Bezos and Gates: What's their impact on the Climate Crisis? : Just Have a Think

depending on which day of the week you look at the stock market the chances are that one of these two will be the richest human being on the planet they are of course Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos both of them made their fortunes providing products and services that were simply too useful and too convenient for people to ignore and the behemoth corporations of Microsoft and Amazon have come to epitomize the principles of mass market capitalism and ever-increasing levels of consumption but of course with great wealth comes great responsibility over the last 20 years or so the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given away almost 40 billion dollars in philanthropic donations mostly focused on improving health and education in developing countries in February 20 20 Jesus took to Instagram to announce that he will be committing 10 billion dollars of his personal fortune into the launch of his own philanthropic organization which he's calling the Bezos earth fund these are enormous sums of money from enormous fortunes so how do the activities and contributions of these two men and the companies they founded measure up to each other when it comes to our most urgent predicament the climate emergency hello and welcome to justify think let's just say that give or take a couple of billion either way these two guys are pretty much the two wealthiest people in the world they both agree that climate change is real and then represents a clear and present threat to life on Earth they also agree that human induced emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the main driver of atmospheric warming and climate change and they both recognize that urgent action is needed in order to reverse those emissions and dramatically slow that warming in his Instagram post back in February Jeff Bezos told us climate change is the biggest threat to our planet I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share this global initiative will fund scientists activists NGOs any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world and back in his 2015 annual letter Bill Gates said this the long term threat of climate change is so serious that the world needs to move much more aggressively right now to develop energy sources that a cheaper can deliver on demand and emit zero carbon dioxide the next 15 years are a pivotal time when these energy sources need to be developed so that they'll be ready to deploy before the effects of climate change become severe in fact Bill Gates has been campaigning on climate change issues for over a decade now back in 2010 he gave a presentation called innovating to zero as part of the Ted 2010 event focusing on the five technologies that he saw as key to achieving an 80 percent reduction in co2 emissions by 2050 gates introduced this simple equation to illustrate the main drivers of co2 emissions P stands for population s is services per person e is the energy consumed per service and C is the co2 emitted per unit of energy consumed Bill's pointless foot for the world to get anywhere close to net zero carbon emissions basic algebra said that one of the numbers on the right hand side would also have to get very close to zero - it was unlikely to be population he argued because that was set to rise from the 6.8 billion people that were on the planet in 2010 through over 9 billion in 2050 it was even less likely to be services which he said encompassed everything from food to clothing to electrical appliances to heating and fuel because as the developing world continued to pull itself out of poverty gates pointed out that all of those services would go up not down in fact he told his audience that those things were predicted to double by 2050 energy efficiency offered a ray of hope even back in 2010 with great advances already being made in energy-saving lightbulbs improved building and insulating materials and better fuel efficiency in vehicles but gates suggested that those kinds of initiatives might at best half the emissions that our species produced so that left that blindingly obvious conclusion that the world had to find a way to bring the level of carbon dioxide emissions from energy generation right down very close to zero and if we were going to achieve an 80% reduction in co2 emissions by 2050 which was the United Nations stated aim back in 2010 then bill showed us that our trajectory would have to take us towards a 20% reduction by 2020 well 2020 has a course arrived and it may not surprise you to learn that we haven't achieved that goal in the year that Bill Gates delivered that TED talk a decade ago according to the International Energy Agency human energy related co2 emissions totaled about 30 billion tons by 2019 that figure had actually gone up to just over thirty three billion tons the scientific consensus is that as a result of these emissions increases we've now missed our opportunity to simply reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that we emit we now need to start finding ways to pull co2 out of the atmosphere at the same time as rapidly reducing the amount we emit in the first place so that we reach a net negative number during the second half of this century so how did gates and Bezos and for that matter Amazon and Microsoft stack up against that ambition well in 2014 Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft but the company he founded nearly 40 years earlier and by then already committed itself to a net carbon 0 future in that same year the US Environmental Protection Agency listed Microsoft as number 2 in the top 100 leading green energy purchase in the state with the company purchasing almost 2.7 billion kilowatt hours of clean energy on an annual basis unsurprisingly Apple were also right up there in the top 5 but Amazon didn't appear in the list at all in fact Bezos his company has been one of the slowest of all the so-called new tech giant's to respond to the climate challenge and even today there's a great deal of skepticism about the motives behind Amazon's environmental position and accusations of hypocrisy from environmental groups like Greenpeace who highlight completely contradictory activities that the company is engaged in according to a 20-19 article by Brian merchant for Gizmodo calm Amazon's announcement of a drive towards 100% renewable energy came more than two years later than Microsoft Apple Facebook and Google and under great pressure from consumers and environmental groups despite making good progress in its first two years in 2016 the renewable energy program at Amazon suddenly stopped the following year Amazon's annual web services sales event one of the key presentations ran under the heading positioning for success in oil and gas since then says the Gizmodo article Amazon has aggressively courted the fossil fuels industry Landing deals and partnerships with companies like BP shell and Halliburton offering data based services such as machine learning for enhanced exploration oilfield automation and remote site data transportation by contrast Microsoft under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella and with gates still on the board as a technical adviser has continued to build on its renewable energy commitment and in January of 2020 the company announced the astonishingly ambitious commitment that by 2050 it will have removed from the atmosphere the equivalent of all the carbon dioxide it has ever emitted since its inception in 1975 with the aim of becoming carbon negative by 2030 and that does indeed mean that it plans to draw down more atmospheric carbon dioxide than it emits outside of Microsoft in February of 2020 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it will be expanding its philanthropic portfolio to enable Melinda to folk on gender equality and bill to pursue all possible climate change mitigation initiatives that move builds on personal investments that Gates has already built up over several years most notably as