Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Clearly, that would lead to mass hysteria and societal collapse.
/s
A ton is 2000 pounds. A gallon of gasoline emits 20lbs of co2 when burnt (most of the weight is in the o2, so the emissions are heavier than the gasoline).
Divide the per ton prices by 100 to convert to per gallon of gas, and you get $0.50-$2.00.
The existence of the tax would ensure they all had enough revenue to scale; fund them all initially, then let economics pick the winner.
Free sustainable transport would stop the least privileged from having to fork over a third of their paycheck to auto and fossil fuel companies while freeing up billions spent on roads.
Making landlords accountable for energy wasting housing design would reduce energy bills.
Not invading countries for their gas and mineral reserves is pretty good for the people that live there.
A direct carbon tarriff distributed evenly by population would lift living standards for the underprivileged and give them the resources to make a choice for lower emissions options.
Right to repair, accountability for forced obsolescence or design faults and consumer rights decrease waste and benefit the poor immensely.
Well I guess one out of three isn’t bad.
Bill gates is right, trying to impoverish people in the developed world would both result in blowback and be a disaster if implemented. I think there is an 80/20 rule with consumption in developed countries. 20% consume 80% of the resources. Getting the 20% to reduce consumption is a won't fix politically. Yet degrowth people think somehow the 80% can reduce their consumption and not go under. Look at the amount of reduction in consumption that triggers a recession, it's 10X less than the shock degrowth people are demanding.
The complicating factor is the upper classes are completely resistant to any sort collective action that benefits lower class people. And they are hellbent to make sure no one ever gets to see a successful example.
I truly believe our only hope is to innovate our way out of this.
can't do it in a democracy
I decide if I work too much. You don't get to decide if I work too much.
>> have too little social engagement
I get to decide my level of social engagement. You don't get to decide my level of social engagement.
>> spend lots of money and resources on things that don't really improve our lives
I get to decide how to spend my money. You don't get to decide how to spend my money.
Anyone claiming that "we are X and Y" is just an authoritarian in disguise, trying to dictate how everyone else should live.
At some point they should really ask themselves whether "saving the planet" is actually worth it if everyone is locked up in a cage for the sake of controlling consumation. Might as well just kill us all.
The word personal responsibility is just an empty post rationalization to say "Haha I won you didn, suck it up"
You're equating the inherent renunciations of living in society (such as respecting others' right to live and personal property) with arbitrary restrictions such as "consume less". Consuming more doesn't lead to direct harm to anyone - it is your hypothesis that everyone consuming more leads to a global issue.
If the problem is human consumption, which grows linearly with the amount of people on this planet, perhaps the problem is that there are too many people. Why does nobody suggest population control in some form? Why is the answer always "let's make everyone's lives miserable so the population can keep growing"? And what happens when population grows so much that even the "lesser" consumption presents a problem? What happens when we reach the lower limit of human consumption requirement, and the number of people is so high that the total consumption still presents a problem?
Or to go even deeper - why even focus on restricting consumption in the first place? Is there any data to suggest that human consumption is actually a problem, compared to the massive amount of energy spent for industrial and military purposes? Without such data, the argument seems like a red herring, shifting the blame to people, while keeping the real culprits in the shadow.
Everything's relative. As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies compared to others. By numerous metrics, we do work too much.
Similarly, the US is the poster child of capitism and we do buy tons of things relative to other nations.
Nope. If a person in North Korea said they were brainwashed they would be executed at dawn. Sounds like you've been brainwashed. That's OK, they don't kill you for it here.
>> As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies
It most certainly does not, if you don't want to work, don't work. Just don't make it my fucking problem that you don't work and we'll get along just fine.
You said that others can't tell you that you work too hard. You decide if you work too hard. If you lived in North Korea and I told you that you're brainwashed, you would probably tell me that you decide if you're brainwashed. You would certainly also tell me that you are not brainwashed. No one in North Korea would say they're brainwashed. My point is that actual data is more useful to compare work cultures between countries than a citizen's perception.
Next, I mentioned the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies. Policies here refers to official government laws/regulations that would enforce a right to take time off. The US doesn't have a minimum vacation policy and is the only industrialized nation to not have one. What you mentioned about not going to work is not a government policy. It's just a personal decision.
Don't do that.
You don't get to decide how much work/social engagement/widget purchasing makes you content any more than you can "decide" how many drinks it takes for you to get drunk.
All I'm saying is that many people could both reduce their consumption and improve their quality of lives by optimizing for factors unrelated to material consumption.
Decreasing consumption in a more simplified way is just decreasing energy use. For 90% of people on earth this would be worse than climate change. It’s never going to happen.
He apparently has 6 total houses.
See: https://www.velvetropes.com/backstage/bill-gates-house
Anyways, Gates is always preaching about “policy” (The Gates Foundation is about power and getting governments to fund their objectives, ultimately) but never actually sets a good individual example of how to live, like normal citizens.
I mean, it is not coincidental that he is preaching about global warming right after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown, which released an unprecedented amount of methane in to the atmosphere.
The headline says 'no.'
He consumes way way way more than the average citizen.
I don’t even know why people listen to him.
Shouldn’t we be listening to actual climate scientists in the US government? And not some software CEO who has conflicts of interest? Why are we even platforming this dude and giving him any legitimacy?
