How to Avoid a Climate Disaster | Bill Gates | Global Energy Dialogues

[Music] thank you all for being here this afternoon we're really honored that bill gates has chosen to come to stanford for the first university stop on his virtual book tour and i'm so pleased that so many of you could join us for this virtual conversation the last 12 months have been a time of great uncertainty and disruption from work in school to gathering with friends and family nearly every aspect of our lives has been abandoned but the upheaval we faced over the last year may be minor compared to what we could face in the decades to come if climate change continues unabated climate change has been called covid in slow motion like coveted 19 addressing climate change requires that we change human behaviors at the same time as we deploy new technological solutions to tackle the crisis and like covet 19 climate change is a crisis that transcends borders it's a global challenge one that will require the best minds from across disciplines to work together to find solutions while solving the climate crisis may seem like a daunting task this year has also shown us what we can achieve for example to create and deploy novel vaccines at breakneck speed in less than 12 months when we focus our attention and our resources on the great challenges before us over the last several years faculty in stanford schools and institutes have made tremendous strides in understanding the science of climate change and in developing innovative green technologies in particular the pre-court institute for energy led by e schwe and the woods institute for the environment led by chris field have played key roles as hubs for interdisciplinary research and education researchers affiliated with both institutes have advanced knowledge related to sustainability and climate change sparking discoveries across disciplines and leading to new solutions but the scale and the time frame of the crisis demand more last may we announced our intention to develop a new school focused on climate and sustainability in order to amplify our contributions to solving this great challenge dean's cam moller and steve graham are leading a large effort involving many faculty to define the blueprint for that school we're building on the achievements of our institutes and the contributions of our school of earth energy and environmental sciences and of departments in our other schools such as civil and environmental engineering our ecology and evolution group and others to create a school that brings together many of stanford's existing strengths in climate and sustainability and to build on them the school will include an accelerator to drive new solutions through external partnerships and scale them for the world climate change is the defining issue of the 21st century and we're putting our resources to work to meet it as we consider the challenge ahead and the work needed to tackle it we're so fortunate to have bill gates join us for this timely discussion today we all know bill as the co-founder of microsoft and for his work with the bill and melinda gates foundation for years bill and melinda have put their resources and platform to great use to tackle global health and development issues but what some of you may not know is that bill has also spent more than a decade focusing on the issue of climate change he studied climate change in detail everything from the carbon intensive processes for manufacturing steel and cement to the policies we need to deploy clean energy innovations at scale to the impact of energy poverty on the world's poorest and now he's written a book how to avoid a climate disaster the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need i'm thrilled to have bill join us today for a conversation about what we can do to help the world avoid that climate disaster we'll be joined for the conversation by arun majumdar the jay precourt provost hill chair professor at stanford and professor of mechanical engineering before coming to stanford arun was appointed by president obama as the founding director of the u.s department of energy's advanced research projects agency energy he also served as the acting under secretary of energy under president obama and he led president biden's department of energy transition team and now a short video will set the stage stage for the conversation thank you in a typical year the world emits over 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases and as we keep doing that the consequences for human life will be catastrophic when i first fell in love with computers as a teenager they were enormous expensive and only the government and big companies could afford them but my friends and i became obsessed with a wild idea what could we do if there was a computer on every desk and now the wild idea is quite team billions of people not only have computers on their desks but even in their pockets now the world needs another breakthrough in fact it needs many breakthroughs we need to get from 51 billion tons to zero while still meeting the planet's basic needs that means we need to transform the way we do almost everything our commitment to developing these innovations will mean the difference between a future where everyone can live a healthy productive life and one where we're constantly dealing with the human and financial crises at a historic scale entrepreneurs and investors have to build new businesses and change existing businesses to get these solutions deployed government leaders have to enact new policies that drive the market for clean energy and advocates have to keep their voices loud to hold all of us accountable for rapid progress avoiding a climate disaster will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on greater than landing on the moon greater than eradicating smallpox even greater than putting a computer on every desk my basic optimism about climate change comes from my belief in innovation it's our power to invent that makes me hopeful [Music] bill thank you for joining us and mark thank you for that introduction um bill you have written this outstanding comprehensive book on an issue that will impact every human being in the world and as mark said it is the defining issue of the 21st century so while reading your book i started put putting you know these pink sticky notes out here and here we have it's filled with them and um on things that i found interesting that resonated with me and there are like almost 100 of them i'm not