How Bill Gates Would Fight Climate Change

“There’s another global disaster we also need to try to prevent,” Bill Gates wrote on his blog Thursday: “climate change.” As I have tried to make clear on this blog over the past two years, we have only some of the tools we need to eliminate the world’s greenhouse gases. We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean electricity, grow food, make things, move around, and heat and cool our buildings, so we can do all these things without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In short, we need to revolutionize the world’s physical economy — and that will take, among other things, a dramatic infusion of ingenuity, funding, and focus from the federal government. No one else has the resources to drive the research we need. CNBC summarizes Gates’ plan:
Bill Gates on Thursday proposed the formation of a new U.S. agency to tackle climate change and a five-fold jump in funding for research on renewable energy… “There’s no central office that’s responsible for evaluating and nurturing great ideas,” Gates wrote. “For example, research on clean fuels is managed by offices in the departments of Energy, Transportation, and Defense — and even NASA. Similarly, responsibility for research on energy storage is spread across at least four offices in the Department of Energy…” “To be fair, the U.S. isn’t the only country that underfunds clean energy research,” Gates writes on his blog. “All the governments in the world spend about $22 billion a year on it, or around 0.02 percent of the global economy. Americans spend more than that on gasoline in a single month.” In February Gates will publish a book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.