Bill Gates Expected to Create Billion-Dollar Fund for Clean Energy (2015)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It is impossible to meet rising global energy needs without either a: nuclear energy as a wedge, b: divine advancements in renewable tech and cost, or c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels.
I dream of a post-energy-scarcity-star-trek future pretty often, but the fact is that barring some revolutionary technological advancement, nuclear is the only long term hope we have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energies. "Green" tech it ain't either: refining rare earths is environmentally disastrous and even recycling the waste can be quite hazardous, such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities.
If we want to be serious about renewable energy and the long road it will take to get there, we will have to get over our fears of Chernobyl and Homer Simpson running the power plant
Much our present problem results from under-pricing of fossil fuels due to:
1. Negative pollution externalities.
2. Far more significant: failing to account for replacement costs of consumed resources. Fossil fuels are accumulated biofuels. We're consuming them at about 5 million times the rate of their initial creation, and at rates exceeding substantively most or all present net primary production.
Enjoy the windfall. It won't last.
2. We have hundreds of years of coal, for example. Many people are willing to use it all then worry about it then. Surely we'll have developed better energy technology long before then. 200 years ago we society didn't even have electricity.
Anyway, my point is to not fight the system but accelerate clean energy development so that it wins in the current market. Solar prices have plummeted in the past 5 years, for example. What will it take to decrease the price further so that more people want it on their roofs, for instance?
Given modest exponential growth, that falls. At 2% global energy consumption increase, rate of use doubles every 35 years. The 10 year average for coal is closer to 3%, though in 2015 it had fallen to 0.4%.
http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stati...
>Together we will focus on early stage companies that have the potential of an energy future that produces near zero carbon emissions and provides everyone with affordable, reliable energy. We will invest based on a few core investment principles...
Which then goes on to list what they are looking for when they invest in companies.
Maybe you're thinking that 'the market' should/would/does exist such that when you get electricity to your house, you can either purchase it from the clean energy plant or the dirty energy plant? The problem is that this market doesn't really exist yet, because the technology and infrastructure need more development.
[0]: http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html
Meanwhile, solar power has a market, has deployments, and is on a path of incremental changes that will take the cost of solar below coal. And once you're below coal, the market will automatically make the switch without any lobbying whatsoever.
I fully agree that we need to keep all existing nuclear as long as possible though, but I'm not so sure it's something it makes sense to invest in.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A7XF4_1...
> There's some experiments on small-scale fission plants, but there's no market, no buyers, no deployments.
And let's not forget - solar is tiny. If you wanted to replace the energy infrastructure with solar - it would take decades , it would require a massive share of the world steel supply ,and it would be a huge building project, and the EROI would not be so big.
So it might be too early to say who will win the race.
I have great hopes on Thorium. I am by no mean a specialist but I understand it has all the benefits of uranium for civil nuclear energy except that it uses a design of nuclear reactors that can be stopped in seconds, and rely a lot less on high pressure (i.e. subject to blowing up) pipes.
But it will take huge investments to develop the whole supply chain and all the associated technologies. It would make sense for a country or a group of countries who would want to develop a new nuclear park to team up and just bite the bullet. China would be a good candidate. But also the vast majority of the nuclear power plants in Europe and the US are more than 30y old. Might make sense to just do it, go clean, safe and stop writing checks to our "friends" in the middle east...
Thorium reactors have to be part of a closed nuclear fuel cycle meaning you have breeder reactors combined with fuel reprocessing. No nation seriously does this right now because when you reprocess you can easily separate bomb materials (although India is allegedly moving towards a closed thorium cycle). Reprocessing involves nasty chemicals that are super radioactive too which is another step where things can go very wrong.
Also, thorium can't even run a reactor by itself. It has to be used as a feed material to breed Uranium-233 by absorbing neutrons and decaying, so at the end of the day you are still using uranium to produce power. The only advantage of thorium is that it doesn't produce as many actinides which are the really long-lived radioactive waste products. So after thousands of year the radiotoxicity of your waste is less with thorium than uranium.
I'm pro nuclear. I like thorium, but it would realistically require a nation to step up and invest trillions of dollars in the infrastructure and licensing only to have things rolling along decades later. Although, it would provide energy for a few centuries if done well.
