Bill Gates on AI, Climate, Carbon Tax, Nuclear Power, China

well thank you for coming to the new economy forum I thought we'd begin follow up some questions about climate because it's become a new preoccupation of yours and then we come back to the long-standing issue of China and America at the end on the climate change just it strikes me that you have become gradually evermore interested in this you have the stake and terror power and nuclear power but particularly recently and looking at what you've written and what you've said it's become a preoccupation can you just say what led you to that point yeah I started spending time on climate about 11 years ago and had some great professors coming in in about five times a year educating me on various aspects you know ten years ago I started funding things like Terra power and I put several billion into various energy related things since that time things like alternative meat which has gone well or battery companies that hasn't gone as well and it's all it's recently with the public interest in climate change that I decided to write a book where the change in awareness and willingness to talk about aggressive goals like zero by 2050 has gone up dramatically particularly with young people and so if we can get people to have that as a goal then we have to have plans where you say okay what does the grid look like you know the energy has to come from somewhere you're giving up all coal all natural gas all oil what is the source of that energy how does it look like so anyway I'm doing a book whose goal it is to try and lay out for people what some of the choices are and how you have to cover all the areas of emission and how difficult that will be so you know my book comes out next next June it's not a very good job poking it on this on this particular thing is what is a reasonable goal for NetZero and secondly the second question you talked about what the grid will look like you give us a rough idea how what energies you think will fill that space well there's no doubt that solar and wind including offshore wind will be a huge part of that because those are intermittent sources the need either for 24 hours sources like nuclear or unbelievable miracle in terms of both transmission and storage is very very high you can look at a country like Japan Tokyo 60 gigawatts you have seven days where you have no wind or Sun power at all so you have to say to yourself if you're not going to have people freeze to death what is the source of energy during that seven-day period the u.s. Midwest you have long periods where a cold front sits on it and the wind doesn't blow so it'll be a lot of renewables and either a storage miracle or are quite a bit of nuclear the electric source will be almost three times as big because it'll be taking over parts of transport and industrial and heating that historically went to direct cart hydrocarbon usage anyway people building models so that futuregrid different universities you know different people picking their choices that's will be the sign that not only do we have a goal to be there by 2050 but we're debating the paths and very concrete plans you know when you see things like a 15% diesel tax you know create unrest the willingness to make the type of change investment in this you can question whether it's there because the pre writer problem has never been worse than it is in in climate particularly for middle-income countries that can appropriately argue that the historical emissions of the rich countries mean they get to wait till per person they emitted as as much as we haven't you didn't get carbon tax is the way to secure that I mean you've set you pointed to the political difficulties of that well that is the most that's the fairest way to do it yeah that's a way to do it if you look at the u.s. in particular I don't think it's likely to happen and so you know we've had tax credits on renewables we've had renewable portfolio standards you can get there in a way that's less neutral there's a variety of regulations and helping nascent sectors you know certainly what's happening solar and wind is very good what's happened in the industrial sector in terms of how do we make steel how do we make cement people have sort of gotten excited about the low-hanging fruit electric cars that's the easy part you still have to do the grid but the various things including industrial are very very difficult you took in the stuff you've written you've talked about industrial but also agricultural as an area that people are not even really beginning to look at in a in a substantial way and yet agriculture accounts for almost as much as electricity yeah cows all owners are 6% there is some hope there actually of all my climate related investments my investments in beyond meat and impossible foods you know may pay for all the battery companies that I've lost money on so I think you points out the cow cows would be the third biggest polluter after China in America yeah cows you know it's both the methane name it directly it's the manure usage then you have fertilizer and land use and so that sector you know what what year will Indonesia or Brazil or DRC not have net deforestation and it doesn't really matter what you do in the temperate zones because the the trade-off of growing trees there and people do the math that doesn't help it's this is a tropical zone game in terms of land use soil no there's a lot of confusion about that once once carbon is out of the geosphere that is being buried underneath once it's up in the biosphere you know it trees die you have forest fires you have a 5,000 year half-life residence time co2 so as soon as you get things into the biosphere you can't really say that you've got to get it back into the geosphere in order to make that multi thousand-year promise that it's not going to be temperature forcing when I push your nuclear which I know is your route into it I mean what you heard on the previous panel they were talking about it as well what do you think is a reasonable expectation for what nuclear power can do I know you're a believer in it well I put many hundreds of millions into it and would you know I it's not a profit-driven activity the entire nuclear industry is making a product today that is too expensive and whose safety although it's actually quite good is too dependent on human operators and so the nuclear industry will only survive if there's a new generation whose economics and design for inherent safety is dramatically better than anything that's out there today I don't know for sure that will happen but when you have 24-hour power that you can place near to the usage of that power and you're trying to grow these the electricity capacity so dramatically it's a lot easier to see your path to the zero emissions if that's part