Bill Gates on Climate: “Are We Science People or Are We the Idiots?”

good afternoon Bill thank you so much for joining us here you think about climate change really comprehensively so we've got a lot of ground to cover today but I want to start almost at sort of the highest most existential level and there's been so much Doom and Gloom but also a lot of Hope we've been talking about this tension all day and I want to contrast a couple things I've heard over the last week or so we have United Nations Secretary General Guta saying that the Earth is about to become uninhabitable Mike Bloomberg who was on the stage with me earlier this morning said that this was something that could kill every person on Earth and yet when I heard you speak on Tuesday you said the planet is going to be fine I want you to help us reconcile these contrasting statements do you think gas and Bloomberg are being hyperbolic or are you really so sanguin about this issue well I'm you know the largest funer of action on on climate including grant money Innovation money uh you know I'm out in Africa and the foundation work seeing farmers who uh are deeply affected and that's why you know I chose to get educated and get involved going back uh around the turn of the century because that's where I'd moved on my full-time work from Microsoft uh and you know this was a topic that I got engaged in you know climate tries to use science and numbers um you know and look at okay at various levels what's what are those effects it's mostly you know there are effects on Humanity the planet you know less less so it's a barely resilient uh thing uh but you know the reason I'm engaged is because it affects human welfare right and I want to talk about the issue of Health in just a sec the this issue of planetary boundaries though is it seems to be coming up more and more when we see oceans reaching 100 temperatures on the surface when we see Coral bleaching when you see the biodiversity loss and the destruction of rainforests to hear you say that the planet is really resilient I think would surprise a lot of people given just how dramatically the Earth is changing in such a short amount of time okay so do do you really do you really believe that some of those some of that damage that I just described could really be uh taken care of uh mitigated in a short amount of time in a way that doesn't go on to compromise human welfare and health well as I say I'm in very involved in climate uh there's been progress you know should climate be the only thing we do should we buy measles vaccine should we pursue Pol eradication uh you know I believe that human welfare can be improved in many ways uh and climate is an important way to make sure that we continue the progress that we've had but it how do you balance you know should you buy meil vaccine uh you know when we go out to raise money for polio we're raising less money now than before uh our organization is the most articulate going around the world saying rich country should be more generous whether it's for climate mitigation climate adaptation Health budgets you know vaccines uh you know so we're on full blast saying that Equity demands we'd be more generous climate is one of those causes and if you thought you know the planet was going to break into two I I guess you'd say hey stop wasting money on measles vaccination because you know if that is the case then who cares about kids Dy of measles but I I I also care about that right and as I understand it you actually came to your work in climate through your work in global health and you've made a stunning advances as has the global community in in reducing disease and early mortality all over the globe h i wonder though is there a concern in your mind that some of the effects of climate change might erase some of those gains in global Health that we've uh achieved through medicine for example uh when hotter temperatures are making malarial mosquitoes uh prolific in higher altitude cities in Africa does that create a A new challenge that again is going to roll back some of those gains we've already achieved absolutely uh there's no way we'll you know the in the year 201 10 million children under five died and we've cut that in half we're down at 4.6 million deaths per year it's one of the greatest achievements of of humanity it was the actually the centerpiece of what we were called the Millennium development goals uh you know fortunately we're not going to go back to 10 million uh children a year dying you know malaria is still out there at 400,000 you know having trouble raising money you know polio is still out there uh paralyzing kids having trouble raising money so there's you know the the actual lens that I see climate through happens to go more through malnutrition uh you know one of the greatest injustices in the world is that uh in these poor countries a third of the kids don't grow up with full physical or mental development and that's because it's more difficult to grow food uh and so helping them in these near equatorial regions where the vast majority of the impact is that's a very just thing given that these are not the people who caused this problem in any way shape or form but it sounds like you have a lot of faith in adaptation that with the right uh crop development with the right farming practices with the right medications large swots of humanity that that again many people are painting in really apocalyptic terms suggesting that whole Nations might become uninhabitable it sounds like I don't want to put words in your mouth that you believe that there's a real pathway towards using technology and the advances in medicine and agriculture to allow continued human flourishing in some of those most exposed regions to extreme temperatures well I'm the I'm the person who's doing the most on climate in terms of you know the Innovation and how we can square multiple goals that you know we still care about children dying honest uh at least we do and you know how can you do climate effectively there's very limited money for uh causes to reduce inequity in the world and uh no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable okay well that's that's