I would agree with any other industrial accident. But the reality of nuclear accidents is that you end up polluting at the scale of a country. That's a big Damocles sword to live under.
More generally, though nuclear faces considerable obstacles, among the most serious are designing a high-risk, high-complexity system for a very-long-term deployment. How long do you expect nuclear to be human's primary fuel source, and how do you plan to deal with non-technical challenges.
Modern technical society is about 200-250 years old -- most sources date the start of the Industrial Revolution to about 1800. Virtually all our present institutions, companies, science and understand, etc., have emerged or substantially evolved during this time (though of course many trace back further).
Running nuclear power at global scale from here until Doomsday means planning at the level of centuries, if not millennia or even millions of years. That's timescales exceeding the oldest people, companies, governments, schools, religions, languages, even basic systems of morality and ethics.
Provisioning global-scale nuclear power would require on the order of 15,000 plants operating simultaneously. Unavoidable metal embrittlement limits these to a practical life of about 40 years. That means commissioning and decommissioning plants at the rate of one per day, and both processes are themselves 20-40 year endeavours.
That occurring through political and economic crises, wars, natural disasters, political and moral revolutions, and more. Things which are somewhat difficult to engineer around.
Even trace amounts of some nuclear contaminants are exceptionally poisonous, and at the proposed scale of operation, risks of release are decidedly non-negligible. Present human experience is limited to about 400-500 reactor cores, and there have been at least 4 major core integrity breaches, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Substantial fault in all accident cases devolves to human and management practices, again, exceptionaly difficult to engineer around. With 30 times that many reactors operating from now until Doomsday, what acceptible accident rate are you targeting? We're at about 1:50 reactor years. Are you going to bump that up 10 - 100 fold?
At 1 per 100 reactor-years, we're looking at 150 core meltdowns pere century. At 1:1000, 15. You'd need to exceed 1:10,000 to limit yourself to 1.5 failures per century, and again, that through political strife, economic crisis, mob and mafia involvement, corruption, war, and natural disaster. Forever.
Renewable energy systems based on solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric sources have far more benign failure rates. And I say that despite the fact that the worst power plant disasters are included in that list. China's Banqiao Dam failed in 1975 (itself a story of engineering, design, management, communications, and meterological factors) killing 171,000. Despite that, the region is now home to over 7 million people. The long term effects of such failures is relatively minimal, compared to the nondiscretionary multi-century wildlife refuges now surrounding the former Chernobyl and Fukushima sites, as well as smaller-factor radiation problems at locations such as Hanford, Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced.
Nuclear power is just one of numerous cases of pleading for exceptions from the Gods of Complexity. The real challenge (and one Gates also acknowledges, though generally privately) is of accepting the limits of humans' footprint on this little, and rare, and lonely planet of ours.
> More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced.
Embracing those limits requires, as far as I can tell, eugenic-style control over breeding. Personally I'd rather the human race burns itself out than go down that path.
Yes, something's got to control human breeding. Either humans or something other than human. Most likely viral or bacteriological, in my book.
The current benchmark (e.g., used in the IPCC's own assessments of carbon-neutral energy options) is of lives per GW generation. I find this naive on numerous counts, e.g., my citation of the Banqiao disaster -- horrible if you were caught up in it (though also note: the bulk of the deaths werev from disease and starvation in the aftermath, the acute toll from the inundation was ~40-50k).
Virtually all deaths due to conventional processes -- physical, heat, trauma, even chemical -- are fairly ameliorable by direct precautions. Even in the case of a massive dam failure -- Banqiao, Johnstown, Vajont -- advance warning of a few minutes would have reduced fatalities tremendously, and with hours or days, all but entirely. Each of these disasters was precipitated by clear warning signs, though they were unheeded, for various reasons. In the Johnstown and Vajont cases, state of the art in engineering and geology was a major component. Perverse incentives to plant operators existed in all cases.