To simplify, let's assume that Bill Gates has a Boeing 747, which burns about 38 pounds of fuel per mile [1]. Distance between New York (JFK) and London (LHR) is 3,440 mile. For a round trip, double that, so we have about 261k pounds, or 118 ton of fuel. Applying jet fuel to CO2 conversion ratio of 3.16 [2], we get about 374 ton of CO2.
If Bill Gates takes this trip every day for a year, we get about 137,000 tons of CO2. Okay, that's a lot! However,
Mankind emitted about 35 billion ton of CO2 in 2020. That's about 66,000 tons per minute. So Bill Gates would have contributed about two minute's worth of global warming in a year.
That's still an extremely large amount for a single person, but the question we should ask is, did Bill Gates's action (such as advocating nuclear power) result in delaying global warming by two minutes? Not one year, not even a day, but just two minutes?
Alternatively, did he speed up mankind's preparation, again, by two minutes?
If the answer to either question is Yes, then I'd argue that it's worth the CO2 spent on it.
Now let's invert the question. What's the justification for people who say "Fuck global warming!" and hop on a trip to Hawaii? Collectively they sustain many more flights per year, and it's not like most of them are doing anything substantial to mitigate AGW.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
[2] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...
Because the BP execs aren't being hypocrites and telling all the commoners to lower their living standards..
Maybe not directly, but neither is Bill Gates.
For the vast majority of other ultra rich, they should be suffering through awful airports and airlines like everyone else. Partly just so there's a chance their collective frustration of flying actually results in somehow working to improve the broken industry.
When you use "leading by example" as an absolute stick, what happens is that you end up being more lenient to the more corrupt and greedy. These people propose that everybody should just take whatever they can buy with their money, consequences be damned, and they live the exact same life - no hypocrisy at all! (It's just a coincidence that they have so much money and power that they can fuck over the less fortunate, while others can't.)
I have seen it play out many times in my country (Korea), which is hardly unique in that regard. Once in a while a politician would propose, say, an election reform to cut down illegal funding, and others would attack him "Look at the hypocrite! He says he's against illegal funding of elections, but he used more than one tenth of the illegal funding we did!" True story.
Pretty soon we’re going to start seeing authoritarian solutions to climate change. Rich and powerful people aren’t just going to sit around and watch the planet die. I think they’ll do whatever it takes no matter how many people are hurt.
Every year we want bigger and bigger cars, particularly in the West, but it's a global long term trend. If you compare pretty much any 2022 vs 2002 model vehicle, say the Honda Accord, you're going to be shocked by the increase in physical dimensions.
How is that not incredibly hypocritical to want ever larger cars (mostly SUVs and trucks now) and yet point fingers at the companies we work for for their poor ESG funding and goals? We aren't even willing to accept cars that remain the same dimensions. They literally have to be bigger. That's despite average family sizes gradually declining for many decades. Climate change matters.. but not enough to give up the chance for a larger car next time.
Bigger vehicles means more materials (plastics, metals, etc), weight that could have been shaved, worse fuel/battery efficiency, and it wouldn't surprise me if it requires signifantly more asphalt and road repairs over time to accommodate the vehicles.
I could keep going about how obsessed we are with more and more horsepower and with lower 0-60 mph times, all of which are extremely excessive wants in the face of climate change.
We have constantly gotten better and better tech, and yet our consumption of resources only goes up. It seems that resource usage has nothing to do with how efficient or advanced our tech is, but simply the maximum amount of human labor we can allocate to resource extracting.
So climate change can only really be solved by a lower population.
That doesn't seem to be true in terms of C02 output
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+carbon+emissions+per+capi...
A phenomenon known as Jevons paradox.
It sounds like Nazi slogan.
Blaming billionaires and corporations from brand new iPhone on networks made by big-tech sounds ironical indeed.
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/apple-reportedly-wont-b...
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/09/29/google-to-shut-gaming-se...
I know it's naive to think we can build manufacturing plants at the source of raw materials, and near consumers, but there should be a better balance?
The source of raw materials and consumers may be quite far apart (certainly in the modern world). While it can be argued that maybe they shouldn't be, that is likely to require a significant change in consumer (human?) behavior. And then there is the question of how local is "local" - are you advocating for each city/state to be self-sufficient in terms of agriculture and manufacturing or are you considering a whole massive country like the US as "local".
Instead, apply of concept of capital gains being taxed less than income to consumption and carbon footprint. It works for the behavior of the rich. I'm sure Bill would agree. It can work for the rest of us in the context of climate change.
p.s. Funny how Bill (and then wife) built a massively excessive home. I guess he asked himself and that didn't work. So now he speaks from experience?
You need to incentivize more efficient consumption. Whether through technological advances or through policy that “nudges” people to consume more efficiently (e.g. carbon taxes).
But the challenges remains. Severs governments were cutting taxes and handing out cash when gas prices jumped. That’s the exact opposite of what you want to do.
I'm not saying he's wrong; it's hard to get people to reflect on, and change, their lifestyles.
But it sends a harmful message; it's like saying it's pointless to teach people to swim safely, because staffing better lifeguards would be more likely than changing peoples' behaviour. Then people count on other people to bail them out from their poor decisions and end up drowning (an actually possible scenario with rising sea levels)