Monday, Dec 7, 2020 • 50min
EP 4: Is it too late to stop climate change?
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Climate change is the most daunting challenge of our time. Tackling it will require unprecedented amounts of innovation, investment, and global cooperation. Are we actually making progress yet? Can we really stop the worst effects of climate change? In this week’s episode, Bill and Rashida take on perhaps their biggest question yet with an assist from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert.
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(3)
Bill Gates
Rashida Jones
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Rashida Jones
00:01
Hi, I'm
Rashida Jones
.Share
Bill Gates
00:03
I'm
Bill Gates
.Share
Rashida Jones
00:03
And today we're going to talk about
climate change
.Share
00:12
[Talk_Khalid]
Share
Rashida Jones
00:16
Sometimes I think about all of the big questions we are asking,
Bill
, and they all feel like they don't really matter unless this one is answered. So just give it to me straight: is it too late to stop climate change
? Are we doomed?Share
Bill Gates
00:33
No. The same kind of innovation that got us into this, where we invented electricity and cars, that have brought so many benefits, that same kind of innovation power accelerated will let us do those things but in ways that don't emit greenhouse gasses. And so it's not gonna be easy, we'll have to put a lot of resources in, we have to get going now. Because to get to zero by 2050 is not easily achievable.
Share
01:05
And without innovation, I would say this is not a solvable problem. But you've seen the personal computer revolution, you see what we've done with various diseases. We are smarter today than ever. And a lot of great people are working on these solutions. People should feel like, "oh, there really is hope here", and that's why it's worth politically getting countries to make this part of their agenda.
Share
Rashida Jones
01:33
Right, right. So, let's just break this down from the beginning, You mentioned greenhouse gasses. What are emissions, for people who don't know, and are emissions and greenhouse gasses one and the same?
Share
Bill Gates
01:44
Yeah. So it 's an interesting thing that when you burn coal or natural gas or gasoline, you create
CO2
.Share
Rashida Jones
01:57
Carbon dioxide.
Share
Bill Gates
01:58
And so our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, about 99%, but right now about 0.4% is this
CO2
, andd that keeps going up, and that is a problem. Because the more of that's in our atmosphere, the hotter the Earth
gets, it retains more of the sunlight, the heat that comes in.Share
02:22
It's not just Co22, although that's by far the biggest part, there's a few other things like methane, which is CH4, and nitrous oxide, but basically we emit about 51 billion tons of that
CO2
every year across five major activity areas. And that the more and more of that that gets into the atmosphere, the hotter the Earth
gets, and if you don't drop it to zero, you just keep getting hotter.Share
02:55
And that heat causes forest fires, it causes sea level rise, it wipes out coral reefs, polar bears. It's just such a sudden change, the heating is going up quite rapidly. And so, you know, the plants and animals can't evolve to adapt, which they could if it was taking place over hundreds of thousands of years, but this human activity is causing this temperature rise and that is no longer disputed how bad it gets, you know?
Share
03:31
How quickly does the ice melt and that drive sea level rise, and how quickly various natural ecosystems go away. There's still lots of uncertainty about which bad things happen how quickly, but particularly if you're near the equator, doing things outdoors, any type of labor, but particularly farming, is going to be impossible. Your crops won't grow well and you won't be able to sustain yourself being out there in the heat of summer.
Share
Rashida Jones
04:02
Your book is coming out,
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
. What's the thesis? How do you avoid it?Share
Bill Gates
04:08
Well, I go through where the areas of emissions are. So this industrial area that people probably the least familiar with, and I explain why are there emissions and how much more expensive it would be to make those things green. And so I lay out, okay, where do we need government policy? Where do we need R&D?
Share
04:32
You know, I hope it 's a hopeful book, but it really addresses all the areas of emissions, not just the easy ones, because If you look back from 2050, it will have taken a huge amount of innovation to achieve the goal.
Share
Rashida Jones
04:49
Okay, so we have these emissions. There 's transportation, which I feel like a lot of people know, because there's a lot of discussion around electric vehicles and all that, but then we have buildings, we have manufacturing, agriculture and electricity generation, which are all significant parts of the puzzle.
Share
05:10
So what do you think people get wrong about how to solve for the electricity part of it? Like, I for one have been told for a long time that wind and solar and other green energy, that is the solution. Is that wrong?
Share
Bill Gates
05:25
No, that's definitely a part of the solution. So if you look at the five areas, let's start with electricity, because the price of wind and solar coming down is absolutely fantastic. Now, unfortunately when and solar are intermittent. You know, the sun goes down at night, it can be cloudy, you can have storms that actually even the wind has to shut down during those storms.
Share
05:53
You want electricity all the time. You know, during that cold storm, you still want to keep your house warm, you want the hospital to work, you want to charge your electric cars. And so the ability to store energy is so limited that wind and solar alone can't provide a solution. So we need a storage miracle, and we need some source of energy like nuclear fission or fusion that we can call on all the time. So some breakthrough there would make the electricity sector solvable.
Share
Rashida Jones
06:31
You know, when I was like a kid, I would go to the beach and cleanup plastic from the ocean and I felt really good about myself. Is me doing that, am I fixing the
climate crisis
in any way?Share
Bill Gates
06:45
Yes, individual behavior alone won't get us to zero, but when you buy an electric car, that not only has less emissions, but the more electric cars we sell, the better we get at making those batteries cheaper and cheaper. And we do in that area, passenger cars, expect to get to the point where eventually the electric car will be cheap enough and have enough range that it basically out competes the gasoline automobile, even without having to do special tax credits or make people feel guilty for buying a gasoline car.