part of a consortium called the breakthrough energy ventures fund or B II V Gates launched the fund in December 2016 along with fellow directors Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries venture capitalist John Doerr and Vinod Khosla energy hedge fund manager John Arnold and SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and in news that attracted great fanfare and more than a few ironically raised eyebrows one of the 20 or so other billionaire investors who joined the fund in its first year was none other than Jeff Bezos himself according to this Business Insider report part of B V's mission is to provide patient capital and that means BV is willing to forego returns on investments for up to 20 years to give the scientists and engineers at startups a reasonable lead time to develop their technologies as billionaire it's the article points out these guys can afford to wait a long time for their return but to be eligible for B V's money the startups have to demonstrate viable technology that has the capacity to reduce annual global greenhouse gas emissions by at least 500 million metric tons one of the more encouraging aspects of the BV Fund is a significant focus not just on energy technologies but also on agricultural solutions a focus almost certainly driven by the knowledge and experience Gates has garnered through the philanthropic work of his own foundation in his gates notes blog from March 2019 bill quite rightly highlights the fact that electricity generation accounts for only about 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions and a very significant reduction can be achieved through improvements in agricultural practices he points out that there's more carbon in soil than there is in the entire atmosphere and all plant life combined and when that soil gets disturbed like it does when a forest is converted into cropland all that stored carbon gets released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide deforestation alone says Gates is responsible for 11 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions and as soil microbes come into contact with the prodigious volumes of modern synthetic fertilizers now being flooded into the ground all over the planet they release huge quantities of the very powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide so as part of its 2019 funding program that be evey fund invested in six startups that are developing solutions that could significantly improve the way the world produces food pivot bio have developed a gene editted bacteria that produces nitrogen the company's initial tests showed that it could produce more bushels per acre of corn than chemical fertilizer even under different weather conditions and in different soil types if used on 30 million acres of land pivot BIOS product could prevent 20,000 metric tonnes of nitrous oxide emissions and that's the equivalent of taking 1.5 million cars off the road Appeals innovation is a plant based coating that can be applied to fruits and vegetables while another startup called Cambridge crops has developed a similar coating made of water and silk that can be used on foods including seafood meat and produce both companies aim to eliminate food waste and the need for food packaging which in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions and conserves precious water supplies the fourth start up a company called Kern's er has created a new strain of wheat that absorbs more carbon dioxide from the soil than the standard crop the company's strain also lives for more than two years as opposed to this single growing season for normal wheat all of which results in greater yields for the farmers and more food for consumers start at number five is called c16 Biosciences they've created a technology that ferments palm oil in the same way as beer palm oil is of course big news nowadays it's used in all sorts of foods like chocolate bread margarine and pizza dough as well as a whole host of other everyday products including shampoo detergent lipstick and even diesel fuel but to clear the way for palm oil plantations companies have had to resort to deforestation causing 11 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions see sixteens innovation would drastically reduce this catastrophic activity unlike the other five startups the final company called babban gonna doesn't rely on advanced technology instead it's solving a problem for farmers in Niger who like a place to store their crops by providing shared facilities for farmers the company allows them to wait until a market is hot to sell their goods this helps cut back on food waste and improves local incomes if the world reduced just half of its food waste by 2050 it could cut back on more than 70 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions now I can almost hear some of you shouting at the screen that Gates and his mates could simply invest the entire billion dollars in regenerative agriculture and other natural solutions like biochar you may well be right of course and no doubt we'll be looking at both solutions in ever-increasing detail in future episodes as their efficacy and importance becomes more apparent to the mainstream investors in the meantime though what about Jeff's own personal venture then this Bezos earth fund well even for a man worth around 120 billion dollars offering up 10 billion dollars of your own money he's a significant commitment and Bezos surely deserves credit for that but the slow pace of movement toward sustainability at Amazon a couple would be arguably hypocritical way they're offering their data services to fossil fuel companies as inevitably caused more skepticism in the press and to that and almost complete lack of detail and how the bays are self-funded to be administered and the result is a spate of responses like this one from Teddy Schleifer at Vox which poses some questions that he says need to be answered before a proper assessment can be made slifer questions whether the money will be made available in its entirety as a robust response to the massive urgency of the climate crisis or dribbled out at say 5% per annum as is the standard practice for many existing legacy funds if it's the former then it may well prove to be of great benefit but if it's the latter then it could turn into a little more than a vanity project for poor old Jeff a bit like he's bonkers plan for package tours to Mars other questions also remain unanswered like whether any funds will be used for political advocacy who will control the fund and make decisions on grants and what will the legal status of the fund be depending on how it's set up it could either be a very effective vehicle for enhancing tax breaks to facilitate more investment in the right technologies or just another massive tax dodge for Bezos and Amazon no doubt all of this will be clarified before the first grants begin to go out in the summer but Schleifer makes the point that it's not unreasonable to expect answers to these questions right at the get-go when the initial announcement was made Bezos got a lot of positive PR from this February Instagram post and Slifer suggests that there should be some sort of transparency for the consumers who ultimately fund these programs he argues that philanthropy at this scale and with this mission is no longer a personal matter that's none of our business it affects all of us and deserves our scrutiny so what's your view on the whole climate philanthropy thing is it a genuine force for change that could contribute towards the survival of our species or just a clever way to siphon off massive tax free company profits let me know your thoughts in the comments section below that's it for this week though a massive thank you as always to the channel supporters over at patreon who make these programs possible if you'd like to get more involved with the channel and have your say in monthly content polls then you can do that by 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Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020