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    The Missing Pieces to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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    After stepping down as Microsoft CEO in 2000, Bill Gates gradually shifted his focus to the operations of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which set out to improve global health and development, as well as education in the US. Partially through his role with the foundation, Gates came to learn more about the causes and effects of climate change, which was contributing to and exacerbating many of the problems he and his wife were looking to remedy.

    Outside of the foundation, he has become more vocal about climate change and has founded and funded a number of ventures that address innovation challenges connected to climate change. His recently published book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” continues this path. It summarizes what the last decades have taught him about the drivers of climate change and plots a path of necessary actions and innovations.

    © Ash.B / Shutterstock

    Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    The book spends only a few initial pages making the argument for the anthropogenic nature of climate change, as it is clearly intended for readers who accept the scientific consensus for it. Early on, Gates asserts that the mere reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is not sufficient to avoid a climate disaster. The only real goal, according to Gates, must be achieving net-zero emissions, taking as much GHG out of the atmosphere as we put in, year by year. 

    However, significant political, economic and infrastructural hurdles have to still be overcome to electrify personal transport. Decisions to exit or curtail carbon-free nuclear power production seem to largely be following public opinion rather than science. These examples demonstrate that scaling viable, existing carbon-neutral solutions is already hard. Finding and utilizing affordable green alternatives to problems where we currently have none is even harder.

    Gates points to the fact that without finding scalable carbon-neutral ways of producing steel, cement or meat, we will not be able to arrive at a net-zero economy in the 21st century. Even if humanity was able to produce all of its energy in carbon-neutral ways and cut carbon emissions from transport, agriculture and deforestation, as well as from heating and air conditioning by half, we would still be left with more than half of the GHG emissions we currently produce. This point is further exacerbated once we consider the growing global population and rising wealth and consumption in populous countries like China, India or Nigeria.

    © Roschetzky Photography / Shutterstock

    What’s More Important Than Innovation?

    Innovation, for Gates, does not stop with technology. It is of little help if a revolutionary technological solution is developed, but there is no way or incentive for an individual person, company or city to use it. Innovation, to use Gates’ words, “is also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new innovations come to life and reach a global scale.” Ideas like carbon taxation and regulation, which are often cited as crucial incentives for climate innovation, may trouble some free market enthusiasts, but, as Gates argues, it is important to realize that getting to net-zero is also a “huge economic opportunity: The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.”

    Gates heavily utilizes the concept of a “Green Premium,” which he understands as the extra cost of a carbon-neutral alternative compared to today’s carbon-producing equivalent. For example, today, the Green Premium of an advanced biofuel is 106%, making biofuel 206% as expensive as gasoline. He stresses that innovation cannot only aim to develop carbon-neutral alternatives. It must also make them competitive and accessible, lowering green premiums as far as possible and driving infrastructural and political incentives.

    It should not come as a surprise that Gates approaches the challenge of getting to net-zero as a capitalist and a technology optimist. He firmly believes that a dollar in the Global North is better spent on carbon innovation than on disincentivizing the utilization of carbon-intensive products and services — a doctrine that his own investments certainly follow. However, spending public climate funds on research and development in cement production or generation IV nuclear reactors, rather than on bike paths in Berlin, Paris or New York, will be a difficult sell. 

    : © PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek / Shutterstock

    A Clear Roadmap

    Bill Gates has received criticism of varying degrees of legitimacy for many of the stances he has taken, going back to the United States v. Microsoft antitrust litigation and beyond. With “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” however, he has achieved what many of our political leaders have not: clearly defining and communicating a holistic and evidence-based roadmap that leads us to a net-zero carbon future and mitigates the most horrific scenarios of runaway, anthropogenic climate change.

    “Show me a problem, and I’ll look for a technology to fix it,” Gates proclaims. Being a believer not only in his own, but also humanity’s ability to innovate its way out of the gloomiest odds, he remains optimistic, whilst conceding the momentous nature of the challenge we face: “We have to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar.”

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      As Climate Change Worsens, How Far Will We Tip?

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      Although there are still those who deny it, the countdown for the planet under the threat of global warming began some time ago. If we were to seek an official starting point, it would probably be in the late 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial age. We now receive confirmation of melting at the poles and warming in the depths of the ocean on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

      The constantly accumulating evidence has overwhelmingly convinced the scientific community not only that the trend is real, but that the consequences will be particularly dramatic for human societies. Humans happen to be the only living species on Earth obsessed by the idea of controlling their environmental habitat for the sake of their own comfort and profit. The rest of the biosphere tries simply to get by with the hand it is dealt.

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      But now the dual goals of comfort and profit appear to be dangerously at odds. Responding to the demand for comfort of those who can afford it provokes increasing levels of discomfort for those societies and individuals that cannot. That simple fact has become one of the contributing factors to the increasingly evident revolt against growing income and wealth inequality.

