular).

~~~
Brakenshire
Very unlikely that fusion will have any impact on climate change on the
timescale which is necessary. The cuts need to be made over the next 20 years,
even if we had the technology, it would take a lot longer to scale up.

------
paulcarroty
If anyone can help for climate change - it's easy: don't eat beef. Really.
Сattle produce TONS of methane. Less consuming => less market share.

~~~
jacknews
Cows are also among the most inefficient at converting food to ... food, and
responsible for a large part of habitat destruction world wide (eg cutting the
Amazon for pasture), which is I think an equally serous problem to global
warming.

------
JacKTrocinskI
I am all for renewable energy but what worries me the most is that our world
population in out of control. At what point do we factor this in and start
doing something about it? Even with renewable sources of energy can we sustain
such growth? I understand nobody wants the government telling them how many
kids they can have but I just don't see how we can keep on going this way, and
I think a decrease in the population rate would help the climate out as well
maybe even more so than renewable energy.

~~~
gnclmorais
I don’t think it’s the number of people the problem, but rather the demand for
resources a few people from the Western world create.

~~~
tremon
That's not an either-or question. Both population growth and per-human
resource demand need to decrease for our society to survive the next 100
years.

------
agent008t
How good, realistically, are our climate models? What are the probabilities of
the various outcomes if current trends continue?

It would be really interesting to know if the research has been verified by
any independent researchers not employed in academia - ideally from the world
of finance, where evaluating correctness of methodology and models is
absolutely crucial. Ideally they would also be highly sceptical of the
predictions and have a pro-economic growth bias.

~~~
viraptor
> ideally from the world of finance, where evaluating correctness of
> methodology and models is absolutely crucial

Isn't it only crucial to the group doing the analysis? Financial world thrives
on information asymmetry. If you have more information / better models, why
would you share it publically instead of extract as much as you can from that
difference? (Unless it's a one-off invest/short-publish-benefit case)

~~~
agent008t
Not sure I understand what you are asking. What I mean is that in (non-
academic, applied) finance - unlike many other disciplines - you relatively
quickly get feedback on the predictive power of your models. Like climate,
finance is also a complex system. You have to always be critical of the steps
you took to arrive at your model and focus on your research methodology.

Therefore I would trust someone who was successful in financial model research
to perform that "audit" of sorts. Someone like David E. Shaw, for example.

------
appleflaxen
One fundamental step that we could take tomorrow is ending the subsidies and
tax breaks on oil, and reassigning them to renewable energy sources.

Why we haven't done this already: special interests controlling our
government.

------
agentultra
I think one thing overlooked with solar panels is their short lifespan and the
toxic chemicals they leak into the environment when they are disposed of.
There isn't much regulation on how to handle the material waste from solar
panels, wind turbines, etc. And with the current threats to the oceans, fresh
water, and soil from climate change, agriculture, and industry... it doesn't
seem to me to be the one we should rely on.

Nuclear has been, and maybe should be, the way to go. Even with the horrible
accidents that have happened, it is safer than coal and has caused less human
harm as far as I can tell. I'm sure most people who are experts on this know
more. Maybe we should bump nuclear from a footnote to the leading header:
nuclear with a light mix of other renewables.

However none of this is useful if there isn't a unified push from all
countries across the world to rally together and make this happen from policy
all the way down. This is a problem facing humanity, not any one nation -- but
people everywhere.

------
imhoguy
Why not biomass? For millions of years the nature balanced CO2 itself with
plants, water cycle and fires. Massive reforestation would help with water
retention problems, biodiversity etc.

Solar, wind, batteries, nuclear sound big but they are not environmentally
neutral (massive and toxic mining of rare materials, noise, poluting
production, toxic recycling, disruption of airflow[1]).

Burning fosil fuels is dead-end way but do we want to make this planet a
complete artificial wasteland full of solar panel, wind farm, battery and
radioactive landfills because "we wanted to stop CO2 emissions at all costs"?