going to ask you 100 questions but i'm going to ask you some of the key messages and there are six student questions that i definitely want to get to first of all your personal journey your focus in climate change started with the awareness of energy poverty um through your work through your foundation that took you to places that didn't have electricity didn't have lights and that started what years ago david mckay of cambridge university was a big influence on you as well so how do you connect the dots between energy and climate and why did you write this book at this time as you said uh it's through the work of the gates foundation traveling throughout africa in [Music] after the year 2000 where i saw that not only was there very little electricity and none of it reliable but also people were talking about uh that growing their crops was getting more difficult uh that there were more floods but also more droughts and that confused me and i realized okay i need to dig in and understand climate change and fortunately um ken caldero who's connected to stanford and david keith uh volunteered to help do six half-day sessions a year to explain things like carbon capture and climate models and ocean circulation permafrost all sorts of things that i hadn't focused on before and so the the next milestone after uh those learnings was that i uh helped start a nuclear fusion company terrapower and i gave a ted talk in 2010. now that ted talk has been viewed about a 20th as much now as the 2015 pandemic tent talk that i gave later sadly most of those views are after the pandemic started not uh when it uh could have gotten us prepared in 2015 there was a big milestone which was the paris meeting and i was kind of disappointed that the metrics uh that were employed there were just these near-term reductions and i'm i think that is great you got to push for the things that are ready to go whose extra costs what i call green premium are modest you want to push those out like electric cars and wind and solar but if you're just focusing on on that it is it's though the problem isn't to get to 100 so you don't incent working on the hard parts the parts uh where the extra cost that green premium is super high and so mission innovation was a side event where countries including president obama president modi we had great involvement committed to double energy r d budgets and i committed to create a high-risk capital venture-type funding called breakthrough energy ventures so that if there were good ideas in the labs uh green investing which was faltering at the time because of uh some failures there that that would be there uh so that you know kind of brings us up to the present breakthrough energy ventress is done well i actually was amazed in 2019 to see that the young generation is caring more and more and speaking out more and more about this issue and the goal to try to get to zero by 2050 is the right goal but i just didn't see a plan particularly as you think about all the different sources of the missions and uh how you know we're going to measure are we doing the right things and uh i delayed the book a year because when the pandemic hit uh you know there was such uncertainty i wanted my uh anything i did publicly to be about the pandemic all last year uh but then after the election you know with biden coming in with european recovery money going towards climate with this glasgow event coming up in november i thought gosh if we're going to take this opportunity to build back uh and put it into climate-related things you know let's start a debate about what a full plan would look like uh and you know how do you accelerate uh innovation uh to with this you know very very challenging deadline well let's talk about scale because this is something that um you mentioned a lot we have i don't think we've ever done anything like this before you start your book with two numbers 51 billion and zero the world is emitting 51 billion tons of co2 equivalent and we need to get to zero by 2050 onwards and what is often lost on people is what is 51 billion and he uses wonderful example of fish swimming in water i suppose we are swimming in fossil fuels how big is this well it's it's kind of mind-blowing it's kind of too bad it's a you know transparent uh gas you can't smell it uh but it does have this uh effect of causing more heat to stay trapped in the atmosphere you know that if we didn't have any co2 actually the earth would be uh way too cold but here we're very quickly changing the temperature and both that natural ecosystems our crops the the days at the equator uh where humans just can't deal with the temperature and humidity uh you know that is a very uh scary thing and so you know and zero uh you know sadly co2 just stays up in the atmosphere for thousands of years and so over any near term you basically sum all those co2 emissions it doesn't really matter which year they're in and of course that that 51 billion if you look at it by years it just goes up even this year uh well 2020 it was less than a a 10 reduction in emissions despite you know people staying at home and you know tourism being absolutely crushed uh because of you know all those different activities it you know we almost need that kind of reduction every year now to get from this increase all the way down uh to zero at at 20 50. so you know anyone who thinks it's going to be easy uh hopefully the book will convince them uh that it's going to be hard and that 2050 is the soonest we could get it done anyone who thinks it's impossible hopefully i give examples from uh you know the digital world that moves so quickly or uh some of the work at the foundation where innovation has actually gone better than we expected we've saved a lot more children's lives than we would have projected partly because of new vaccines so you know it's it we've got to enlist everyone in this very very hard work so that actually brings to the first student question and we're going to have 10 billion people in the world by 2050 2 billion more than today that's more than india or china um and our first student question is where will they live so let's get alex this question hi mr gates thanks for taking my question my name is alex nikovich and i'm a phd candidate in civil engineering here at stanford doing research on developing data-driven tools to improve urban building energy efficiency my question for you is this by 2050 over two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities how do you envision technological