Bill Gates Has a Master Plan for Battling Climate Change | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates Has a Master Plan for Battling Climate Change

wsj.com

40 pointsbreck33 comments

Oh, where is Admiral Ackbar when you need him?

If it is about what people, not mostly corporations, need to do, then it is probably a trap/distraction. Or something that people must do that will destroy a lot of corporations, like full stop all international travel and most city travel. And those fortunes won't accept that peacefully.

I hope that there is a solution, even if is backed by him. But inertia is something hard to stop, both in economics and in climate mechanisms.

The situation by now is that we have a lot of excess of carbon in the atmosphere already, we are adding most of the produced 100 million/day barrels of oil, and a lot of positive feedback processes (like methane being released near polar regions, or gases released for the each time bigger/more frequent forest fires, or losing albedo). Going from that rate of emissions of long lasting greenhouse gases to effectively reaching negative emissions will be hard to plain impossible or just too risky.

Yeah I stopped really caring so heavily about recycling when I realised just one dominos shop causes more rubbish in a day than I do in a year. You can't recycle greasy cardboard.

Corps first or fail

> You can't recycle greasy cardboard.

You can compost it, though. It's a slow process, but you can grow trees in that compost. I'd argue that this is an adequate form of recycling, if we have enough managed forest land.

OTOH... you're not wrong, corps gotta lead the way. I lived in Seattle when we made it illegal to throw away recyclables. Great start, right? No, corps got a carveout. Starbucks made a big show of letting customers sort their recycling, compost and garbage with fancy new lids on their bins. But ultimately, there's a single bag under there, and it all goes to landfill. Ridiculous.

If we reduce meat consumption we can free up large areas of land used today for animal fodder production and repurpose it for this.

Ok so force them to accept boxes back for composting :)

The carbon that makes up the cardboard was carbon that was once in the environment. I’d rather landfill it and remove it from the carbon cycle than spend resources attempting to reuse it.

You have to take into account that both the 100m oil barrels/day, and all the carbon that is being released in the artic was not in the environment/carbon cycle. And those volumes are several orders higher than the amounts that recycling takes out.

There is a solution, and it was just demoed in Washington earlier this month

https://brilliantlightpower.com/suncell-demonstrations-in-wa...

Let me save everybody a click. From their website:

> Suncell® directly generates electricity from reaction of hydrogen to dark matter using water freely available in the humidity in the air.

Lol

I think overall Gates is a decent guy with his heart in the right place but these articles of him opining how the world should work always rub me the wrong way.

He has all the money in the world, and he should just go do what he is able. If you want to push some policy as credible, than have it stated by an expert, and stop attaching his name to every opinion as if it lends credibility.

The one thing I can't reconcile about BG is how he could supposedly be in favor of helping the poor and especially poor regions like Africa, but then support #ImaginaryProperty laws (copyrights and patents), which absolutely crush the poor. He is with one hand supposedly trying to help India and with the other hand part of the conglomerate trying to get India to block SciHub at the ISP level, cutting a billion people off from access to the world's scientific knowledge.

I just can't figure that one out. The only possibility I can see is that he came to that realization about the public domain late, and Microsoft's recent moves toward open source are him quietly but methodically turning the aircraft carrier around.

What he is doing is good.

He is using his platform (i.e. the fact that people know his name, journalists want to write about him, and people want to read articles about him) to promote policies that are created by experts.

When those same experts say the same things it doesn't generate the same level of awareness/conversation.

If you want to read these ideas straight from the experts, then go read the IPCC climate report, but most people aren't going to go read that on their own.

He's been doing this a long time, and from what I've read he takes a pretty hands on approach to much of his foundation's work. By "hands on" I mean he puts in the effort to learn quite a bit of the underlying science relevant to the areas his foundation funds.

The impression I've gotten when I've seen or read interviews with the experts that have worked with the foundation is that they don't have to dumb things down for him. He's not going to writing research papers in the field, but he can read them with good understanding.

> Rodi Guidero, managing director for strategic investments at Gates Ventures (who now oversees Breakthrough Energy Ventures), Guidero blurted, “That’s a terrible f—ing idea.” He argued the fund would lose money and embarrass Gates. “Why do you think I care about that?” Gates replied. (In retelling the story, Guidero now says, “I can’t believe I said a thing like that to Bill Gates.” Gates says he doesn’t remember the exchange.)

