We Need Clean-Energy Innovation, and Lots of It
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
How can he stay out of politics, in that case?
The Republican Party aggressively opposes any climate change policy, from research to reduction to mitigation. They aggressively support the fossil fuel industry. The Koch brothers, whose combined wealth is on Gates' scale, spend billions to advocate similar positions. The Fox media network, from Fox News to the Wall Street Journal, push propaganda supporting these positions. (These statements are not partisan simply because one party looks bad. Much of it is factual -- clearly that's the GOP's position -- and if you accept the science of climate change, I think their claims clearly fall within the realm of propaganda.)
There is no media outlet that pushes back or calls any of the above on their propaganda, except those too small to matter, and the Democrats are passive.
The best investments Gates could make for climate change might be a political organization and/or a media network. I can guess why he doesn't, but I'd be interested to know. I wonder if he hoped, like many geeks, that he could avoid it and just do good things.
This puzzles me too, to a degree. Most educated people can recognize the propaganda on their editorial page, and most know, based on Fox News Channel, that the owners have very low journalistic standards and are willing to publish deceit. WSJ reporters even appear as Fox correspondents now (at least, when I watched briefly a few months ago). Why would smart people still trust the WSJ?
To address one counter-argument, the NY Times is not the same; it's editorial page has much higher standards. I don't agree with everything, but rarely to I read blatent lies and propaganda.
I suspect it's simple branding. The "Wall Street Journal" brand carries integrity, and people don't think skeptically about it.
There are some realities of actually owning/running a business that are hard to understand if you have not done it before. Realities like how cumbersome and obnoxious most government attempts at regulation are, including and especially taxation. I have yet to meet a person, including prominent SV billionaires, who wouldn't give 100% of their money to the gov't if they thought it was spent well and transparently. The reality is that it is not, and these people feel rightly that they are better allocators of capital than the government, and so oppose taxation. In the Hard Thing About Hard things, Horowitz writes that most management books are written by people who have never even managed a hot dog stand. I think that a publication that is so overwhelming supported and favored by business owners even despite it's obnoxiousness at times must have some underlying value. It's probably best not to dismiss it as 'simple branding' just because you can't wrap your head around that position.
Having done it I don't agree. It's a widely used cover story, 'you can't understand X because you haven't done it', a way to avoid accountability or having to make a reasoned argument. We all have directly experienced only a tiny fraction of the world, yet we use our cognitive abilities to understand much more.
I also disagree with your view on taxes and regulation. Our taxes should be higher, certainly more fair (the wealthy sacrifice much less than poorer Americans), and some industries need much stronger regulation, including Wall Street and the medical industries. Finally, government, being a human institution, is flawed; but I have yet to see a business (over a certain size) that doesn't waste money, experience corruption and incompetence, etc. It's a weak argument to simply dismiss serious issues with the unsupported meme that government is somehow relatively incompetent.
Of course many agree with you. Some have good arguments, some are merely self-interested (who wants to pay more or have to follow rules?), many merely parrot what the read in the WSJ. You can identify the latter by the consistent use of the same talking points.
Finally, the condescension is unnecessary. If you have a good argument, people will be pursuaded. The condescension brands everything else you say as part of the same rant, not to be taken seriously.
Agreed, NY Times is one of the very few legitimately great news organizations left in the US.
What shocks me is that people don't see propaganda in ANY newspaper.
I have studied propaganda and psychology, because it interest me and frankly, because it is very useful for making money with your company. I would recommend watching "The century of the self" for a great overview of the subject before going deeper on what interest you.
Now I find propaganda everywhere. Have you heard the phrase "the land of the free" or "opportunities". It is propaganda. People that have never traveled around the world will hear the phrase and believe it without doubt.
In fact, those phrases are used for the contrary. Every time "land of the free" is used it is for removing yet another freedom, leaving the people with the empty phrase that was true 100 years ago, while removing the freedoms that sustain it one by one.
For example, Obama will talk loud about freedoms, while making it smaller the amount of money you could extract of your own bank account without reporting. He will let police confiscate your wealth if he thinks so(to buy army grade weapons), it will spy on all your communications, harass you on airports, and bail too big to fail institutions with your money.
It's telling that in Australia the Republican equivalent is the rather Orwellian named 'Liberal Party of Australia'.
I think it's clear why they are called political parties.
