Bill Gates doesn’t shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. “Well, who’s the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?” he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. “If there’s someone else, I’ve never met them.”
The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he’s thinking about the state of climate tech right now. Let’s get into it.
Are we too focused on near-term climate goals?
One of the central points Gates made in his new memo is that he thinks the world is too focused on near-term emissions goals and national emissions reporting.
So in parallel with the national accounting structure for emissions, Gates argues, we should have high-level climate discussions at events like the UN climate conference. Those discussions should take a global view on how to reduce emissions in key sectors like energy and heavy industry.
“The way everybody makes steel, it’s the same. The way everybody makes cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same,” he says.
As he noted in one recent essay for MIT Technology Review, he sees innovation as the key to cutting the cost of clean versions of energy, cement, vehicles, and so on. And once products get cheaper, they can see wider adoption.
What’s most likely to power our grid in the future?
“In the long run, probably either fission or fusion will be the cheapest way to make electricity,” he says. (It should be noted that, as with most climate technologies, Gates has investments in both fission and fusion companies through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, so he has a vested interest here.)
He acknowledges, though, that reactors likely won’t come online quickly enough to meet rising electricity demand in the US: “I wish I could deliver nuclear fusion, like, three years earlier than I can.”
He also spoke to China’s leadership in both nuclear fission and fusion energy. “The amount of money they’re putting [into] fusion is more than the rest of the world put together times two. I mean, it’s not guaranteed to work. But name your favorite fusion approach here in the US—there’s a Chinese project.”
Can carbon removal be part of the solution?
I had my colleague James Temple’s recent story on what’s next for carbon removal at the top of my mind, so I asked Gates if he saw carbon credits or carbon removal as part of the problematic near-term thinking he wrote about in the memo.
Gates buys offsets to cancel out his own personal emissions, to the tune of about $9 million a year, he said at the roundtable, but doesn’t expect many of those offsets to make a significant dent in climate progress on a broader scale: “That stuff, most of those technologies, are a complete dead end. They don’t get you cheap enough to be meaningful.
“Carbon sequestration at $400, $200, $100, can never be a meaningful part of this game. If you have a technology that starts at $400 and can get to $4, then hallelujah, let’s go. I haven’t seen that one. There are some now that look like they can get to $40 or $50, and that can play somewhat of a role.”
Will AI be good news for innovation?
During the discussion, I started a tally in the corner of my notebook, adding a tick every time Gates mentioned AI. Over the course of about an hour, I got to six tally marks, and I definitely missed making a few.
Gates acknowledged that AI is going to add electricity demand, a challenge for a US grid that hasn’t seen net demand go up for decades. But so too will electric cars and heat pumps.
I was surprised at just how positively he spoke about AI’s potential, though:
“AI will accelerate every innovation pipeline you can name: cancer, Alzheimer’s, catalysts in material science, you name it. And we’re all trying to figure out what that means. That is the biggest change agent in the world today, moving at a pace that is very, very rapid … every breakthrough energy company will be able to move faster because of using those tools, some very dramatically.”
I’ll add that, as I’ve noted here before, I’m skeptical of big claims about AI’s potential to be a silver bullet across industries, including climate tech. (If you missed it, check out this story about AI and the grid from earlier this year.)
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