good to hear the climate people have to decide are we the science number people are are are you know you really want to make your arguments you know based on uh what you actually know uh you know about okay how much is the planet itself at risk for example okay I want to come back to some of those points I want to talk about technology though H here in the United States we're experiencing a real Renaissance in wind and solar electric vehicles batteries some of these Technologies are starting to see real exponential sort of hockey stick like growth that you'd be familiar with from your time in the tech industry does the rapid gains in some of these specific technologies that are obviously reducing emissions give you hope or change your calculation that maybe we'll be able to reach some of these very lofty Net Zero goals for our broader economy sooner than perhaps we might have thought even just a couple years ago because the the number of uh Source submissions is very large and because some of those are extremely hard to Abate you know 60% of emissions comes from middle- inome countries uh and so even if the rich countries go to zero your your Delta temperature effect is very tiny tiny the rich countries we do have to lead and you can look sector by sector you know solar now the interconnect limitation the transmission limitation so we created a nonprofit group that's about the grid um implementing the Ira very quickly so we created a nonprofit group that we fund uh called investing in our future it's just to accelerate those things in every area of emission and every policy we need more philanthropic dollars we need more smart people we need more consumers willing to buy green products so there's nothing you know we're not on a path to get to you know a 1.5 degree limitation climate uh it's changing the entire industrial base uh and you know so it's an extremely hard thing to do Innovation gives you a chance of doing it and what I seen in the Innovation space uh you know that I committed to create breakthrough in 2015 it's gone far better uh than I would have expected even in very tough areas like steel cement agriculture hydrogen what we're seeing is very promising but not at a level where you'd say oh this you know move on from this that's you know why uh you know we built this incredible team we partner with governments and philanthropists and you know it's got many pieces it's got fellows Venture policies open- Source grid models and we've started up a dozen philanthropic organizations that are to accelerate these things it's you know it's a serious effort absolutely and we're not done yet to your point I wonder though when you think about some of those technologies that you're invested in you mentioned the hard to Abate sector you're also very uh interested and involved with things like modular nuclear and I think for some people they think about new Next Generation nuclear the potential for fusion and hold these out as hopes that maybe they will be some of those technologies that do sort of make a step change rather than sort of this more incremental progress that we've been seeing so far what's your thoughts on how close some of those new technologies might be and what the challenges might be in terms of Permitting or regulation to getting them implemented Ed at scale yeah so we do uh open source grid models where you can look at for every country because again it's rich countries are a very small piece of this they have a special obligation to get to zero first and to uh get these things on the learning curve so the green premium the extra cost to be uh being clean is driven to zero so you actually have a way of getting diffusion into middle- inome countries you know sadly if you try to subsidize it you're at many multiples of what the foreign aid budget is and so it's just you know the voters aren't going to come up with that so Innovation is the only way you can uh achieve these goals doing the green grid is very hard because you're not just taking today's electricity you're taking the electricity that's driving buses and cars and steel plants uh and direct air capture you're having to come up with all the electricity so it's you know 2 and 1 half three times larger and that's very daunting and you can use these models and say okay if we don't have any nuclear uh fision we don't have any nuclear fusion we don't have any geothermal we just uh have those limited set of things that degree of difficulty and how long it's going to take practically is much much higher but we can't count on Broad acceptance of Vision I you know put putting billions into that it would make um you know new reactors with no high pressure no afterheat problems different economics uh it would be a helpful tool and you know the only reason that I do that is because of climate it's not like I decided the nuclear industry is a fun way to uh make money or something uh and likewise Fusion you know there's 16 Fusion companies I'm an investor in four of those uh it it's a question of when I would say not only do we get Fusion but we get it in a form that can make cheap electricity there's quite a variety of approaches and you know this deadline means that we're very much in a hurry not only do we need to get things but then you know the time it takes to deploy them in the World At Large uh you're going to have to leave you know 20 to 30 years for some of those things and you know that pushes you past the deadline that we're all trying to achieve right and and what you just said is especially true in the global South where for all sorts of reasons it's much harder to deploy capital for clean energy Investments for example all of which is to say it fossil fuels particularly gas and coal are going to be with us for many decades to come it seems a lot of people look at those numbers and you know throw their hands up in the air and say that this essentially ensures that the planet to use the secretary General's words will become uninhabitable what's your view on the fossil fuel industry again some people really vilify them other people today Mike Bloomberg said he views them as a part of the solution how are you thinking about their role in