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-
found-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-found-to-
affect-local-climate/)

~~~
Dumblydorr
Simply put: biomass is not a good technology. You need huge,huge fields to
produce enough crops for turning into biofuels. Those fields need water,
space, pesticides, and labor, it's simply not economical compared to solar or
wind on the same location.

------
viach
It seems to me that climate change can only be stopped using unpopular
decisions. And unpopular decisions can't be applied globally in a
heterogeneous world. I think it is called "the tragedy of commons".

------
VBprogrammer
On a journey in the car the other day I was looking at all of the Oil Seed
Rape grown in the British country side. Diesel cars can be run with minimal
modifications on straight vegetable oils. I wondered how much land we'd need
to be self-sufficient on car transport.

We fill the car with fuel roughly once a week. So that's 40 litres a week or
2000 litres a year. Looking on wikipedia I found the yield is about 1000
litres per hectare. So for our purposes we'd need at least 2 hectares (about 5
acres or 2 rugby fields).

There are 24 million hectares in the UK. However there are 38 million
registered vehicles (and some of them will be using a great deal more fuel
than we do). That's without any allowance for the energy use in growing and
pressing, land use for other crops or housing, or suitability for crop land.
And that's just transport not the various other energy requirements we have.

I'm not sure what the point was but it made me quite sad.

------
johnchristopher
Totally off-topic. I like the design of the site so I looked up the source.

There's something like 25 000 lines of JS and CSS o_O.

------
perfunctory
"It’s easy to be overwhelmed by climate change and what to do about it. Global
greenhouse gas emissions, for example, went up again last year—another
reminder that we must act quickly if we want to prevent the worst-case
scenarios of our warming planet.

Still, as I learn about all the new ideas to address this challenge, I am
optimistic that with the right mix of solutions we can deploy right now and
new innovations we can build a path to a carbon-free future."

I bet if you google it you will find exactly the same statement written by
somebody 10 years ago. And I bet somebody will write it again 10 years from
now. When will we stop fooling ourselves that technology is gonna save us?

------
lazyjones
I'd like to know who he thinks the "we" is in this article. Several countries
are already using ~100% carbon-neutral electricity and the USA and Europe are
progressing rapidly. The main culprits are developing nations and China, so
it's "them" who should be doing something urgently and "they" have a whole
slew of other problems not covered by Gates' US-centric perspective.

Reasonable approaches would be to bring manufacturing back to countries that
use mostly clean energy (oh, and modern approaches to labor and human rights)
and to tax imports from developing countries with poor CO2 record heavily
until they fix their issues.

~~~
antocv
You are downvoted for apparant racism.

The western world, of about 500 million people, pollute 4x more than China
which has 1.2B people.

~~~
lazyjones
> _apparant racism._

By people who apparently don't even know the meaning of the word.

> _The western world, of about 500 million people, pollute 4x more than China
> which has 1.2B people._

The western world has a much larger population, but I'd like to see you back
that claim up with reproducible numbers.

It's a fact that CO2 emissions in China are growing rapidly (per capita and
absolutely) while the "western world" is mostly reducing them and has been
doing that for many years. Also, we have to rely on China's "official data",
which may or may not be correct.

~~~
sampo
> CO2 emissions in China are growing rapidly

China rapidly tripled their emissions from 2000 to 2010, but after 2011 they
have hardly increased at all.

