Bill Gates at TED 2010: Innovating to Zero
I just watched Bill Gates’ talk at TED 2010 online: Innovating to Zero. It is an interesting talk, though I have some critiques 
which I will discuss below.
Gates has devoted his energies since leaving Microsoft to his foundation which focuses mainly on health and development issues, such as developing a malaria vaccine, combating HIV/AIDS, and improving agriculture.
During this year’s presentation, his main argument went as follows:
1. Global warming is a major threat to the planet, particularly in the poor areas of the world where The Gates Foundation is active. The ONLY solution to the climate crisis is to bring CO2 emissions to zero (a principle I discussed in an earlier post).
2. Solving global warming boils down to the following equation:
CO2 = P x S x E x C
CO2 emitted = Population x Services per person x Energy use per unit of service x Carbon intensity per unit of energy
If you recall your high school algebra, in order for the left hand side of the equation to be zero, one of the right hand factors need to be pretty close to zero as well. Of the 4, the first two (population and services) will continue to grow. The third, energy use per unit of service (AKA energy efficiency) will improve, but alone doesn’t get us to zero. The last factor, carbon intensity, must move to zero.
To do this, Gates says, “If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years . . . [it would be that] this thing that is half the cost of coal and doesn’t emit CO2 gets invented”. Specifically, Gates calls for the R&D into new energy technologies over the next 20 years, and deployment over the next 20.
Joe Romm at Climate Progress applauds Gates for some elements of his talk, but strongly disagrees with this last point. Romm makes a convincing argument that putting faith in a yet-to-be invented energy source to solve the climate problem is folly.
He quotes a statistic that it usually takes a new energy source 25 years after commercial introduction for it to reach a 1% market share. Therefore, even if a new type of carbon-free energy were developed, deployment at scale would be too little too late for the climate. Remember that the world collectively needs to rapidly decrease emissions by over 80% by 2050 in order to keep the climate system within a 2 degree C threshold.
Romm argues instead that we should be working to deploy existing renewable energy technologies and cost-effective energy efficiency measures which do actually have a chance at solving the energy/climate crisis.
Another opinion comes from Alex Steffen at worldchanging.org, who dubbed Gates’ talk as “the most important climate speech of the year” not because of his call for energy innovation, but rather for his “definition of success: zero”. I agree. For someone of Gates’ stature and influence to lay out the problem in simple terms is sure to influence influential people across the planet.
Where do I stand? I agree with both Gates and Romm – we need research into future clean energy sources (such as fusion reactors), but more importantly we need to agressively deploy existing climate solutions. As just an example, the entire US electricity demand could be met by covering 100 square miles of the Nevada desert with solar panels.
So what do you think? Should we focus on innovating the next technology to save the planet or work with what we’ve got?
Both. We should be firing on all cylinders as smartly and efficiently as we can given the pace at which warming and climate change is projected to alter ecosystems and coastlines over the next 5, 10, 20, 50, to 100 years. In terms of utilizing the existing clean energy options that we have, prioritizing the sectors where their use is already underway (like the built environment) and expediting the process seems to make a whole lot of sense to me as well.
Nice post.
Another item that Bill got wrong is the footprint of carbon based energy production. He compared apples to prunes when he said that coal required a much smaller footprint then renewable sources to generate the same energy. That is missing the entire coal supply chain. That supply chain has an enormous and toxic legacy that dwarfs the area required by either solar or wind. The folks at Land Art Generator Initiative calculated that more energy could be produced per year via PVs as are extracted once from a coal mine in West Virginia.
Then there is the hidden water side to energy where coal required an order or two of magnitude more water per unit of energy then wind or solar.