Political parties like "Branding" words with capital letters to words so the original definition becomes blurred, if not directly contradictory to the original meaning.
EDIT: Remove "but" from first sentence. I'm agreeing with @TheSpiceIsLife :-)
Do we need to make solar cheaper or more efficient, for example? More battery research?
Solar is already cheap and efficient enough to be rolled out on a much wider scale than it currently is. It's a bit odd to be standing around and calling for more research when we are not bothering to fully exploit all the research that's already been done for reasons that are mostly political.
As for the consumer being happy to pay, that's why the favourite wonk answer (implemented succesfully in a few countries) is a carbon tax to let the power of the free market do it's magic by accurately pricing in the externalities of carbon (and other greenhouse gasses).
Right now you can find various studies claiming that shutting down coal power stations would save countries billions in health costs, but that's not the kind of "scandal" that makes it into the mainstream media, though every theoretical bird killed by a wind turbine is, strangely.
So, if solar is cheap and efficient we're going to need to do a little better at selling it. I don't see real numbers, just the unsubstantiated claim. Plus, I see the claim of a breakthrough on solar cell efficiency every couple of months on HN, which leads me to believe we're still waiting for one.
http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/images/efficiency_chart.jpg
The recent MIT future of solar report is a good HN-level summary of where solar is now:
https://mitei.mit.edu/futureofsolar
It's not a sales pitch, but the people who are investing billions in solar these days aren't hippies, it's big business now, and they're convinced so the brainwashed masses will eventually twig they've been lied to.
Also, it's physically addictive.
Fossil fuels are much the same. There's an unbelievably vast propaganda and lobbying machine promoting the use of fossil fuels, even though - like smoking - they're killing our civilisation.
This is why good government matters. It can provide a policy balance to destructive commercial self-interest.
And solar is being rolled out, with very good economic results. It's even being rolled out successfully in the UK, which is not the sunniest place on the planet.
In parts of the US it should literally be a no-brainer. But it's not, because most of the rich people who need fossil fuels to stay rich would rather kill it.
Responses: - Very harmful: 80% - Somewhat harmful: 16% - Not too harmful: 3% . Not harmful at all: 1%
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...
Where is the significant percentage not convinced that it's unhealthy?
The people saving the money are the residents of the property, and there is not enough confidence that the presence of solar panels increases the sale price of a property by the amount invested.
So, if you are either a landlord or a first-time-buyer looking to trade up in a few years time, you won't invest in a domestic solar installation. Your money will give you a better ROI somewhere else over that period (e.g. buying your next property).
Therefore, a political solution is probably desired. Something to reduce that 10-year period; something to encourage landlords to install solar; something to encourage first-time-buyers in particular to install.
There is zero reason to subsidize home owners installing wind or solar energy however you could get better results by subsidizing their purchase of power generated that way.
It not only dampens peak demand (the most expensive to serve) it can also delay the need for grid improvements required to deliver the peak demand. Progressive utilities consider it a win-win.
I'm surprised landlords haven't jumped at the chance to add solar, they seem like exactly the kind of people who would invest up front for a guaranteed payback. I guess there must be some reason why it's not a standard thing, the difficulty of billing the renter for their electric use separately maybe?
What makes you think he's staying out of politics?
Voters don't like the idea of people buying politicians. If the public sees that a politician has been bought, they are less likely to vote for them. So if you're investing in politicians, you don't want to make that information public--that's the quickest way to decrease the value of your investment. Publicly staying out of politics is a smart political move for a person whose primary influence on politics is monetary.
The Koch brothers are a good example of this--the only reason we know that they have been funding Republican and Tea Party campaigns is because of good investigative journalism. They don't go out and announce it. In fact, in interviews they have pretended not to have even heard of the organizations they fund.
It would surprise me greatly if Gates doesn't similarly already have his hands in politics, but the thing Gates has that the Koch brothers don't is soft power[1]. I doubt any major news source will try to write an exposé on Gates' funding of X lobbying organization or Y "grassroots" movement, because most journalists (and people) agree with Gates' goals. Even Fox News would be putting their own goals at risk if they wrote such an exposé, because there's a risk that it would actually bring attention (and funding) to organizations that oppose Fox News' goals.
The only pattern I can find to explain it is that they might see the issue as part of the 'culture war' with liberalism, and so they reject it outright as part of their effort to reject liberalism. (But that's a huge generalization about the thoughts of tens of millions of people.)