advancements like ai internet of things and the digitization of information will improve the sustainability and quality of life for people living in cities and how can we ensure that we do this ethically and responsibly thanks yeah so population growth as we go from a bit over 7 billion today to 10 billion asia goes from four billion to five billion uh the thing that's a bit daunting is that africa goes from a billion to three billion and the rest of the continents actually are a slight net shrinkage including europe uh in the americas and so the babies are being born in the toughest place on earth um you know it's it's an amazing fact that really is what got me into global health work was that as you improve children's survival parents choose voluntarily to have less children and so it's only the continent where 15 to 20 percent of kids die before the age of five in the toughest areas that we still have this huge population growth so uh you know improving health should bring that growth rate down uh there's some disagreement when you do these projections on will it be africa get to three billion three and a half you know we haven't seen the bend in the curve there that we've seen elsewhere uh and of course if you have climate change and it's creating instability that's going to be a negative feedback uh to that population growth uh as well so huge problem as the questioner said uh people are moving into cities so you have more people and you'll have more services per person basic shelter air conditioning uh so that's going to go up as well you know people as they're better off they eat more meat which you know that's a challenge for global food production and so the overall equation even if the rich world cuts back on its use uh you know smaller houses and cars uh just for justice alone we need more buildings more electricity uh and so just you know reducing consumption is not a path to story it can help and you know i'm i'm all for it where particularly where it's inefficient the other part of the question was the use of digital technologies it is amazing some of the efficiency you can get by monitoring you know when uh you need to use power you know getting data that says okay why are we so inefficient how is this power so people in the digital world uh can make huge contributions potentially even fundamental contributions about material science and catalysts that uh whether it's with quantum computing or other techniques the sciences now are very digital uh you know simulating the grid we have an open source model that's going to help people think through the grid likewise our nuclear reactor that's a only exists in digital form so people in ai and computer science can make huge contributions to these innovations so let me move on to innovations like you said i mean you have clearly stated in the book that we need new technologies and other innovations policy innovations as well to address climate change because we don't have all the solutions wind solar and evs are not going to get us to zero you talk about the industry cement and steel then food and agriculture transportation and and i like the way you've framed it in terms of how do you pick innovations there are like five questions and how much of the 51 billion are we going to get to how much space will it require and you pay a special emphasis to green premium so explain all of that in the context of the next question by mayank hi bill thank you for your work in climate change my name is maya girder and i am a sloan fellow at stanford's graduate school of business focusing on climate tech ventures as a key stakeholder in tackling climate change you must come across a huge number of ideas to address climate change ranging from technological innovations to new co-venture ideas to holistic climate plans what are the key questions or considerations that you recommend we use to assess various climate ideas and plans particularly given the multidisciplinary nature and many layers of complexity involved in addressing climate change thank you yeah so that's a question that you know we've had to look at in doing uh breakthrough energy ventures uh and you know roone when you were uh running rpe you got off you know to a great start reminding people it's not just the few things uh that come to mind immediately it's very very broad in areas like steel and cement the amount of innovation the amount of r d has been pretty modest because the costs are low the current products work the building standards actually are pretty hard uh set about the exact recipe you use for those products so to re-energize those fields and say no you know we need to do it a a different way uh that um you know it's surprising that we we have to go back and change that and the scale of it is is really mind-blowing the green premium uh is in some ways a very obvious concept but not uh discussed much in the past i i have a slide with the uh two examples on it you know for an electric car if you buy it today you pay more up front you say you save some because your electricity is cheaper than gasoline and your maintenance is less but you give up range uh takes more time to charge but we can see is the volumes going up you have lots of companies like quantum scape and many others that are working on those batteries the costs come down range will come up we'll have charging station and eventually quick charging and so although the green premium is is like 15 percent extra today uh over time uh you know even a company like general motors can say no we're not going to make these gasoline cars anymore because uh the electric car will be uh uh preferable without a premium without even taking into account the fact that assuming the grid has gotten to zero uh that's a a zero emissions activity so if we could take every area of emissions and do that you know get the green premium down to zero uh then we win you know and so when we talk to say india in 2050 and we say please use green steel green cement uh you know if the premium is still high they're going to send say send us the trillions of dollars because you historically admitted more and we need to deal with basics here we're not as rich as you we're not responsible and that you know i don't think at the current level which is many trillions that's doable the other example is cement uh where a ton of cement is only 125 dollars i was amazed uh some markets is even cheaper than that but because you get a ton of carbon emission for every ton of cement it's almost double the