2021 – March

2021 – Feb

1. Bill Gates on How to Avoid Climate Disaster

Bill Gates helped usher in the digital revolution at Microsoft, and has spent the decades since exploring – and investing in – innovative solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems – global poverty, disease, and the coronavirus pandemic, which he’s spent nearly $2 billion on. Lately he published a book on How to Avoid Climate Disaster. Listen to his interview with Anderson Cooper on CBS 60 Minutes discussing How to Avoid the Climate Disaster: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-climate-change-disaster-60-minutes-2021-02-14/

His key messages on Nuclear Energy re Climate  Change Mitigation:

• • Of all his green investments, Gates has spent the most time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear energy — arguing it’s key to a zero carbon future.
    • He says he’s a big believer in wind and solar and thinks it can one day provide up to 80% of the country’s electricity, but Gates insists unless we discover an effective way to store and ship wind and solar energy, nuclear power will likely have to do the rest. Energy from nuclear plants can be stored so it’s available when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing…

• • Bill Gates: Nuclear power can be done in a way that none of those failures of the past would recur, because just the physics of how it’s built.
    • I admit, convincing people of that will be almost as hard as actually building it. But since it may be necessary to avoid climate change, we shouldn’t give up.

• • Anderson Cooper: You’ve been criticized for being a technocrat, saying technology is the only solution for– for tackling climate change. There are other people that say, “Look, the solutions are already there. It’s just government policy is what really needs to be focused on.

Bill Gates: I wish that was true. I wish all this funding of these companies wasn’t necessary at all. 

• • Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won’t even come close.
  • He says in the next 30 years we need scientific breakthroughs, technological innovations and global cooperation on a scale the world has never seen.

In another Interview, he commented on the Texas massive power outages due to winter storms: the future climate crisis will create severe extreme weather patterns that we were not used to, therefore  sources of energy that aren’t weather-dependent, but are green, like nuclear will be important.

Bill Gates says Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s explanation for power outages is ‘actually wrong’ (yahoo.com)

ANDY SERWER: This recent storm has caused massive power outages in Texas. And the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, blamed frozen wind turbines and said it shows the Green New Deal would “be a deadly deal for the United States.” How would you respond to that, Bill?

BILL GATES: Well, in terms of the current situation, you know, he’s actually wrong. The wind turbines– you can make sure they can deal with the cold. It probably wasn’t anticipated for the wind turbines that far south. But, you know, the ones up in Iowa and North Dakota are– do have the ability to not freeze up.

Actually, the main capacity that’s gone out in Texas is not the wind. It’s actually some of the natural gas plants that were also not ready for these super cold temperatures. So even though, you know, viewing this as an attack on renewable energies, in this case, is wrong, in fact, the point he’s making, which is that as you rely more and more on wind and solar, that reliability will be a challenge and you need– you’ll need three things to maintain reliability while driving renewables over 80%–

One is more transmission. So we have an open source model. We’re going to show that if Texas had had slightly more on a connection, they wouldn’t have had a problem.

The second is energy storage— still hard to store these amounts of energy. And finally, sources of energy that aren’t weather-dependent, but are green, like nuclear– and so those three will be an important part of the zero-emission electricity system.