this energy transition well they're very heterogeneous group of companies uh some you know work in renewable energy some provide R&D dollars uh to things like biofuels that uh could be an important substitute there's no doubt today that if you tried to make uh hydrocarbons illegal that the voters would rebel against that they like driving to work uh there's a variety of practical things and you know so it is there is a demand there the ideal is that you set a carbon tax that's the same size as what it takes to do direct air capture and so uh you know and but that would mean that you know the cost of cement and gasoline and air travel would be dramatically higher right uh because we haven't innovated in those space we have gigantic green premiums uh and whenever voters are tested like in France you put on a diesel tax well they say oh those people in the city are richer than me they somehow should pay for this in Germany when you say okay we're going to make you buy electric heat pumps they they back off from it so these if you try to do climate things brute force uh you know you'll sometimes get people say hey uh I like clim but I'm I'm for cl climate but uh I don't want to bear bear that cost and reduce reduce my standard of living you know I believe we should spend a lot of money on climate change I believe we should have very high carbon taxes the political realities are such that without Innovation it's unlikely particularly in middle-income countries that that the Brute Force approach will will be successful yeah You' mentioned carbon capture and sequestration a couple times now and that obviously people point to as a a important part of the solution set going forward but we've people we've seen the people sort of view it in different ways some people Al Gore today in that chair said that many people fossil fuel companies are using it as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels for the foreseeable future While others and including in your book you present it as a important tool that will you know help mitigate that last vestage of emissions as we're able to draw down in sector after sector how do you think about carbon capture and its role is it being used as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels or should it be developed as sort of this Edge case that cleans up the last of the mess well there's no excuse for not getting to the point where we get to zero CO2 emissions you know we in terms of avoiding the unknowns of you know what it's like to get certain temperature increases you know we have to get to zero emissions and that's a very daunting task the you know the the both the subsidization and the non- taxation of oil and gas is a barrier uh if you if you could politically put that tax on that's a very good thing the scale of carbon capture is very hard to say it's not one of these path dependent things we don't want a path that's dependent on Fusion but we want to maximize the chance that that's among the tools we have available to get to Zer Mission because it makes it so much easier to have these very dense non-weather dependent near to the powerload uh ways of of making electricity so yes in the the Breakthrough energy portfolio we have a number of companies that are trying to bring the cost of carbon capture down you know today I'm the biggest individual customer clim Works which does carbon capture at over $300 a ton there are companies uh that will get us to or well below $100 but even so for 10% of emissions you know $50 a ton that's 500 billion a year three times all foreign aid so how much that will scale up I I'd say that's an unknown because you know how is that financed can you just say a bit more about something you just mentioned you're the largest individual customer at clim Works CLW works is one of the most uh scaled and advanced carbon capture and sequestration companies what does it mean that you're the single biggest customer what does that look like what like what kind of a customer are you uh but but are you offsetting your own personal emissions with that and what can you give us a sense of the scale of that uh it's you know like 10 million a year okay uh and and just to it's a variety of things the clim works as part of it you know buying uh electric heat pumps for low-income housing where they get the benefits of lower monthly bills and I'll I take the carbon credits for those things you know there's uh you know solar panels there's a a huge variety of things I don't use some of the uh less proven uh approaches such as uh I don't plant trees ah a lot there's a lot of people are very enamored with trees we've got trees on this stage some people would even say that if you just planted enough trees it could take care of the climate issue altogether and that's complete nonsense okay I mean are we the science people or are we the idiots which one do we want to be uh I'm going to call my friend Mark Benny off and ask him what he thinks at the very moment that we're trying to find all these new sources of clean energy energy demands around the world are rising in just about every economy including here in the US in some measures driven largely by data centers and the demands of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency as someone who is such a Pioneer in the tech technology industry do you have any thoughts on the role of the tech industry itself in helping create this problem that you're now trying to help solve well the I would say the tech companies because they are very profitable and they can afford to take a long-term view they will be uh a among the Pioneer buyers of long-term storage green Energy Solutions now the way you do the metrics to them you got to keep them honest that it's not you know just buy a certificate and say oh the green electrons come to me and the dirty electrons go to all those other people in this you know you can always look at dollars per ton you know if somebody thinks they're doing something at well under $100 per ton you should be skeptical uh you know the clim works is kind of a clearing price and uh there are a few things like avoiding methane emissions actually that are uh pretty low cost but not that