price and so uh you know there's no market for something that costs twice as much and yet as companies come in and slightly reduce this we need to make a markets we get scale and learning and competition so that the same magic that have for solar the lithium ions come to the innovations in in cement making so let me switch to innovation you you talked about in your book innovation supply and innovation demand the r d can help to reduce the green premium and create an innovation supply but we cannot forget about the innovation demand and so and you also talked about electricity a lot because as you said in your book you got to elect you got to decarbonize the grid and then electrify as much as you can so in the context of the electricity sector and you know we know we need new storage solution long duration we need nuclear we need carbon capture but in that context tell us about how you view the innovation supply and how do you create the innovation demand for those technologies the expansion of the electric generation actually stunned me uh now it should have been obvious because the energy's got to come from somewhere so if it's not coming from gasoline to power car natural gas to heat a house uh which turns out to be a lot of energy uh you know where is it going to come from well it's got to come from a green source and electricity which fortunately we can move around once we solve that then it's usable against many of these areas but with the huge growth and of course hydro isn't going to grow it's our main green source of energy today but we've tapped out at least in north america all of the significant opportunities there so you know the solution certainly is mostly renewables uh you know probably 80 renewables but if you work that out we'll have to build renewables a lot faster uh than we are even today you know when it feels like wow uh we're being very aggressive we'll probably have to have offshore wind in there as well we'll have to have lots of transmission uh you know we see a cold front over the midwest right now and you know that uh although the reason texas doesn't have power is because they didn't weatherize their natural gas plants and the wind and the even one of the reactors tripped because of a sensor not being weatherized properly uh so that's not a case of of a problem with renewables even though some people have suggested that but the idea that that intermittent sources create a reliability problem that is legitimate uh and so the open source model uh that we're putting out there for people to play around with let you say okay how do you how do you deal with very tough weather events which for the u.s it's either a heat wave or a cold front over the midwest is a challenge there we need a miracle on energy storage uh which it's way too expensive for the electric grid right now and we probably uh unless that miracle surprised us we will need something that's not weather dependent and it's large-scale green energy which nuclear fission uh assuming fusion doesn't uh surprise us and mature quickly that's the most likely way uh to get that so it's the grid uh is there uh but you know it's going to take a lot of investment a lot of new regulations to let transmission get done uh and and so it is a centerpiece of the solution actually that brings to the next question and we're going to have the next student question it's about infrastructure even if we have this the grid solutions ready today the storage solutions and all you and i have chatted we have had at least one session on how difficult it is to build transmission lines so that brings us to the next question from ej thank you so much for taking my question my name is ej and i'm a graduate student here at stanford focusing on decarbonizing large-scale energy systems what has struck me about the transition needed is that infrastructure and investment that will be required to support the transition so my question is what are ways we can mobilize capital for different solutions at all different scales from nascent technologies to large-scale deployment well one program that has been very successful and stayed intact even the last four years is the tax credits uh for solar and wind uh we have to give credit to japan and germany who put on uh tax credits uh particularly for solar but also for wind and started to bootstrap that market but then the us came in uh with an aggressive plan and so that's really driven things forward at quite an aggressive rate and the beauty of that is as the volume's gone up the cost of those things has come down even more than at least i expected they would particularly in the case of of solar and so now over time not yet but over time we may be able to ship those subsidies to more earlier stage things like storage offshore wind carbon capture that we still don't have yet the whole planning process for the grid used to be very local you know a state utility commission would say okay build a coal plant or not uh and it wasn't really that much of a national problem if you're generating massive renewables out of the midwest then you need a plan you know how does it get out to the coasts and uh you need to incent the states in the middle to feel like okay uh you know that it's okay to have transmission here there are some ideas about using less space to do lots of transmission you know super conducting and things we can't count on necessarily uh that that's going to work the finance industry you know isn't uh you know going to give us dramatically better pricing for the money uh so we have to take some of that risk out often the government uh you know will have to be the first dollars in on nuclear that's been uh very very important but the you know packaging it up uh and so the signal is cleared to the utilities which have been fairly conservative and the utility commissions that uh give them permission we're not there yet uh we're not there on on the national overall plan nor on the transmission piece let me switch to a different topic and that's food and agriculture your chapter on how we grow things really resonated with me because when i was an arpa-e i constantly use the example of the harvard bosch process for artificial fertilizers to set the bar for arpa-e that's what we the kind of innovation that we need and that was arguably the most important innovation of the 20th century that is most people have not heard of and and we won't be alive without that that innovation the nitrogen from in the soil and then uh in a norman borlaug you use