Second graph here: [https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-chinas-
co2-emissions-...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-chinas-
co2-emissions-grew-slower-than-expected-in-2018)

~~~
lazyjones
> _Now let us return to why the reported Chinese CO2 emissions growth in the
> communique is so much lower than our projection in the 2018 Global Carbon
> Budget. The real reason is not clear, but the problem is an unexplained
> inconsistency in the coal statistics in the communique._ [...] > _There is
> no apparent explanation for these discrepancies. Some people have suggested
> that China’s statistics bureau is manipulating the data to make coal
> consumption growth look smoother than it actually is, although there is no
> direct evidence for this. Whatever the case, the discrepancy over coal means
> that overall CO2 growth could be as high as around 4% – compared to 2.3%
> reported in the communique – even before accounting for other sources of
> uncertainty that we usually include in our analyses. Those factors push the
> uncertainty range even wider, to -0.4% to +6.7%._ ...

------
bsmith
This is all well and good (really), but I'm a bit disappointed that the entire
post omits the word "efficiency." Yes, we must do everything he mentions – but
we waste a TON of energy. Reducing our demand will only make any other
solution(s) easier to achieve. One salient stat: it's estimated that
commercial office buildings in the U.S. waste about 30% (!) of the energy they
consume.

Shameless plug: my startup (bractlet.com) uses physics-based simulation models
to try and claw back most of that 30%. If you're interested in that sort of
thing, I'd love your feedback on our website/offering. Feel free to email me:
brian@bractlet.com

------
11235813213455
I think the best solutions are very down to earth, non-ironically. Plant many
many trees, stop deforestation, stop people eating up on Amazon forest,
they're literally destroying the Earth lung while it needs a bigger lung. Of
course it'll need changes, people will need to stop over-consuming about
everything, reduce their meat consumption drastically, and stop many other
negative habits. One that upsets me are pets, how come more than 1 billion
people have pets? Just imagine the huge impact on climate if they were all to
replace them by plants

------
gdubs
These solutions make sense to me. To get there, I think we need a price on
carbon. Use the revenue to pay a dividend, to make it palatable to the general
public. Ratchet it up aggressively over the next five to ten years. Let people
trade credits to spark innovation, reforestation, etc.

Basically follow the Behavioral Economics of a 401k plan. Get people to start
contributing _anything_ , then get them to commit future raises and bonuses to
the plan. The more “out of sight, out of mind” the better.

------
Zanni
The article mentions traveling wave reactors and molten salt reactors being
developed by Terra Power. Any relationship or synergy between these two, or
are they orthogonal efforts?

~~~
jabl
I suppose there would be some synergy in general nuclear knowhow, fuel supply
(that is, making available a supply of HALEU or RgPu which is not something
the current global nuclear supply chain is providing) and maybe in terms of
reprocessing. But the reactors themselves are quite different.

------
syllable_studio
I'm excited to see a "Subsurface pumped hydro" solution on his list. This is
an idea I thought of recently and have since found other projects working on
it.

[https://blog.syllablehq.com/can-we-create-the-worlds-
largest...](https://blog.syllablehq.com/can-we-create-the-worlds-largest-
battery-deep-below-sea-level/)

~~~
ambicapter
Personally I'm waiting for us to directly inject heat into the Earth's core,
and retrieve it when needed.

------
YjSe2GMQ
This is all good, but the reality is we'll not have enough renewables any time
soon:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption)

We should seriously consider solar geo-engineering. Not as the ultimate policy
but to buy time.

~~~
czechdeveloper
I really hope not. We don't even know all consequences of geo-engineering.
Well, we know it will lower yield of crops on which we depend to feed
ourselves.

Future is green or none at all.

~~~
alluro2
Why not both - our current "forward" momentum is increasing greenhouse gases
and, even if we switch fully to renewables with minimal carbon footprint in a
very short time-frame, that momentum will continue to have effects. If we
apply the "backward" momentum and start removing carbon while also switcing
production to green, it should stop the negative effects more quickly.

Of course, I'm all for thorough planning and extensive, well-funded and
organized research first - unfortunately, we can't seem to start doing one of
these things seriously, let alone all three...

~~~
czechdeveloper
Removing CO2 is not geoengineering in my book. That is reversing what we did
and I'm all for that.

Geoengineering is for example emitting particles to atmosphere to lower amount
of sunlight hitting earth. This will cause sky to change color, lower yield of
crops and possibly other unknown consequences. That I would rather live
without. That is last resort think, not first think to do.

We don't even have carbon tax, plane fuel is not taxed etc. and we already
talk about geoengineering. This is crazy.

------
jacknews
I think biochar is a CCS technology that works right now, and could be
deployed/encouraged at vast scale.

Small-scale farmers char their agricultural wastes rather than just burning it
(perhaps in simple earth kilns) and bury it in their fields, capturing carbon,
and improving the soil at the same time.