many uh you know and this is a a gigantic uh scale problem the the induced electricity demand in the US is not not very large we'll get it is we Electrify cars buses Industry Home Heating replacing natural gas so we will get about a two and a half times electric electricity increase the data center load you know in that will be something like four or five% and there's some really brilliant things particularly in terms of AI execution that may drive that down back down below 1% the word policy is in the title of this session and I I know you personally intervened and helped save the IRA at a pretty pivotal moment last year when it was looked like it might fall apart I wonder how you think about its record so far what is the implementation of it actually look like a a and more broadly how you rank President Biden's climate policy a lot of people are very supportive of the IRA of course but also very very frustrated that he continues to allow drilling on federal lands well you know we should tax oil and gas no matter where it comes from we you know the idea that okay if we don't drill it here if it's on taxed it's going to get drilled somewhere the the the key thing is that you've got to take this externality which is the CO2 emission and and make it unattractive and as you do that tax then you have alternative things come in uh you know which in the case of Passenger cars okay get getting down to the lowend is hard but we need we need to get there um you know the IRA is a very dramatic uh set of money to bootstrap key Technologies including into areas that most climate people don't talk about I mean industrial emissions if you don't solve that the whole thing uh doesn't get solved and you know what it does for green hydrogen what it does for long gration storage some things it does in transmission uh bootstrapping some direct air capture it's it's a fantastic uh climate Bill uh if people think some other politician would have gotten more great uh they should vote for that person uh but you know we're trying to implement it as quickly as possible uh there's a lot of funding opportunities for people who care about that we're helping doe work with treasury to get the regulations get those written well uh you know the faster we implement it the more people see the benefits of jobs uh particularly in areas where the hydrocarbon jobs be less uh over time so you know the implementation phase of that bill plus the two bills that were bipartisan the chips and science Act and the infrastructure bill it's just an amazing opportunity but we have to make sure people see it you know it's kind of like Obamacare at first people are like ah what is this thing okay you know 10 years later they're like oh I get it uh we don't have that much time to keep this thing intact you know it's not guaranteed that tax credits necessarily last out the full 10 years because they can be repealed if you get a a change in political control earlier today I asked Al Gore how he is someone who spent his whole career in politics uh explained the Republican party's continued opposition to climate action what's your answer to that having worked in Washington to get the IRA P how do you explain the reticence of so many republican elected leaders to engage with this issue in a way that scientists and other sort of climate Advocates feel is in good faith you know I have a lot of Partners who fund Republicans and engage Republicans in a pretty deep way uh you know there's some interesting data on young Republicans and their commitment to this you know so my reaction is not to demonize but rather to say okay what why are you know if we're so convinced and we're actually you know going to stick to the facts uh you know why have we failed to bring more people along and this is a super important thing so whenever I meet you know people who do climate phany I'm like oh you're you know how to connect out and some of them have a history of of working with Republicans I think that's extremely valuable you can't have a climate policy that when one part's in charge it goes Full Speed Ahead and then it stops dead cold these are 30-year investments in steel factories fertilizer factories new ways of making meat I mean it's it requires a constant Full Speed Ahead uh in order for the US to be an Exemplar which if we're not then you know it's not likely we'll succeed you just mentioned new ways of making meat my very next guest is jilberto tomzon the global CEO of JBS the biggest meat packer in the world what would you say to him I mean you can say it on their way out but are there do you have uh questions or challenges for a company like that with such an enormous scale that's operating in the Amazon uh how should they be thinking about their role and responsibility and what do they need to do to change well in some cases we've got to out compete the things that drive deforestation because the difficulty you know yes you protect this land but the demand signal is still there for this other land so you know we need to make the equivalent of palm oil cheaper than palm oil uh ideally meet you know even though it's off of its uh initial excitement the new generations coming along are far better you know so every industry whether it's JBS or people any typewriters they're always subject to significant Innovation that changes the rules of the game in this case you know there's a huge negative externality in terms of methane emission and land use that comes uh broadly from agriculture but from beef in in particular uh and so you know we've got to fund The Innovation almost at an unnatural level uh so that we take that demand signal away thank you I'm I'm GNA bring this up with them thank you for that sticking on the topic of Agriculture you earlier mentioned some of your own efforts to account for your own emissions by being the largest customer of climb Works you're also the largest or among excuse me the largest personal owners of Farmland in the country in your book how to avoid a climate disaster you have a whole chapter about agriculture and you write about the need to pursue regenerative practices how much of that work is actually being done on the land you personally own