the example of borlaug in the 1960s and 70s for the dwarf strains wheat for which he got the nobel prize in peace and it proved paul ehrlich wrong and you you talked about that too and i'm a living example of borlaug's innovation i wouldn't be alive if it was not for him i grew up in india um so now looking ahead with the current techniques in modern biology like gene editing and other things should we be looking at a second green revolution to address both food and climate and collectively if so what would it look like in your mind yeah absolutely uh you know in climate you've got both the mitigation which is this idea of reducing emissions and you've got adaptation which is helping the uh people who are be negatively affected already and agriculture plays a central role in adaptation and a significant role 19 percent of emissions in mitigation and having more productive seeds and seeds that can deal with higher temperatures can deal with drought because sadly the you know center of continents will be drying out with that ex uh extra heat uh but other parts will get floods more than they have in the past because it'll uh that rain will go will go somewhere and so it blows my mind that we only fund the seed innovation system for the world which is called the cd system at less than a billion a year uh there is so much promise as you say with these gene editing techniques not only for disease protection and specific per crop type productivity but the gates foundation is funding scientists who are even working on photosynthesis itself you know for example when it's too sunny the plant likes to shut down and it likes to wait you know because it's it's not evolution didn't optimize it to make the biggest seeds possible it's optimized for survival but you know by changing that relaxation time and getting the plant to go back in uh and start growing sooner uh after it's too bright you know we can increase plant productivity 20 and there's quite a few of these techniques so uh you know i'll reveal my uh optimism this space with the proper investment uh there's a lot that can be done and as you drive productivity you can take uh land out of cultivation likes happened in the us and it you know forests regrow there and the you know the malnutrition and incredible food problem we already have in africa which gets worse with population change and climate these seeds are really the only hope uh that we have to do the equivalent of the green revolution uh from the 1960s and 70s so explain and this is something that struck me explain why people should know about the organization called consultative group for international agricultural research cgiar not to be mistaken for cigar yeah no it's it's kind of an obscure group but this is where the seed work gets done the two most famous centers are uh the one that works on wheat and maize which is corn uh that's down in mexico that's simeon and that's where borlaug did his work partly to avoid diseases but then he saw the way he did his shuttle breeding he took out this limit the plant had on when it would was willing to grow so if you added fertilizer it was mind blowing and then it was so so productive that the stalk would bend so he had to breed in these japanese varieties uh dwarf varieties to so that it wasn't uh as high anyway an amazing story the other cg uh center that's well known is in the philippines and that's where the rice work gets done uh and you know again they're you know they're very strong but and they can use these new techniques uh you know assuming we uh get people uh comfortable with this some of the things are called gene editing or well some are called gmos some are just gene editing that definition varies by country uh you know we can also put more nutrients into these crops and so seeds are just so under invested uh and we owe it to the farmers in these developing countries uh to help them deal with climate change and thank goodness there's this highly leveraged high impact way if we could get that funding from a billion a year up to say two billion a year so let me switch the topic to the urgency of the matter you have asked you know r d the federal government r d to be increased by 5x and you know and these uh to reduce the green premium and increase the innovation supply and and you all and you wrote beautifully about about how scale matters but the issue is the innovation supply chain because we need policy to create the demand and you got innovation supply and there's a supply chain and which is where the scaling really happens and other factors come in and and you have created breakthrough energy ventures to invest in some amazing companies that i've seen and so the question is how do you reduce the time period because we don't have much time so that brings to the the next question by shinkun hi mr gates i'm cinco a computer science phd student at stanford focusing on data-driven methods for informing policy my question for you today is this given a costly process it takes to revamp infrastructure to bring energy r d to wide adoption and to build institutional incentives and support what both actions or demonstrations do you think can fully accelerate the innovation ecosystem and overcome infrastructure and policy obstacles thank you yeah it this is you know partly why some days the the 2050 gold uh seems like it's going to be very hard to achieve because even for passenger cars you know if you get the green premium to zero by 2035 you know then you have to retire all those vehicles so that one which is the furthest along just barely makes it uh all the other ones like that expanded electricity grid steel cement we really haven't invented everything we need uh you know can we make uh green hydrogen that's super super super cheap and that might if so then there's a way of using that as an input say to steel making fertilizer making and you know it's it's kind of magic but we can't count on that and you know there are so many steel plants there are so many cement plants the cement you don't like to move it long distances and there's usually limestone very nearby uh and so it's everywhere uh you know in india brick kilns which also are high emitting you know they're everywhere and and so when you think okay if in 10 years we know what to do and it's gotten you know it's an approach that's close to uh zero premium can you actually even in 20 years get that deployed uh people like voslov's smile tell me that you know it's never happened that fast before he's written so much great