------
JoshTko
Climate change sounds as innocuous as daylight savings. We should call it the
impact it will happen to people. Maybe climate caused catastrophe, or climate
extinction, anything but climate change.

------
jamisteven
Something I have been thinking about for years: black attracts heat, right? So
why do we not have a worldwide initiative to turn anything that is black to
white. Primary uses I am thinking are roofs of houses, and pavement on
streets. I remember as a kid painting roofs on my Dad's commercial properties
in Florida with reflective paint in order to reduce cooling costs of the
properties, which ended up working pretty well.

If climate change really is the threat they say it is, why are we not starting
with the simple and obvious solutions first that are super easy to
deploy/implement?

~~~
voisin
>If climate change really is the threat they say it is...

When can we stop couching our discussion of climate change with clauses like
this?

Also, the UN has some numbers on what happens if we increase the albedo of the
planet. IIRC, the issue is that almost nothing we do can counteract the loss
of albedo from the melting icecap.

~~~
bubblewrap
When the climate change has actually happened.

~~~
Brometheus
Climate change happens right now!
[https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/publ...](https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/public/2016-07/temperature-
figure2-2016.png)

~~~
bubblewrap
But obviously not to the degree that something dramatic has happened to the
world. And a lot of assumptions presumably go into that chart, that are not
shown on the chart.

Anyway, I don't want to discuss climate change. Just saying there is no
dramatic impact yet - once there is, maybe the language will change...

~~~
irb
Due to the gradual nature of the change to the climate in comparison to the
average human lifetime and the shifting baseline of people's perceptions, many
people will never acknowledge that there has been a dramatic impact.

~~~
bubblewrap
Some people... So what. Some people actually believe in flat earth theory.

------
RickJWagner
By being completely non-political, Bill Gates earns my attention. I like his
ideas.

------
rorystaa
It appears that the link is broken

~~~
lorenzhs
Link contains a bunch of unnecessary parameters but works for me. Maybe try
the "clean" link? [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/A-critical-step-to-
reduce-...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/A-critical-step-to-reduce-
climate-change)

~~~
muterad_murilax
Doesn't work either.

Even if I go to [https://www.gatesnotes.com/](https://www.gatesnotes.com/) and
click the link on the frontpage I reach the "Oops!" page.

------
robomartin
This is truly disconcerting. The fact that someone like Bill Gates writes (and
presumably believes) something like this is of real concern and an indicator
of just how far askew this whole business of climate change has gone.
Everything he proposes is pointless.

I've written about this before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19732189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19732189)

Here's my challenge for anyone to undertake. I don't care how much or how
little you know about the domain. See if you can refute this and then we can
have a conversation. If you know basic college Physics even better.

Step 1:

Take a look at this graph. It represents ice core atmospheric composition data
for the last 800,000 years. Yes, it is VERY accurate information.

[https://cdiac.ess-
dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...](https://cdiac.ess-
dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg)

Step 2:

Measure the slope of the rise from minima to maxima. Get a sense of what you
might call the average rate of change over this 800,000 year period.

My numbers are, again, roughly:

Increase of 100 ppm atmospheric CO2, about 25,000 years.

Decrease of 100 ppm atmospheric CO2, about 50,000 years.

Step 3:

Understand the crucial point (in caps for emphasis only, not shouting):

THE ABOVE MEANS THAT IF HUMANITY DID NOT EXIST IT WOULD TAKE THE PLANET ABOUT
50,000 YEARS TO REDUCE ATMOSPHERIC CO2 BY 100 PPM.

Think about that for a moment.

Step 4:

Now explain how installing bunches of solar panels, wind farms and converting
the entire transportation infrastructure to use these energy sources will
REVERSE climate change.

Step 5:

Really think about the above. Hopefully you've realized the absolute futility
of these proposals. I would call them "demented" but the more accurate term is
"political". They are not rooted in any kind reasonable scientific basis.

Realize that if humanity evaporated from this planet next Monday it would take
around 50,000 years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2. IF HUMANITY EVAPORATED FROM
THIS PLANET. Then answer this:

How, pray tell, is anything less than us leaving this planet going to deliver
results any faster than about 100 ppm in 50,000 years?