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers...
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach," wrote Google's Ross Koningstein and David Fork in a piece published yesterday in IEEE's Spectrum"
That's not how PPAs and generation works. Nuclear power is already barely viable in the Illinois market (dominated by Exelon) because wind sells its power so much cheaper.
There's a new generation facility coming online near Vegas that's going to be selling solar at around 4 cents/kwh, the lowest price in the nation.
Cheap renewables don't get consumed above existing fossil generation; cheap renewables push out existing fossil fuel generation. For an example, see Germany and how their utilities can barely keep some generation running because they don't get enough revenue with solar dominating during daylight hours.
Solution: Continue to heavily subsidize solar, wind, utility-scale battery storage. Continue to shut down coal plants. Purchase peaking combined cycle natural gas generators, put them into non-profits (because they won't be profitable) to meet the generation gap until enough utility-scale battery storage can allow renewables to be firmly dispatchable resources (they can be relied on to provide power at a constant rate, vs intermittent resources). Profit (or rather, help stop climate change).
That means when natural gas prices decrease, so do profits for nuclear, coal, and hydro plants.
Google "location based marginal pricing" to learn more.
The changes are not occurring purely because the renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper, but also because of (whisper it) benign regulation of the grid and air quality etc., which prioritises renewable and disincentives dirty coal power.
I approve of your solution (though with a carbon tax I'm not sure that wind and solar need subsidies any more), though I'm not sure why the peaker gas plants need to go non-profit. They already get paid lots of money for short periods operating on an intermittent basis, so it's only a minor modification of their current business model. And if you have a specific dollar value on their use (including a portion for carbon production) then you have a ready made business model for utility-scale storage technologies to replace and a finincial incentive for the tech to be developed.
The big problem there is that they'll sell you that energy when they have it, not when you need it. Production is really becoming cheap with renewables; storage is the real problem (and a very big one).
Hydro could help, but in places with almost no water (California/Nevada), it can't be relied on.
Here are some ideas:
1. adjust the rules regulating the market (e.g. price greenhouse gas emissions correctly)
2. introduce a tax on advertising to discourage unnecessary consumption
3. ensure the price of products and services includes full life cycle costs of disposal and pollution
4. replace the whole "economic growth" philosophy with something else that is consistent and reconcilable with planetary ecological limits
5. encourage non-coercive measures to discourage population growth (e.g. access to contraception, family planning, give women increased options for education and employment), particularly in the more affluent countries which have very high per-capita environmental footprints
6. discourage population growth as above, and provide increased economic opportunities, for people living in less affluent countries, since people are able to move between countries to seek better opportunities for themselves. Or instead invest in the rather less ethical "Fortress $(countryname)" approach to keep out the people unfortunate enough to be born in the wrong part of the globe.
Tangentially, you may be interested in Donella Meadows' "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" [1].
[1] -- http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-place...
2. See 1 above
3. Seems like a sound idea, probably very difficult to determine the correct price of pollution per above.
4. What are the planetary ecological limits? "Replace the whole [whatever] philosophy" is a good example of expecting everyone to agree, which is probably impossible.
5. The more affluent countries tend to have lower birth rates already (a few bordering on being below replacement rate, Japan for example IIRC) probably because they have better access to things like education and contraception etc. So it seems lower birthrates tend to correlate with higher per capita environmental footprints, probably because the same things that cause lower birthrates also cause higher standards of living. Maybe the solution is to simply increase the birthrate, thereby decreasing per capita consumption. Maybe that's the wrong metric to focus on. What a mess.
6. As above.
Sometimes I think it would be better if solutions were as simple as enumerating a list. But what's the fun in that. Heaven forbid problems could be solved so simply, then what would we do.
One thing we can be certain of, probably, is that whatever changes we implement will have unintended consequences. So maybe the solution is to do nothing in an effort to avoid the unintended consequences, thereby leaving us to deal with the obvious consequences of business as usual, whatever they might be. What I'm implying is: maybe the GOP have got it right. Wouldn't that be ironic.
This comment was heavily inspired by P.J. O'rourke, I highly recommend his books. Politics hey, what a circus.
NB: I don't necessarily agree with anything I write, so don't hold me to it.
Sadly Capitalism and the ideology that Americans and now it seems the entire world has bought into won't allow that.