of your generation portfolio and nuclear you know you get a million times as much energy per reaction as you do burning hydrocarbons and so it's very advantaged if you do the design right I can't say for sure it would succeed but it'd be good in this innovation portfolio we have to have a lot of bets knowing that some of them won't won't succeed and in that you I think you'll come terraPower you you think you've come up with a new design which would be safer and more efficient yeah in the computer art design is amazing and that's beautiful because you can simulate earthquakes volcanoes you know planes crashing into it all sorts of things that none of the existing nuclear plants could you do any of that and you can show that your cost and inherent safety are very very strong we need to build a demo plant at one point and we plan to do that in China the US government decided that we shouldn't do that and so now the back-up plan now is is that we'll try and build that demo plant in the United States so it's it's it's not an easy endeavor but none of the paths to climate success are risk free will come back to us China in a second but how frustrating was that for you you put all this money into setting up this technology you had the Chinese on board to test it and administration stopped well it's it's frustrating because I'd gone for a decade meeting with every secretary of energy you know who'd encouraged us and actually you know the US government had created an agreement because you need explicit permission to do this type of collaboration and so it was a surprise when that was withdrawn and it meant that a lot of things we had done it was a setback it you know in the very best case it was a five-year delay in the worst case it was a you know completely collapsed it you know I I don't care about the money the question is does that get added to the portfolio clean generation if so it makes the problem dramatically easier to solve will you be able to try it in America though is there no we're working I I go and meet with senators and congressmen and say you know today's reactors are not economic ignore everything else so the nuclear industry will disappear and that's true globally unless there's a new design the u.s. historically has this capacity to innovate you know it understands the sciences and the challenges it has the historical databases better than any other country so it'd be great if the US regulatory and energy R&D budget allowed this next generation to come into place so that's the current focus is to get a demo plant built in the US do you think there's any sign a tool I mean just looking out in the audience you can see people looking somewhat skeptically doing is any at all of nuclear-nuclear winning people over well people like cheap electricity they don't know that much about where it comes from or why it's reliable they know they like it cheap and reliable and so when you say to people you're gonna double their electricity bill you know even when they have a commitment to climate it's very tough to you know make these short-term trade-offs and you know the key to the system has been that that reliability which intermittent sources without a storage miracle do not provide nothing on that when you looked you talked about that grid in 2050 how much would you would you guess that nuclear is of that it's bimodal it'll either be 0% or 1/3 you know in the u.s. today it's 20% of all power generation in France today it's 70% of all power generation you know in Japan it was 15% of all power generation so it'll be pretty modal somewhat by country but this new design will either be viewed as acceptable or it it won't happen which a big theme of this conference as I said has been China in America Henry Kissinger said we were in the foothills of a cold war as long as I've known you you have been a there's a passionate advocate of engagement with China had how do you view the current situation I'm even more passionate about the value of engagement than ever and you know the last few years have seen a lot of voices arguing against that even arguing in some extreme cases for so-called decoupling I think it's a benefit that there's interdependence you know the fact that we have tourists from Japan we have from China we have students from China we have companies you know the do research in China you know Apple is the tech funny that actually sells the only tech company that actually sells a lot of product in China that interdependence can lead to more dialogue more mutual understanding and so to have people arguing against that is definitely a serious concern do you worry at all about a world with two internets or do you think the world is too interconnected I mean people out here are saying that you could end up with effectively a Chinese Internet and the an American internet is that possible or certainly two very different technology systems I don't see a way bifurcating scientific research so AI which you publish almost all of the work you do I don't see a way that you can sort of say okay these countries are publishing to each other and these other countries are published in each other you know biology energy AI it just doesn't work like that the idea the US has thrived intellectually by being at the Rd level a very open country and that has been to the benefit of the US in terms of things like pharmaceutical companies or software technology companies and you can't you know just carry around little notes to each other hey don't give this to somebody whose grandmother was Chinese it doesn't work Shirley Shirley that is an attitude that is but you know you may well be saying the correct thing from the point of view of the world economy from the point of view of efficiency but there is a great many there's quite a lot of evidence that some people have prepared to take that on you wouldn't have trade wars that people were irrational well it'd be interesting to have somebody draw out their bifurcation and try to explain you know I'll describe a person to them I'll describe you know Australia Japan what side are they same you know which is the open science side who's going to go and close all their publishing down and you know require that only a small set of people have access to that AI is very hard to put back in the bottle and whoever has the open system will so vastly get ahead of whoever tries to not let everybody in the world see what they're doing that you can completely ignore whoever tries to close their system subject what's your estimation of who's ahead in different parts of AI at the moment to you one of those people who think this is an area where China seems to leave the US or some bits like even that that's kind of a silly thing in my view in terms of what does it mean I mean I spent last night three hours at the Microsoft