      A report by the insurance company Swiss Re cited by The Guardian informs us that we are quickly approaching a point of no return. “One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats,” The Guardian reports. If 20% of the nations of the world succumb, it won’t be long before 30%, 40%, 50% and more are affected as well. It appears that Australia, Israel and South Africa are particularly exposed. The report also cites India, Spain and Belgium.

      In other words, this time it won’t be only the forgotten and neglected developing nations (Donald Trump’s “shithole countries”) that are the first to pay the cost. If people used to luxury and accustomed to thinking of themselves as sheltered from disaster are the ones who may suffer first, alarm bells will quickly start ringing.

      The Guardian cites some worrying figures: “More than half of global GDP — $42tn (£32tn) — depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Tipping point:

      For capitalists, an abstract target to both aim for and avoid, since on the positive side it represents the maximum reward expected from any endeavor designed to exploit and eventually exhaust a market or a body of resources, while, on the negative side, it threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The balancing act consists of finding the point of equilibrium between maximum exploitation and braking before reaching the tipping point.

      Contextual Note

      In the year 2000, which marks the beginning of the age of internet marketing and social media, tipping points became something to aim for rather than avoid. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” was released in that year. It reads like a recipe book encouraging the kind of viral development successful marketers manage to achieve for a new product or a new practice. 

      Gladwell praised and encouraged business models aimed at creating “social epidemics.” Though it may seem absurd and even macabre today, as the world battles an incomprehensible and unpredictable pandemic, Gladwell’s book offers advice on how to go viral. He even formulates laws and rules that describe the process: the “Law of the Few,” the “Stickiness Factor” and the “Power of Context.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic may have put a serious dent in the prestige our culture allotted to tipping points two decades ago. In the era of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good,” epidemic change represented seemed like a complementary and rather more respectable ideal. 

      The year 2000 marked the summit of the dot.com craze that quickly turned into the dot.com crash. Venture capitalists were hurting, but that was only temporary. Social media hadn’t yet taken off, but Gladwell clearly sensed its imminent arrival and understood its deeper logic. Global warming, with its threat of disastrous tipping points, had become an issue but it was already being dismissed by climate change deniers, who preferred to focus on a rapidly rising stock market.

      The rise and more recent fall of the image of tipping points raises a fascinating question about contemporary culture. If we admit that, in the year 2000, the idea of the tipping point promoted by Gladwell had mainly positive connotations and that, today, the prospect of a tipping point sets off alarm bells evoking the fear of imminent disaster, can we identify the tipping point that pushed us from the positive appreciation to the negative one? 

      There seem to be two candidates for the tipping point about tipping points: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. If the dot.com crash of 2000 felt more like a thrilling roller-coaster ride than a traumatizing event, the 2008 crisis was an earthquake that leveled some institutions and seriously attacked the credibility of some of the previous decade’s ideals.

      The Gladwell version of a tipping point was associated with the inebriation that accompanies sudden commercial success and the rapid achievement of a monopoly position. That had become the goal of every economic actor’s ambition for the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. The current perception of a tipping point, as cited in The Guardian’s article, is one of a risk to be anticipated and avoided. The sense of having a mission of conquest eventually gave way to a simple hope for stability and survival.

      Historical Note

      A tipping point indicates a critical threshold beyond which the return to a previous state of equilibrium becomes impossible. Before Europe’s scientific and Industrial Revolution, people regarded tipping points as fatalities, the result of uncontrollable forces or trends. Since the industrial age, developed countries have evolved a culture of control that supposes human societies will have the ingenuity and the technology capable of fending off catastrophes and avoiding catastrophic tipping points.

      But that belief has recently been shaken by various uncontrollable events. And instead of ensuring mastery, the post-industrial culture of control has developed a perverse tendency to magnify its fear of tipping points. That is what’s behind the “science” of risk management and its method of contingency planning. Intended to increase our security, in the wrong hands it can become an irrational obsession. Instead of discovering solutions, it magnifies problems.

      In 2004, The Guardian broke a story about a secret Pentagon report warning “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The Pentagon’s pessimism — or would it be more accurate to call it paranoiac optimism? — seems laughable today. It tells us more about the psychological climate inside America’s war machine and the budgeting rituals of the military-industrial complex than it does about the reality of the threats the world is facing.

      Today’s more realistic report by Swiss Re reveals that the trends the Pentagon identified are real and increasingly threatening, even if they don’t follow the logic of a Hollywood catastrophe movie that seemed to inspire the authors of the 2004 report. The threat is real, but the timeline was off by several decades. 

      In 2004, the Pentagon recommended to a refractory Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” What better way to secure funding from Congress than to amplify their dread of unmanageable catastrophe? Alas, the Pentagon’s fearmongering had no effect on the Bush administration’s policy, though it probably did enable them to slightly pad their budget.

      Swiss Re announced that its objective is “to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when setting premiums for businesses.” This is bound to be more realistic than the Pentagon’s speculation, but the motive similarly focuses on getting other people to pay for what they are told to fear. That principle seems to be baked into the mentality of control cultures. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated, understanding tipping points is all about getting richer.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More