You have to love apocryphal tales like this. The idea that Gates would hire someone who didn't know that Gates wouldn't care about this (in this situation) when they work so close is just so funny. It's almost a story planted on purpose a 'went against all odds people told him he was crazy'. Note that I remember other stories about how Gates liked people to stand up to him and not be yes man.

> “In another 20 years, you’re not going to be wondering if you got a return,” says Larry Cohen. “You’re wondering if there’s going to be a planet left for your great-grandchildren.”

I wish they'd stop with that type of over the top hyperbole. Most people not in the top slice of the 1% (meaning not the 1 percent but the top slice of that) are just getting by day to day with daily issues. I don't think many of them are really thinking about children of children that haven't been born yet. A good test to see if you are comfortable well off and lucky might even be to see if you actually think about those thinks along with 'your legacy'.

That's why it says "In another 20 years" and not "today". Because you can bet that it'll be on everybody's minds in 20 years.

But why? Are the effects of climate change within 100 years so bad that we will worry about the survival of humanity? Isn't that just an exaggeration?

The estimates I've seen mostly suggest damages in the range of 0.5-10% of GDP https://www.brookings.edu/research/ten-facts-about-the-econo...

Here's a quote from the IPCC consensus report: "For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers (medium evidence, high agreement). Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change." https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGIIAR5-Chap...

Another IPCC quote: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6% (5–95% percentile range 0.5–8.2%), compared with 0.3% (0.1–0.5%) by 2100 under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5% (0.1–1.0%) in the 2°C scenario." https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGIIAR5-Chap...

I call b*llshit on these claims. Where is the extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims? It isn't there. 20 years ago people were saying it'll be all over by 2010. Kyoto did nothing. Computer models don't tell half the story.

Dunno. Seems like the oceans are dying. Ever more efficient fishing, acidification, and increasing pollution are taking a heavy toll. The ocean based food web might just collapse. Countries that depend on the ocean for food will get less stable and food prices will rise. Farms are increasingly penned in by developments, and when the weather changes enough for the new ideal areas for farms, will likely to be over developed already. Farms placed poorly will have more crop failures, and spend more energy in attempt to mitigate lack of water, healthy soil, lack of sun, extreme weather events, etc.

Bees might well not survive, complicating any farming that depends on them. Rain is becoming more acidic, making it harder on plants.

Seems like many scientists are ringing alarm bells, even if we aren't sure what the world will look like in 20 years, seems like a bad idea to roll the dice and hope for the best.

Can't read; asks to subscribe. We should ban these links ideally.

There is a browser extension called "Bypass Paywalls" for Firefox. That being said, I agree.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7642187

Chrome too! https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Here's another article about the book. I haven't compared with the WSJ to be sure but I'd expect it covers the same major points: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/14/how-to-avoid-a...

BTW, those with Apple News+ subscriptions can often read WSJ articles by browsing to the article in Safari on iPhone or iPad, hitting the paywall, and then hitting the share icon, and then picking "News" as the sharing target. That tries to open the article in News+, which succeeds for many paywalled WSJ articles. This does not work in the desktop News+ app.

If you want to know more about Bill Gates and what he's been up you might like this Netflix 3 part-er: "Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates"

https://www.netflix.com/title/80184771

I think what he's trying to do with water sanitation and Terra-power (modern safe nuclear power) is pretty cool.

https://archive.is/pempV

Does it start with not actively promoting the use of private jet ? and not using private jet himself ?

Yep, he wrote it all in his book he wrote from his yacht. /s

He said recently on Trevor Noah that he pays $7 million per year for sustainable jet fuel. Edit: Also he claims his family's travel will be fully offset this year

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/14/bill-gates-on-his-carbon-foo...

Ive gotten used to hitting paywalls on these kinds of articles. Not sure what HN would be without them but its nice to be made aware of these things and see a diverse range of platforms / sources being linked. That said Im aways aware that if a topic seems interesting enough I can make a mental note to dive into some free resources on it when Im back at my desktop pretending to work rather than on my phone in the bathroom pretending to be in the bathroom. All that said I cant tell if Gates is just another psuedo-celebrity subjugating my mind chakra with never ending global PR stunts or the smartest most selfless of the private-jet hoarding jabillionaires. I guess time will tell, if were all dead in 30 years hes a jerk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com