Research Lab in Beijing which is across the street from Tsinghua University a lot of the best day I work in Microsoft is being done in that lab they publish papers about the work they do you know what is that is that Chinese ai ai is that American a I you know we gladly pay their salaries but if we didn't have that publishing approach you know those people would go and work somewhere else and and so I you know the world's at a certain state of the art in terms of AI the companies that fund that in a strong leadership way include Google and and Microsoft but even in universities they're not far behind whatever the latest commercial funded or invasive rephrase it and regardless of regardless of who's funding it I accept both American companies is there any kind of approximation about which areas you think China is ahead in which areas you think Europe is ahead in which areas you think America there is ahead in you know almost every one of those papers is gonna have some Chinese names on it and some European names and some American names on it even the stuff that comes out of our we have a big lab in Cambridge in the UK and God forbid there's you know Asian people in that lab it's incredible how these people are mixing up and working with each other you know who loud this to happen if the rules don't buff the brakes it but do you obey in general in that that you've been of great beneficiary of globalization and you've been a great sponsor of it and a defender of it you are you worried about it at the moment more more than I was five years ago yeah and it's not just the u.s. I mean the UK is daryun pristine and you know the the turning inward they you know is it cyclical because you're always gonna have populist and come along the elites in some ways will overplay their hand and you're gonna cycle or is it secular and it's going to stay that way you know I think all of us you know come to forums like this seeking insight into okay you know what what will turn this around and let very tough problems like climate change be done on a global collaborative baby worry the ability of elites at the moment to persuade people the issues like climate change it's gone down it's going down it's definitely gone down and and you know whether you want to stop pandemics or solve climate change or stop terrorism that when you don't get that level of cooperation and Trust that's going to be a huge huge challenge that you have an explanation for that I know you read it oh no I'm just you know I'm not out there asking you know yellow best people why they vote a certain way or you know people in Australia who voted against climate change or people in you know Brazil or Philippines or various places but it's hard to pick a country we say Wow they'll they're you know they've got climate change solved they know how to make steel and cement and you know congratulations that one's taken care of there I don't know that country but it's bizarre isn't it because every government that you visit that we visit will say that the green industries are the industries of the future that's what they want to invest in that's great did they increase their energy R&D budget what approach who are they investing in to solve these specific problems that at the Paris climate talks I was involved with the 25 countries committing to doubling energy R&D which that is good because for the long lead-time stuff that's where the solutions are gonna come from many countries have come through we have five billion of additional energy Rd over since the that Paris climate talks and you know I'm a very much I am optimistic that we can bring what I call the green premium that is the extra cost of doing things in a green way we can bring that premium down very dramatically which you know to say to a middle-income country where India's paradigm attic hey you should you should make your electricity this way you should make your steel this way you should fly your planes this way in order to be able to say that to them you have to bring the current green premium down by about 90 percent but there's many paths to get there many scientists were working ideas they even with the 10% success rate if we sort of unnaturally accelerate this by creating incentives regulations raising R&D budgets I still believe we can get there one last question on that if you were a government why would you tell get that money well there are different people do the taxonomy differently there are things like cheap hydrogen you know breakthroughs in transmission where you don't have to do it overhead or you use superconducting to make it lossless it's a reasonably finite list you know the way I do it in my book it's 14 things that you want crazy people to think through exactly how they're going to solve those things and if it isn't government's it has to be for not for business like you well yes for the pure R&D part ideally the government's are going to be bigger I mean you know USDOE budget which I think should be triple this six billion a year so I don't think you're gonna get that extra you know twelve billion a year out of philanthropy we did go I called you know 25 people and I got 21 people to say yes what I call them to invest in this very high-risk venture fund called breakthrough energy ventures and you know we're gonna raid we raised a billion dollars the first time we're gonna do that many times again so that these high risk companies that there's lots of capital and the great thing that's happened in the last few years is as breakthrough Energy's technical team has validated these things we've been able to have other people come in so we so far we haven't had to be the sole investor in any of these companies even though over half of them it breakthrough energy hadn't been there to help them form the management and explain how the technology works they would not have come together we could carry on talking for a long time but they just have to go to dinner I'm gonna give first can we thank bill very much then I'm going to give you a variety of housekeeping things the house the housekeeping is please note a change to our start time tomorrow morning the plenary will begin at 8:15 not 8:30 and the important information tonight is the Beijing municipality government Welcome Dinner at the sunrise Kempinski shuttles will be leaving directly from the front of the conference center and you have to bring your badge and your read invitation and 6:15 will be the networking reception and 7:00 p.m. is the gala dinner I originally read it as the gates dinner we will go in that direct here thank you very much bill thank you [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Television

Views: 320,403

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Id: vapTJLUSvpQ

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019