Looking at instances of explosions also suggests that warning, evacuation, and shelter could save virtually all lives, assuming a proper understanding of circumstances. Halifax, Canada, Galveston, TX, West, TX, Martinez, CA, Tianjin, China, and Lac Megantic, Canada all represented substantial loss of life which could have been avoided through both better advanced risk management and notice in advance of the precipitating disasters. Contrast the Pepcon disaster, among the largest non-nuclear blasts ever. Immediate deaths, though, were only two (another 370 or so injured), in large part due to the facility's isolation from any surrounding structures.
By contrast, long-term chronic exposures can be quite debilitating. Minimata, Japan, Love Canal, Hinkley, CA ("Erin Brokovich"), Bhopol, India, Agent Orange throughout Vietnam and SE Asia, and industrial contamination throughout China, will likely be with us for a long, long time. Flint, MI, can be added to that list.
Chemicals can generally be mitigated through binding and sequestration operations, nucleotides are more difficult. Long-term low-level chronic emissions, or perhaps worse: punctuated equilibria, concern me.
The bigger concern I have though is for systemic failure. Nuclear energy provisioning, particularly based on very sparse fuel sources (uranium from seawater, thorium from rare earths mining) creates a long-term dependence on a large and potentially fragile technological stack. By contrast, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are rather simpler, and even geothermal is fairly straightforward.
"Complexity is the enemy of reliability" is a phrase first occurring in The Economist newspaper, January 18, 1958. It's been repeated, usually as "complexity is the enemy", many times since, though I suspect those citing it don't know the origins (my first encounter was through Eric S. Raymond's writings).
Creating a civilisation-supporting technological stack that isn't complex seems a strong goal. And quantifying systemic global risk part of the problem.
http://books.google.com/books?id=aDsiAQAAMAAJ&q=%22complexit...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24cxgc/program...
> By contrast, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are rather simpler, and even geothermal is fairly straightforward.
My understanding is scaling these technologies is where the complexity may lie, and that it would so extremely difficult to support the growing energy needs of the world's population using these technologies that they aren't really even an option. I'd like to be wrong. Am I?
This gets into a whole mess of considerations, and there's not a lot of agreement.
There's little doubt that there isn't a gross surplus of solar energy incident on Earth's surface. But that surplus is, by orders of magnitude, fairly thin relative to present human energy demands. By the time numerous factors are applied, you end up with infrastructure requirements which are truly prodigious.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the real lesson of Limits to Growth has largely been missed -- not what limits are, but that they exist, and even highly generous assumptions of abundance (or effluent absorption capabilities) are rapidly overwhelmed with even modest rates of growth. That is, the lesson is humans must embrace limits. There's considerable more math on how far in advance clear warning signs do or don't exist, though fundamentally the principles are simple.
This turns the typical statement of sustainability on its head. The question isn't "how do we provide energy, food, and other resources for the people we see coming", but "how many people can be supported, at what level of affluence, for what duration?" It's not energy supplies that are insufficient, it's humans which are overabundant.
Answers to "how many" vary, though I've seen published values ranging from 50 million to 50 billion -- three orders of magnitude. Someone's off by a lot.
Going by history, the range of 50 million - 2 billion corresponds to human population from early prehistory to about 1920. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the value stood at about 500 million.
Levels at or above present populations would require a large number of complex problems be solved for a very long time.
The answer to your question may well be not that you're wrong, but that you're asking the wrong questions.
Put another way: there's nothing inherent to the Universe (or even this small speck of it) which gives humans any right to existence or level of affluence. Predicating reality on what we'd prefer is the definition of wishful thinking.
At some point there has to be a compromise made between cost and safety. You could spend an extra $10 billion making a plant even more safe, but in doing so make the scheme unaffordable, and 20 years late. And even then the station could still have complex failure modes that are very difficult to model. Maybe that is exactly what happened to the nuclear industry since Chernobyl? We ended up with ever more complex and monolithic systems that require thousands of expensive physicists to do basic building and maintenance. Perhaps it would have been better to invest in small modular systems.
I guess one reactor every 3 days isn't any less daunting, but that 15,000 number seems to be really specific and could use a link or some fleshing out.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?reload=true&arnum...
Abbott starts with present global electrical consumption and assumes a nominal 1 GW capacity plant.
1. TerraPower isn't solid state, but dynamically relocates fuel rods to achieve a "travelling wave".
2. Fuel isn't radioactive waste but depleted uranium, a form of uranium in abundant supply, as a byproduct of fuel processing.