which I understand is made through your investment vehicles but still nonetheless you own and control are you starting to use your personal Farmland as a way to drive this kind of policy change that you want to see yeah I own one 4,000th uh of the farmland and it was a not something where I woke up and said oh I want to on a farm or something it's not Green Acres uh and it you know we we run those Farms very efficiently we're using there's a thing called pivot bio uh which is a uh fertilizer substitute uh which is looks pretty fantastic it's early days for that but we've been the pilot customer so there's a lot of practices we're able to try out uh but you know as a percentage it's it's as of my wealth or of the Farmland you know this is pretty small small understood nevertheless I just wonder how you think about it it sounds like you're starting to use it sort of as a laboratory for some of these practices everything I do is climate conscious and so you would you would make the argument that including I I understand it's uh only 1/ 14,000 of the Farmland in the United States perhaps but if if if maybe I can even go with you to check some of it out if we went there would we see regenerative organic practices on that land not organic okay why not because that means using that means putting more pressure on deforestation by making less food per acre well if the invitation ever arises I will happily go walk some of that land with you uh another policy issue if I may uh all week there's been a lot of talk about proposed reforms to the World Bank the IMF uh later this afternoon in just a couple hours we're going to have World Bank president a banga along with prime minister mam Mattia Barbados right here on this stage there has been in these reform efforts and in the Bridgetown initiative with which president prime minister mle helped develop a scenario sketched out where if the World Bank changed some of its requirements some of the way it operate it would be able to unlock trillions of dollars in private Capital this is sort of a dream people have on how we might be able to rapidly scale climate Finance around the global South do you believe that's feasible I mean I no I mean the numbers yes you can squeeze a bit more money out of the World Bank the main important thing I most people don't look at that balance sheet the main thing the World Bank does that really improves The Human Condition is a concessional finance arm called Ida International Development Association that is funding Primary Health Care uh schools nutrition programs unbelievable things it's somewhat depleted nowadays and it requires um more money it requires grant money you know the big donor the generous doners are the Europeans uh they're under a lot of strain with the money uh that they need to give to Ukraine the recipient countries have higher interest rates you know can no longer add to their debt level so that's a definite constraint so yeah I have you know I we wake up every day thinking there should be more resources to help the poorest to help them de with climate uh you know climate adaptation compared to mitigation is really massively underfunded even the most basic high-scale thing like making better seeds for those Farmers that are higher productivity and deal with the temperature and get rid of the pressure to do deforestation by being more productive even that is ridiculously underfunded so you know in the world Dom in it we have finite financial resources and you know unless the US Congress completely changes its priorities uh the there's no trillions of dollars thing out there we can tune some of the parameters uh mostly we can spend the money better we can use innovation so I'm a hopeful person I'm hopeful about child to death child malnutrition uh climate change but you know I try to bring a numeric framework where I don't see some trillions of dollars fund available uh you know are people willing to increase their taxes you know even the the IRA Bill uh you know wasn't able to put say corporate profit taxes back to where it had been uh and you know so it's a challenge we are going to have to solve climate and health problems in uh clever ways we will not be able to bruteforce them thank you for that we are fast out of time but I want to just ask you one final question you you said you're a hopeful person and and I will say you're more hopeful than some of the other uh business and world leaders I think we've been hearing from this week which is refreshing in its own way I wonder what is your then call to action I know you have a a portfolio of interests but for those who are specifically interested in climate what's your message to people who say well how can I help I get these reader emails all day what can I do what do you say to people like that well there's a lot of things you can do in terms of your own buy Behavior Uh whether it's buying offsets whether the food you buy the electric car the heating in your house those early demand signals where somebody pays a green premium create volume and drive Innovation and competition and get us to the only point that is scalable out into the World At Large so consumers really do matter a lot their political voice uh if they're democrat or republican you know Republicans for climate change action are are gold uh you know that's got to be a number that somehow uh we manage to increase over time uh your voice as an employee in your company uh who's you know buying cement buying steel buying electricity you know in in increasingly legitimate actual ways of uh doing uh those things so that you can uh have a lower emission footprint uh and so there's tons of ways uh to get involved in this it's been amazing you know in schools where uh we've actually had people who go and learn the steel industry which you know the best and the brightest we not thinking about that but the the increase in Talent that's driving this wave of innovation uh that's a key reason why I'm hopeful Bill Gates thank you for your time thanks thank you

Channel: New York Times Events

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Length: 33min 56sec (2036 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023