stuff about the uh historical shifts and so you know he he provides a sense of realism uh you know and that's why i say this will be the hardest thing we've ever done and if we waste any years because you know we're politically confused or if the younger generations you know picks other priorities and isn't driving this hard in both parties uh and the world uh then i you know i i don't think we're likely to to make the goal let me switch the topic to environmental justice because i'm so glad and thank you for writing the whole chapter on adaptation and you have done this in the context of environmental justice equity especially on the international landscape and you talk about kenya tanzania we know about the case of what could happen in bangladesh this was you know in the biden transition this was almost a daily topic because this was so important to him and he elevated the issue and this brings to the next question but it's it's really about why is this important to you and there's a question from someone from tanzania let's get maison hey bill thanks so much for taking my question i'm mason i'm from tanzania and i'm a senior in electrical engineering here at stanford i have to say i'm a big fan of the work you and the folks at the foundation do especially in places like tanzania countries like my own have experienced the disproportionate impact of climate change but can realistically do very little to change this and so my question for you is what should the role of developing countries be in charging the climate future for the world well you're exactly right uh you know tanzania has lots of uh farmers you know who've got very limited uh uh acreage uh it's got a quite a high population growth uh and uh it's near enough to the equator that these uh the tough weather including very high absolute temperatures and high humidity uh will be reducing productivity and and causing uh crop failures way more often than it does today you know tanzania uh can take the output if we really rev up the sort of global seed system then you actually have in each country the national agricultural research center it's called the nar that takes those general things and adapts it specifically for the local farmers and it gives the government gives advice to those farmers uh you know does demonstration plots uh so those farmers get involved and so certainly in the agricultural sector you know tanzania can do its part uh you know we're going to tanzania and saying hey some of your policies won't allow these new seeds to get used and is that really the right trade-off it's you know of course their decision but some scientists found tanzania are speaking out about uh how critical this will be so we owe it to tanzania uh to innovate also to the degree there is a green premium you know the poorest 80 countries or so we ought to be willing to subsidize that but you know to fit our budgets you know you have to get that green premium down very very dramatically you know the one thing i don't like is imposing uh emission constraints on poor countries that the rich countries themselves aren't yet meeting you know so we say oh you just use solar power even though it's it's intermittent in east africa there's geothermal uh you know there's wind there's a variety of things that if the grid is done right i can see uh how they become energy self-sufficient with uh very very low cost but it you know it's going to take planning and it takes ethiopia kenya tanzania working together to make that reliable grid i'm going to come back to this later on but i want to talk about government your last but one chapter is a plan for getting to zero and you explain that technology solutions are necessary but not sufficient policy matter matters governments matter both national state local leadership matters your zero goal is the same as that of president biden so what would you suggest to president biden what should he be doing now and what would be your recommendations to congress to state governments to public utility commissions what is your recommendation let's start with president biden yeah well it's fantastic and you know thanks for your work on the transition team uh you know the biden administration has adopted this as one of its top four goals and they placed people who uh not only care about climate but they're quite sophisticated about climate in many of the roles not just the climate rules so the national economic council you know brian d's you know strong climate person from the obama white house and you know i i've started talking uh with these people and it's great to see the energy and the commitment as part of this uh build back better initiative and so there's a lot of demonstration projects that can be done you know this is an opportunity hopefully uh to get some of those transmission projects going that haven't uh been funded you know the us should play in this green hydrogen opportunity after all we've got essentially the among the cheapest natural gas in the world and you know that's an approach uh that would give that industry you know at least some role you know you can convert pipelines to carry green hydrogen and anyway you know i'm thrilled that now this demand side uh for the innovation that we're going to have policies that go even further uh than we've had before the tax credits have been good in a department of energy you know rpe was a great idea now it's the stimulus bill the one that was passed uh in december uh got it up uh to the kind of level you and i have talked about for a long time uh so that was that was better than most people would realize the nuclear area uh got a lot of uh um authorization uh for things like the the terrapower uh demonstration plant and so building on that uh this administration can do a lot you know now there'll be pushback you know are you know does this help all the communities uh and you know that lens learning about environmental justice that was a new thing to me the white house has for the first time dr martinez who's there uh to make sure that's incorporated into these plans you know the degree to which local water pollution air pollution ended up uh in the um the low-income communities affecting people of color by far disproportionately i didn't have uh the awareness of that so it's wonderful that you know as we're doing these plans we start uh to have that in our our mind if you think globally uh the injustice you know is also very strong because it's the poorest countries that are suffering uh those are you know near