Suggested references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
Make nuclear energy a global resource that all nations MUST buy into based on their % of consumption.
build the appropriate plants, and if the US uses 25% of that power, it pays 25% of the bill. Make it protected by some joint/independent body/military in a de-nationalized territory.
Make it illegal to profit off of it.
This is a social problem, not a tech problem. There's no reason to have any "surrounding communities" -- the lead recycling can be performed in isolated factories.
Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC
The Great Global Warming Swindle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg
Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth.
CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased.
Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want.
Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just make the clean water or gasoline when the sun shines and store that.
Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.
Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC
The Great Global Warming Swindle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg
Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth.
CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased.
Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want.
Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, smelt aluminum, desalinate water and use it in greenhouses, convert water and coal to gasoline. A key to such desert applications is don't need to store the electric energy from the solar panels -- instead, just smelt aluminum, the clean water, or gasoline when the sun shines and store that.
Solar for the US electric grid? Nope: Need storage, and it alone is more expensive than the alternatives so that for the grid solar is not wanted even for free.
I disagree with your stance on nuclear - in the sense that nuclear is one way to partially replace coal/oil, however a much better combination is solar + nuclear + energy efficiency in transportation + reduction of global footprint of manufactured goods (energy in industry).
How to reduce "consumerism"? Well, you need a revolution. Or, you need to tax sales heavily. Neither are easy.
Ubiquitous virtual reality and the porting of previously matter-intensive goods and desires into trivially replicated code.
And the advancements in renewables look like they are doable, just not as fast as we'd like. More nuclear would be good, but limiting research and development to just fission or only solar is a false choice. As we've learned from applying developments in microchips to cutting wafers for photovoltaics, developments in one area of tech can often be used to improve other areas.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/29/news/economy/bill-gates-brea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
EX: A single location is storing 4,200 gigawatt-hours per year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huizhou_Pumped_Storage_Power_S...
As to geography you can also move electricity ~1,000 miles with minimal losses, So there is some dependence on geography but outside of some islands you can use pumped storage just about anywhere in the world as all you really need is a large hill to start with.
Siting and water flows for such installations are somewhat lacking.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor...
There math is also wrong on energy density, you get ~30% efficiency with gas > electricity. So one gallon of gas takes less water on balance. ~4 cubic meters of water dropping one mile ~= 1 gallon. A 10 meter drop in water level over 1 km^2 = ~2,500,000 gallons of gas per day and 0.9 billion gallons of gas per year.
Sure, you would need two ~1 km^2 square body's of water within ~3 miles of each other with one ~1 mile higher than another. But, building two 10-20m deep pools is cheap, so now you just need a large flat hill or an unusually deep valley.
PS: People talk about how variable wind is, but if you ignore the peak and compare median power to minimal power it's actually surprisingly steady. Yes, we will waste a few days at peak power, but that's not actually a lot of wasted energy.
If you want to see seasonal trends, the Fraunhoffer Institute in Germany has excellent actual production plots for Germany. Solar does well in summer, not so much in winter. Some of the slack is made up for with wind.
There's additional other sources, including wastestream processing, though that itself is just derivative of biofuels. Germany has surprisingly little geothermal potential.
And though Germany is a high-latitude country, it's fairly representative of about 450 million people living in modern high-energy lifestyles, throughout Europe.
Solar hot water heating is much more efficient ~90% and easy to store locally. Payback is ~3-5 years in most of the US even if you only need heat for a few months out of the year. Granted, it does not work in Alaska, but it does work in Mane.
Thus, Wind for base load 24/7/365. Solar for peak power usage. Toss in a 30% buffer + ~20% extra generating capacity get's you to 5 9's.
This isn't guaranteed to be true. Before electrical household appliances were common, we used far more energy at night because indoor lighting was the primary use case for energy. And we are likely to revert to this pattern again if we ever have a mass move toward electric cars which will be charging at night.
Presently with inflexible base-load power generation (coal and nuclear), that's at night.
Given nondispatchable opportunistic generation, that's likely to be during daylight hours.
Storage is the electrical demand of last resort, along with other very-high-energy uses (e.g., thermal banking, aluminium smelting, etc.).