I agree with Jimmy Carter: "The U.S. Is an "Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery"[1]
See also Yes, We’re Corrupt”: A List of Politicians Admitting That Money Controls Politics[2]
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[1] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/30/jimmy-carter-u...
[2] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/30/politicians-ad...
Oh the whole world hasn't bough it. North Korea is still free from it. Cuba seems to have regretted it though
And please also refrain from these other logical fallacies:
- Domination proves superiority
- Being better than bad solutions proves it is a good or even best solution.
- creationism
- slavery
- patriarchy, sexism
- kings as gods
- gods as gods
All this makes me pessimistic that mankind can fix the problem in my lifetime, and I will have to tell my daughter: i'm deeply sorry. We screwed up.
A breakthrough in innovation seems to be our only chance.
The notion was that since the modern aesthetic is glass skin for large buildings, then why not let that new skyscraper in London, NYC, Houston, etc generate some of its own power from the acres (yes, acres) of glass covering its exterior?
The solar cells would be less efficient for a variety of reasons, and most windows wouldn't face direct sunlight all day, but these inefficiencies would be countered by volume: the entire building would be covered in solar cells.
Fantastic idea! And ... it fizzled. The XsunX website still exists, but you have to find really old press-release PDFs buried within to find any mention of Power Glass.
Use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, though, and you'll see their website years ago focused almost entirely on Power Glass and its promise.
I really wish this idea could take off ...
Right now, there's an oil glut and a natural gas glut. The US may be self-sufficient in energy in about four years without even trying. The fear that fossil fuels will run out in the near term is gone. This has taken the pressure off the need for alternative energy.
Industrial farming at scale is much newer than that. This is like claiming that GHG is from "many thousands of years ago" because people made wood fires back then.
> It has changed the entire planet, but the difference with our more recent GHG experiment is one of scale.
Yes, and if you asked me for a guess I'd say the scale of the farming "experiment" is much greater. I'm interested to hear reasons you believe the opposite is true, not just an assertion.
> We massively underestimate the effect that all these GHG will have.
We do? Are you saying that you understand the true future effect of one change to a very complex non-linear system?
> On top of this we are only about 10% of the way into the GHG experiment
Similar to the last point, but this should be followed by "according to [Researchers'] model" and not left as a plain assertion.
> the world will not be a pretty place once we get to 1200 ppm CO2.
Please name the model or whatever logical progression you are using to arrive at this idea, too.
Actually most agricultural land clearing did happen many hundred to thousands of years ago. People have proposed that all the carbon released by this activity did have an impact on the planet and this prevented us from re-entering another ice age. I am not too sure how much evidence supports this hypothesis as the amount of carbon released was relatively low until we started burning fossil fuels in the last century.
Yes, and if you asked me for a guess I'd say the scale of the farming "experiment" is much greater. I'm interested to hear reasons you believe the opposite is true, not just an assertion.
The effect of farming has probably had more impact to date on the planet, but it is not as large as what the GHG experiment will have on the planet if we do nothing.
We do? Are you saying that you understand the true future effect of one change to a very complex non-linear system?
Actually the effect of adding GHG is very easy to predict - it increases the amount of energy trapped in a concentration dependent effect. What is hard to model is what the precise effect will be and when it will happen. A nice analogy to use is what will happen if you drive your car at 100 mph into a brick wall without wearing a seat belt or having an airbag. You can’t predict in advance what will happen to you, but none of the likely outcomes will be good.
Similar to the last point, but this should be followed by "according to [Researchers'] model" and not left as a plain assertion.
Under the "do-nothing” model (effectively our current model) we just keep burning all the fossil fuels until they are all gone. We do have a pretty good idea of how much fossil fuels we can extract and so it is easy to calculate how much CO2 will be released if we burn them all. Unfortunately all the changes to the model over the last few years is much of the fossil fuels we thought were uneconomic to extract (and so were not counted as being releasable) have proven extractable (i.e. fracking and shale oil).
Please name the model or whatever logical progression you are using to arrive at this idea, too
My model is our current “do-nothing” model where all the fossil fuels that can be burnt will be burnt. The end outcome of this is a CO2 concentration north of 1200ppm. While we can’t predict exactly what will happen if we reach this level we do have a pretty good idea from the past that it won’t be nice.