the equator whereas it's the rich countries where historically the us uh is the biggest emitter uh you know we've caused the problem and yet they're uh the ones who suffer so there's a lot of justice uh considerations uh that this plan has to to take into account well you are in the private sector and and we have a government that is is is leaning into this uh issue on climate so then that brings us to the next question by the student uh kavya's question hi mr gates thank you for taking my question my name is kavya i'm a second year earth system student with a focus in human environmental systems here at stanford and my question for you today is what do you believe is the best way for the private and public sectors to work together on the climate crisis so we can harness the power that both hold in our society thank you so much well the private sector um has you know the great skills uh you know organizing risk capital organizing complex engineering projects you know even the oil companies if they choose uh have skill sets that like you know putting carbon underground getting waste underground uh you know using various approaches for green hydrogen their engineering capability should be drawn into those things uh the tech companies you know now are really stepping up saying okay we want uh not just sort of green energy where we bought a certificate but we want to never have uh uh dirty electrons coming in to power the data center so they're pioneering buyers of various storage solutions even when they build buildings you know i i'm talking about okay insist on green steel and green cement yes it'll cost you more but you know overall you you uh got to be a good citizen and and help drive these things forward uh and so that dialogue about what the private sector can do in its own is great i don't without the right government policies though the high green premium stuff will never get on the learning curve you know so the magic of what happened in solar can happen in this uh short time period that we have and so we have to be willing uh you know the tax credit uh amount you know we'll have to you know maybe even double uh the amount going into energy r d you know i've set an ambitious goal to say why isn't a priority at the level of our health research investment which is 35 billion a year and you know depending on how you define it our current energy uh is like 6 billion to 12 billion uh depending on on how strict your definition is the government's a big buyer uh and so it can start you know like california did with low carbon fuels or with zero emission vehicles you know that those programs have been quite beneficial and it's impressive that a state was willing to do that uh now you know we can take those learnings and bring them up to the federal level uh so it's going to take policy the one thing i'd say about policy that scares me a tiny bit is if we have good policies for four years and then we don't have good positives for four years it's very hard when you tell somebody who's building power plants and transmission lines or you know steel plants okay you know every four years or so you know these incentives aren't going to be there and so hopefully we can have the core of this uh you know get to be uh bipartisan and you know the advocates the younger generation is is going to have to play a big role there to make sure that we're not flip-flopping on the importance of this uh in these three decades i'm glad you said that because the the two four six eight cycle is not quite conducive for long-term predictable signals from the private sector so i'm so glad you said that your last chapter is on individual actions and what we can do individually and what are in your mind what are the one or two most important personal choices or steps that individuals can take to address climate change well the first is your your voice politically and i'm not just meaning how you vote if you learn about the issue you're passionate about the issue you see you know the negative effects the opportunity uh you know share that with other people you know you get extra credit if it's uh people from both political parties that you're you know creating a sense of understanding and a sense that you know with the right effort this is a solvable problem uh the second is that you're a buyer uh you can buy an electric car you can buy uh meat uh from impossible or beyond or many others that are coming into that space uh and that drives up the volume and you know the quality of those products will go up uh the costs will come down uh the pacers actually surprised me uh that that category is is at least there's a glimpse of how uh it can get solved there'll be more and more products where you'll have reporting about how green the company is and uh you can uh have your your preference there uh finally you know you're an employee and so uh your organization uh tech company finance company uh you know you should make sure that their skills you know their best people are engaging in this problem that the products they're buying that their you know scope three emissions reporting is is is very very strong and that they're upping the quality of how this offset uh work is going on uh people need to feel engaged that uh you know they and and and you know with the green premiums hopefully we give them something that every year they can hear about some great new companies and they can see the progress in this concrete numeric way so my last question uh uh is on covet and i mean you spent so much time on on on pandemics and and sometimes you know some of the lessons are relevant some of them are not relevant so if you could dissect this a little bit to say what lessons have covet 19 taught us for climate change and where do you think it is risky to apply covet lessons for climate change yeah well coveted and climate change uh they share the characteristic there are things that we expect our government uh to think ahead uh and plan for so that we don't get into a disastrous situation you know government does that for earthquakes with building codes uh they do it for war by having big defense budgets and they do war games and in both the case of pandemic and climate we're not there yet uh the pandemic a little bit of work before the pandemic about how quickly you roll out diagnostics would have made the united states more like australia than what we ended up being which you know is 10 times worse so it's a bit embarrassing that in many respects uh the us despite the great skills of