Step 6:

This is for extra credit.

Some out there are talking about reversing climate change (which, for the most
part is code for atmospheric CO2 accumulation) in 50 years.

Great. For 100 points: Explain how we are going to achieve a 1000x improvement
of the natural rate of change without destroying the planet in the process.
You see, anything we do will require energy and resources. And nothing is 100%
efficient. Which means the byproducts of this massive planetary-scale
undertaking is far more likely to cause more damage than to fix anything at
all. You don't speed-up a planetary scale process a thousand-fold without
serious --unknown-- consequences.

Again, any time you find yourself saying "but, but, but, solar and wind power
are clean and renewable" remind yourself that it would take 50,000 years for a
100 ppm reduction if we left earth with all of our toys in tow. That is
reality.

Now what? No clean energy then?

No, of course not. But not for these fake reasons. Here's a research paper you
can read that will set you straight as far as the relationship between
renewable energy sources and climate change. The conclusion, paraphrasing, is:
Even if we deployed the most optimal forms of all renewable energy sources
globally, atmospheric CO2 concentration would continue to increase
exponentially.

[https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-
publication-...](https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-
data/pdf/43326.pdf)

Pour that into your cup, sip on it for a while and then go re-read the Gates
memo.

We want clean and renewable energy for other reason. It will make human life
better. We want nuclear also, which is FAR, FAR better than the other sources.
What we do not want to do is continue the lie that this will "save the
planet". It will not. It will make things better but the solution to
atmospheric CO2 accumulation will require an approach and technology that we
have yet to imagine.

------
sigi45
Whenever i hear something about Trump and see all those people following him
and playing / taging along, i get very frustrated and unhappy.

We all should be able to fix climate change while in parallel Trump is
President and we don't care about that?

How does that work?

I'm 32, i might just not create children, accept our faith and will enjoy what
still exists.

------
Krasnol
Bill Gates: somebody buy my nuclear stuff, I already invested so much

------
perfunctory
Let's imagine the government got their act together and decided to act on
climate change. I firmly believe that simply investing in R&D, reforming
industry and rebuilding infrastructure will not be enough. Whatever policy is
introduced to fight climate change it will have to include, one way or
another, radical reduction in consumption. We might as well pretend that that
policy is already enacted and start behaving accordingly.

\- less flying.

\- less meat more plants.

\- take some days off. reduce commute.

\- if you have any fossil investments... for love's sake, why do you still
have fossil investments?!

~~~
hairytrog
The only way to do this is a radical change in government from democracy to
autocracy. The only way to do that is a catastrophic war or resource shortage.

~~~
perfunctory
Not necessarily. Prohibition was introduced by a democratic government, wasn’t
it? Not that it worked very well. But airlines and airspace might be easier to
control than alcohol smugglers.

------
aiyodev
> We can do even more. By investing in energy innovations...

Ok. Do it. You promised to give away your entire net worth years ago but
you're still worth $100 billion. What's the hold up?

~~~
simonh
So what you seem to be suggesting is he should spend his entire net worth all
in one go right now and then walk away, and if he doesn't he's a fraud? If
that's what you mean, it doesn't seem to me to be a very effective strategy
when tackling long term problems, especially as new problems keep coming up.
No investments means no revenue to tackle new problems.

Do you really think committing everything up front would be a better use of
his resources?

~~~
ldng
At very least he could have its foundation desinvest in non-renewables.

~~~
simonh
They dis-invested from their fossil fuel portfolio in 2016.

[https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/gates-divest-
fossil...](https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/gates-divest-fossil-
fuels/)

~~~
ldng
My bad. I wasn't aware of that. Genuine question, did they also dis-invest in
GMO (which tend to be bad for bio-diversity) ?

~~~
simonh
They do support some GMO research as part of their commitment to improved
agricultural output and food security in the developing world. I suppose it's
a case of conflicting priorities. They've been into reducing poverty and
hunger longer than they've been into environmentalism.

Even then it's not a straight trade-off. GMO can have harmful consequences,
but if it reduces the agricultural footprint that's an environmental benefit.