Using Tesla numbers, 230 miles on 60kwh. Average person drives 13,000 miles per year which averages out to 9.3kwh per day. Split that over 12 hours and your looking at ~780watts.
Further, if it cost less we would charge cars during the day.
PS: Average household uses 31kwh per day. But, offices are really daytime biased.
That seems like a lot, but for comparison purposes, China uses 5,400,000 GWh/yr. I don't know how many sites China has available to build storage plants of this capacity; the terrain there looks kinda special --- Wikipedia claims the lower dam is over 400m high...
The scale of solar and wind build-out required, and of energy storage, are both absolutely staggering.
Largest built infrastructure, possibly short of highway and road systems (which are significantly lower tech, and have far fewer moving parts).
Though highway maintenance costs might give you pause as well. Lifetime for solar and wind plant is roughly 20 years, due to various degredation factors.
Basically, you're right about the limiting factor being that it's expensive to drill deep holes. The heat distribution in the earth's crust is highly variable, so geothermal is more favorable where the crust is hot, because you don't have to drill as deeply (and install and operate equipment at great pressures). In a favorable area, such as near active volcanoes or large hot springs, geothermal may be a viable choice if the area is available for drilling (i.e. not in a national park) and close to a metro area or other high-capacity electrical grid.
When all of these factors work out, geothermal is great. The Geysers north of San Francisco has a capacity of about 725 MW[0], and basically powers SF. It loses ~1% production annually, though, because the hot water powering the plant becomes extracted, and cold water pumped in cools the rocks slightly. Note that the rocks will re-heat themselves, but it takes time.
However, it doesn't always work out. Much of the hot crust in the US is in Nevada and Idaho, where there are very few people, and not a lot of groundwater. Colder crust has the hot water too, but it's at great depths (e.g. 3-4 km) which would cost maybe 50-100 million USD to drill to. (A recent temperature test well--not production--well near me cost $3MM to drill ~1000 feet, and it gets exponentially more expensive with depth. The well, located by a small hot spring not far from Seattle, had a temperature inversion and turned colder with depth, so the money went down the drain).
I do some consulting work for a company[1] that is experimenting with a technique called 'Enhanced Geothermal' or EGS that tries to exploit hot, dry rock by pumping cold water in through an injection well and pumping now-hot water back out at a nearby production well. This opens up a lot more exploitable ground[2] but is still very expensive and not yet proven for production. A test is in progress at Newberry volcano in Oregon[3].
However, I have high hopes for geothermal longer-term. I think that the drilling costs may get a bit lower, especially as a lot of the technology is developed by oil and gas companies (and associated drilling companies that are now or soon to be out of work, with current low oil prices). Additionally, once EGS is more proven and therefore less risky, investors will be willing to put money in. I don't know if it will ever as profitable as fossil fuels, but once the geological and technological uncertainties are lowered, then it should start to become a great, fairly safe investment (i.e. the demand for electricity is unlikely to drop down much).
[0]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph240/halasz1/ [1]: http://altarockenergy.com [2]: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/geothermal_resource2009-final... [3]: http://blog.newberrygeothermal.com/
I myself doubt whether there will be strong action until major changes already start.
And unless the whole world agrees to act in unison, it doesn't make sense for America to act unilaterally. China and India will just eat our lunches and do the polluting for us.
While unilateral US action through regulation and taxation might not directly do anything to ameliorate the global problem, US investment in technology might. The US can absolutely sell technology to China and India, whether it's intellectual property sales/licensing, product sales/licensing, or simply by charging huge amounts of tuition for Asian engineering students to learn at US universities (this is currently a very large subsidy to US education).
Prokon used unregulated financial instruments to take investments, and they obscured their financial situation by spreading their balance sheet over dozens of companies. It took the bankruptcy administrators a year to even figure out what the financial situation really was.
I think what we should take from that is that oversight over companies that take financial investments, especially from consumers, should be tighter. That really has nothing to do with alternative energy.
Well, since you are concerned, I have some really good news for you. For your concerns, the news is much better than anything from research on solar cells, energy storage, wind farms, geothermal energy, nuke energy, carbon-taxes, etc.
The news is really, really simple and says how to address your concerns in the best way, absolutely, positively the best way possible.