the cdc and the nih and the fda we were not a model now there's one thing we did right which is we funded r d and we funded it very rapidly so you know what was called barta uh most of the money to make these vaccines put pfizer aside because they funded their own but the next four vaccines it was large checks from barda the next biggest funder which was about a third the size is a group called sepi that our foundation and others are in but the bar the money was absolutely necessary now sadly the pandemic uh is something that eight one compared to climate change it's much easier to solve because even though we didn't prepare uh now these vaccines you know show us that by the end of the year uh the infection rate will be dramatically down and we'll be on a path particularly if we can vaccinate the whole world uh that still uh you know could take us a while longer if we're not smart about that this will end whereas with climate change you can't wait until people start dying because by then the legs in the system and the die off of the natural ecosystems you know the coral reefs the uh the the you know farming productivity near the equator this will be uh uh irreversible in a lot of the damage that it does so we're asking people in this one to invest ahead of the problem and we're asking them we're no it's not one breakthrough you know people say which breakthrough do i like and you know i i love them all you know i like long-term storage i like green hydrogen but the the key point of the book is that you have to have solutions across all the spaces it was a 50 reduction hey fine pick half of them and just punt but this is a hundred percent production and so it's so much harder uh than the pandemic but the kind of global cooperation which has mostly been pretty good in the pandemic uh calling on the science community calling on the private sector you know pfizer uh they picked a german company very small company who was early uh but had this mrna thing and it was a brilliant choice that they made now they're you know i have phone calls with them regularly they're collaborating together so uh you know some negative lessons um several from the us government about speaking out openly about how bad it was going to be you know always minimizing the situation accessing people who weren't uh experts uh to get involved but uh you know i i do think government uh you know the lessons of the pandemic are there and several of them apply to this effort so a quick answer i know we're running out of time and this is stanford related as you know stanford has been working in energy and climate issues for two decades um and now we're starting a new school on climate and sustainability which is we don't often start new schools but this is important what advice would you have in starting this new school and what advice would you have for undergraduate and graduate students quick answer in that and we'll wrap up well it's fantastic that stanford's doing that uh and that you've you know encouraged your donors to give you the resources to bring a stanford level of expertise to these problems and you know the fact that stanford can integrate you know understanding of climate understanding chemistry physics these are very multi-disciplinary things uh it's partly why it's a hard one to understand partly why you know i get a kick out of climate because you the number of things you have to learn to understand climate are very large even economics uh god god forbid uh you know needs to to be part of how you structure uh the solution here so i'm i'm thrilled to have uh stanford stepping up you know i hope you'll concentrate on the hard parts of the problem as well as the ones that are uh further along uh you know the way that universities work with the private sector always uh requires some creativity uh to make sure you're drawing on the strengths of each and you you know when things are you know in the public and when they become sort of uh you know licensed ip but you know stanford has a lot of great experience there the health field the health field does give us some good examples of how this works where you've got the nih funding and you know we the progress in health uh has been fantastic and i'm you know very optimistic about uh the next several decades there so we should we should draw on all of that uh you know hopefully your best and brightest students will find this an attractive field to go in uh you know it it this is a somebody could start a career today and they would have plenty of hard work for their entire life uh working on these issues this is not a flash in the pan type opportunity bill this was a terrific conversation thank you for spending the hour with us and you have explained in your book how hard this challenge is to get to xero you have not sugar coated this issue and a global change at this massive scale is historically unprecedented we have never done this before but we have to do it that's the that's the calling that that you have laid out and you also so i i was schizophrenic reading this book because it is terrifying to see how big the challenge but also your optimism of of the holistic comprehensive approach to address climate change and it at the end of the day it's all about us we have to decide individually and collectively through a government through organizations so i hope all listening out here get a chance to read this important and timely book from from bill gates how to avoid a climate disaster and i want to take this opportunity to thank the 150 students who submitted questions for bill unfortunately we could pick only six of them we will share all the rest of the questions with bill and finally i want to thank the team at stanford pre-code institute for energy the stanford woods institute for the environment and the team at gates ventures for the effort in putting this together and we will now conclude this broadcast of today's program on behalf the entire stanford pre-court institute for energy in the woods the certain environment we thank you for joining us and thank you again bill for joining us it was terrific thank you you

Channel: Stanford ENERGY

Views: 3,228

Rating: 4.2820511 out of 5

Keywords: Stanford, Stanford Energy, Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Majumdar, Arun Majumdar, Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Climate disaster, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Id: B-JjEZa4bk8

Length: 59min 34sec (3574 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021