Actually one of the big worries is that some of the large carbon sinks like the arctic tundra will start warming up enough to result in a non-linear runaway release of GHG. We don’t know if this will happen, but I am none to keen to find out.
Also, I used to live in Adelaide where Barry Brook held the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change. He then moved to Tasmania about a year after I did, thereby fixing our electricity related emissions because Tasmania's electricity is almost entirely hydroelectric.
Can't find the article now, was titled something like "Silicon Valley taking on the Fossil Fuel Industry".
I am however utterly ignorant of the difficulty of doing this. I doubt this research would be funded by Monsanto or other companies which sell artificial fertilizer.
It is very difficult since the symbiotic relationship needed is difficult to recreate - it is not just a matter of introducing a few new genes.
Even doing this would not avoid the need for the Haber-Bosch process. The symbiotic bacteria just can’t produce the amount of organic nitrogen that we need to get into modern crops to have them produce at the level we need to feed everyone. Even crops like legumes which have the symbiotic bacteria are supplied with artificial nitrogen when grown under modern agricultural conditions.
> we need to be able to power all sectors of the economy with sources that do not emit any carbon dioxide.
Yes. That said, I think a lot of the optimistic future trajectories for world climate models rely on the assumption of CCS technology permitting negative net carbon emissions later in the century. On the positive side: hypothetically if the technology were to exist we could get away with some emissions; negative side: this technology doesn't actually exist.
> But when it comes to preventing the worst effects of climate change, the investments I make will matter much less than the choices that governments make.
I completely agree. A global price on carbon would help here. It's going to be difficult for clean-energy alternatives to compete with existing energy sources such as coal, that (i) are priced in a way that ignores the negative externalities of greenhouse gas emissions, and (ii) are heavily subsidised. The global economy needs to be appropriately regulated in order to coerce it into doing more useful activities.
> Scientists generally agree that preventing the worst effects of climate change requires limiting the temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, and that doing so requires the biggest emitters to cut emissions 80 percent by 2050 and all countries to essentially eliminate them by the end of the century.
Indeed!
> These are solvable problems.
Here I disagree. We are not going to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. We missed that window by a few decades.
It would still be a VERY good idea to limit temperature rise to +3 degrees Celsius, or something, instead of ending up with a world where it is +4 degrees C and still rising.
I recently finished reading the book "Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming" by McKenzie Funk. I am actually more optimistic about the future now: we still have geoengineering options available, such as pumping sulphur into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight heating the world by a fraction of a percent.
It's worth pointing out, however, that:
* geoengineering gives us a means to partially/completely address one of the symptoms (temperature rise) of the problem, and continue to avoid addressing the causes. other symptoms: nitrogen cycle disruption, species mass extinction, extinction of non-renewable resources, extinction of renewable resources (global fish stocks), ...
* geoengineering options will also cause some climate change, and these changes will not be uniformly or fairly distributed over the world. All things being equal, powerful countries will run geoengineering projects, and as far as it can be predicted and controlled, the climate will be adjusted to preferentially favour the countries running these projects.
* the long-term, large-scale secondary consequences of things we do that seem like a good idea are not always anticipated!
* geoengineering options are akin to patching a highly complex system by adding more complexity to patch a symptom. this requires upkeep and potentially makes the entire thing more fragile.
This approach would have the nice side-effect of removing the economic motivation for climate changing denial and all the anti-science propaganda that results.
1. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186023-russia-bets-its-en...
2. http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil
3. http://www.livescience.com/51597-maunder-minimum-mini-ice-ag...
>"The expected decrease in global temperature would be 0.1 degrees Celsius at most, compared to about 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times by the year 2030"
A grand solar minimum would have little to no effect on our warming climate.[1][2] The work this paper is reporting on did not even make any claims about climatic changes, and the impact of a grand solar minimum has been extensively explored in the literature with the conclusion being that it will be a fraction of the anthropogenic warming trend. It's not entirely your fault, that's some pretty bad pop journalism from livescience.
1. http://www.skepticalscience.com/grand-solar-minimum-barely-d...
2. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-...
Relatedly, Elon Musk claims that if you cover the area used up by a Nuclear plant with solar panels than you can get equal power production. The actual reactor is small, but the security etc. means that there's a large boundary zone. Plus of course no-one wants to live near one.
Detailed stats are here: http://statline.cbs.nl/Statweb/publication/?DM=SLNL&PA=70802...