In three posts in this thread, I've given a reference to a quite well done BBC video available at YouTube.
The secret solution, best possible for your concerns? Sure: Do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do zip, zilch, and zero. Totally f'get about it.
Why? Because as in the video, CO2 has nothing at all to do with the climate -- in any meaningful sense at all. None. All details are in the video. It's like you had some doctors tell you you had a very sick child and then a week later told you that it was all a mistake, that some lab tests got mixed up, and, in fact, your child is fully healthy.
And from CO2, the earth is fully healthy.
Again, why? Because in fact, CO2 has no effect at all meaningful. It didn't in the past several hundred thousand years, isn't now, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Best news you can get. Why? Because to save the planet from the dangers of CO2, you don't need to work on solar, wind, nukes, carbon-taxes, home insulation, subsidies, EPA shutdowns of coal plants, have cold houses in the winter and hot houses in the summer, etc. All those things you were doing to save the earth from CO2, you get to stop all of them.
Now, is this a happy day for you?
I'm not joking.
Watch the movie. If you have any questions, then post them here and I will respond.
The Great Global Warming Swindle
It's anti-democratic and, to use a provacative but applicable term, un-American. National issues should be decided democratically, not by a few oligarchs. We were founded on the rejection of an aristocracy.
It may be unfair to Gates and to this fund but unfortunately, even with the best of intentions, he is part of the problem.
But he is, by amassing and using power that should be democratic, whether or not that was his intent. Doing good things with that power only makes one an "enlightened oligarch". Though to be fair to him, I don't know what he should do - at least lobby for higher taxes for the super-wealthy, and economic policies that don't result in such conncentration of power - Bill Gates of all people can't claim to be a helpess, innocent bystander.
I'll add that his power, even well-intentioned, can distort things for the worse. For example, there was (maybe is) a problem in some African nations where foreign AIDS (and/or malaria or TB) funding was so much greater than local health care funding that they hired away all the talent and net more people were dying from a lack of basic health services.
In fairness, there is a middle ground. Realistically money always will provide some power, some people will have more than others they have a right to use their money as they choose, and it's great if they use it to help others. However, when that concentration of money becomes so great that it undermines democracy, then it's gone too far.
> He innovated, created tens (hundreds?) of thousands of jobs, and one of the biggest companies on the planet. ...
A side point but let's not whitewash Microsoft's history, which wasn't all bad, but wasn't unicorns and rainbows either.
Just characterizing someone's statement and then disagreeing with your characterization is an internal debate for you. If you have a respose to something I specifically said, that's valuable.
Also, it's sad that democracy is now seen as such a liberal idea that people call it socialism (though it's not that at all).
The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship. This is closer to the form of governance of corporations and open-source projects. The problem is, there's no easy way to guarantee the benevolent part.
I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates. Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a capitalist system. There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism - which has the same economic problems seen in any communist country past or present. So for better or worse, I think we have to accept the influence of the wealthy.
It's not. Don't accept the status quo as inevitable. Money wasn't always so enormously concentrated in a few hands, and the disparity wasn't always so great. It's worse now in the U.S. than in modern history, and worse than on other Western nations. It's now in an extreme state.
The current rules of the economy, the tax rates, etc. that yield this situation are not inevitable or somehow natural. They aren't the result of capitalism or the free market. They are simply the product of politics that favor one group (a group that now has enormous power over government) over others.
> There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism
I disagree. They can have their money, and we can separate money from politics. If we take money out of elections then money loses a great amount of influence. If we decide and fund public issues democratically, as our nation fundementally believes, everyone gets a vote in deciding things for their community. For example, I was reading that because government is so under-funded a park in a New York was being funded by someone wealthy. Now who decides where that park should go and what it should look like? Instead of being decided democratically by everyone in the community, it's dictated by the oligarch. That's not democracy.
> Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a lot of bad options.
I agree, but it's clearly the most effective; almost all the nations that lead in their citizen's welfare, from health to education to safety to civil rights to economic issues, are democracies. Also, there is very importat moral component - nobody has a right to tell me what to do, and if we have to come to an agreemet, we should vote on it with everyone getting an equal say.
> if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.
I disagree that the results are necessarily worse than they would be under other forms of government. Also, we're talking about the United States and not a developing country.
> The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship.
Hmmm ... I haven't heard that from anyone but the dictators who want people to think they are benevolent. If they are so effective and benevolent, why not hold an election? No doubt everyone will vote for them.
> I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates.
Let's assume Gates is more intelligent than the average (almost certainly true) and is purely benevolent (certainly not true, and remember the corrupting influence of power). He still can't do better because he can't possibly understand the interests and needs of millions of people; nobody has that capacity. That, along with the lack of true benevolence, is one place where central planning fails and where free markets and democracy succeed. The people who don't have a seat at the table are the ones who get their interests trampled on because either nobody cares, or people think of course, the other person's priorities really aren't as important as their own.
Removing (reducing to be more realistic) the influence of money on politics is a great idea. I'd love to see a system that leverages technology to provide a finer-grained representational democracy. One where you can vote for a representative on any given issue, or group of issues, or type of issues, etc and you can change that vote whenever you want. Google experimented with such a system internally at one point. Pure direct democracy is too dangerous, it's mob rule and would stomp all over minority rights and issues. Representational democracy is too far removed from the people. Something in between is likely the sweet spot. But it may never happen. Politicians have no incentive to dismantle the system that supports them.
I too disagree that alternative systems would work better in Africa, but it's clear that democracy doesn't work very well either compared to developed countries.
Well Gates might not be investing in things that people in the US would vote for, he's doing a great job in service of humanity. One could say that maybe the people he's actually trying to help, e.g. in Africa should vote on what to do, rather than him making the decisions - but would they make smart decision? These are uneducated people who don't know anything about economics, or science, or anything outside of their day to day struggle for survival. Well they might be better aware of the issues that they face, they almost certainly are not well equipped to solve them - democracy is of no help here.
Anyway it's all moot, the money is his, and it's his right to decide what to do with it. Good on him for using it to help humanity.
Luckily, the free market, despite the excessive subsidies that are granted to coal and other fossil fuels, has caught on to the trend and more and more money is pouring in. 97% of economists that publish in this field agree that doing nothing will cost us more than action right now. But still the "common sense" hasn't caught up with reality and relentless propaganda has convinced large numbers of people that solar, wind, efficiency and demand manangement are the domain of idealistic tree huggers and/or parasitic boondoggles rather than a pragmatic and cost effective solution.
I'm lost, where is he talking down existing solutions and what are his speculative investments you're talking about?
This matters not only for grid power but for off-grid energy needs, ranging from chainsaws to backup generators to marine and aviation fuel.
The problem is that renewable energy is very capital intensive. Without some kind of price fixing (thank you tree huggers) it is excessively risky. When you have price fixing it is very attractive to speculators who make unpopular profits from electricity bills.
The best way to make money is to already own a big power station and not bother reinvesting or maintaining existing capacity (coal). You reach a situation where no one has any incentive to build anything unless they are heavily subsidised. The public are stuck renting ever more expensive energy whilst funding massive building projects that they will never own.
As you say in places where demand isn't growing quickly, it's more about shutting down and replacing existing plants, and that's where it can get political, see the "war on coal" in the US. But even there, it's an economic no-brainer to shut the coal plants that are killing people and replace them with gas and renewable, the only thing stopping it from happening is politics, not anything inherent in renewable tech.
Elon Musk is a bit better than him since he doesn't preach - but I would agree with Gates that he's a little gung ho on space travel. I honestly don't think it is humanity's place to leave earth, we are fish in water. Whatever comes after us (speaking in terms of evolution) will be the alpha in terms of space travel.
We are the only form of life we know of that can get into space using ingenuity. The alpha could be our descendants or created by tying our ingenuity in with the genetic background of other creatures.
We are the best chance known of getting life off of one small planet - I think it is our place to expand life through the universe.
Not sure if it's our "place" but for damn sure it's a good goal, getting life off the Earth and becoming sustainable in space massively reduces the risk of humans going extinct.
The solar system is rich in resources we are going to need at some point.
E.g., "Gates' billionaire "Good Club" sees population growth as leading global issue (London Times / 2009)" https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/237yxs/gates_b...