Share
07:26
And then, what I call the green premium, the extra cost, by the time it gets to zero, which for passenger cars we can see over the next decade, that's likely to happen, everybody buying electric cars pushing that forward. You know, if you use less electricity, then you're reducing your emissions. But the world is still going to use so much electricity that we do need to stop having coal generation, natural gas generation, because that's where most of the
CO2
is coming from.Share
Rashida Jones
08:01
How bad will it be if we don't get the emissions down to zero?
Share
Bill Gates
08:06
If you miss, then it keeps getting hotter and hotter, and eventually the ice in places like
Greenland
and Antarctica
melts and raises sea level substantially. So all the beaches that you're used to, they're gone. People who live near the coast, they're gone.Share
08:26
You get enough heat that you really can't work outside or grow crops near the equator. So, the worst effects of
climate change
are near the equator. Unfortunately, a lot of developing countries, countries that aren't wealthy like the US
are near the equator. Big parts of Asia
and Africa
. There are these farmers who grow their own food, subsistence farmers. They will be the first one to face malnutrition and starvation.Share
08:59
The
US
will see forest fires, we will see more hurricanes, we will see a lot of extinction, the natural ecosystems will die off. The further north you go, the less bad climate change
is. In fact some areas will actually be able to grow more food, but net it's a very bad thing, getting worse and worse every year that you continue those emissions.Share
Rashida Jones
09:29
Elizabeth Kolbert
argues that the Earth
is in the midst of a man-made sixth extinction. Her book The Sixth Extinction - An Unnatural History
won a Pulitzer
prize in 2015, and her next book, Under a White Sky, is coming out in Spring of 2021. Welcome, Elizabeth
.Share
Bill Gates
09:51
Hi
Elizabeth
.Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
09:52
Thanks for having me. It's really an honor and a pleasure to virtually meet both of you.
Share
Rashida Jones
09:59
Do you believe that we can actually reverse this extinction?
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Elizabeth Kolbert
10:04
Well, I think that we are in a period of elevated extinction rates, extremely elevated extinction rates. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times higher than what are called the background extinction rates that have prevailed over most of the history of life. We have a still have a long way to go before we reach the level of extinction that defines the mass extinctions of the past.
Share
10:32
For example, the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs killed off something like 75% of all species on
Earth
. So we definitely will make the decision whether this extinction event that we're in right now becomes truly a major mass extinction or whether it doesn't.Share
Rashida Jones
10:49
Bill
, do you believe that humans are going extinct?Share
Bill Gates
10:55
Actually, part of the problem is we have a lot of humans. We've got over 7 billion, and that is stretching the resources of the planet. One piece of good news is that most of the world is near its peak population. We're expected to go from about 7 billion to 10 billion and not much more than that.
Share
11:17
The really good new there is the burden of humanity on the planet will reach a limit. But that is, as
Elizabeth's
gone out in the field and make great people measuring this these problems, it is destroying a lot of natural ecosystems. So we should make sure that we're helping poor societies make this transition to lower voluntary lower birth rates as fast as we can.Share
11:46
And then we should make the burden per human on the environment dramatically lower through innovation. And the point that it's not just
climate change
that's hurting these natural ecosystems, the human footprint is more than just greenhouse gas emissions. I'd put it at the top of the list, I hope people don't forget the other parts of it. I'd say it's the hardest.Share
12:13
A lot of the other things people see, because it's local, It's the local effect, you know? What you're doing to your river or your lake. Whereas greenhouse gasses are invisible. You don't smell them, it gets worse every year.
Share
12:31
And so only by getting people to think forward where the
Arctic
will be utterly different, the Antarctic
will be utterly different, the coral reefs will likely not survive. Then we can hopefully motivate them to take action now.Share
Rashida Jones
12:50
Humans have been imposing their will on every other species for quite a while, right? So we have to assume that animals have adapted to some of the impact, but probably not at the rate that they're used to adapting.
Elizabeth
, what plants and animals should we be most worried about? And are there species that would survive a climate disaster?Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
13:16
Well, you're asking one of the, you know, great questions of biology these days. And
Bill
mentioned coral reefs. Coral reefs are the poster creatures, I suppose, you would say, for the impacts of climate change
on an ecosystem. Corals are tiny animals and they have, reef building corals in particular, have these tiny, even tinier plants symbionts living inside their cells.Share
13:41
And that relationship, which has evolved over millions of years, is crucial to reef building, it's what gives these creatures the energy to in effect build reefs, which are these extraordinary structures, you know, way bigger than a man made structure and take many, many generations of corals to produce. And they are home, at some point in their lives, about a quarter of all marine creatures spend some of their lives on a coral reef.
Share
14:05
So that's a hugely important marine ecosystem. And what happens as water temperatures are rising, and we're seeing that, you know, every year now, practically, as water temperatures rise, that corals' relationship with their symbionts gets thrown off, and they sort of eject their symbionts.
Share
14:24
And when that happens, they can starve to death, and that's a coral bleaching event. And we've just come through, you know, a series of very significant bleaching events and when you get one after the other after the other, the corals can't recover.
Share
14:37
And so there was just a study very recently that suggested that something like a quarter of the
Great Barrier Reef
, which is just the most extraordinary place on Earth
, half the coral cover has been lost in the last couple of decades owing to these bleaching events. So that's just a huge, huge example. Unfortunately, one example, but a very, very striking example of what happens when you change temperatures very quickly.Share
14:60
And as you alluded to, what's important here is, you know, not just that we're yanking up the temperatures of planet
Earth
, but we're doing so really fast, right? So if you're a creature that has to evolve, right? You know, your human being goes out, you know, the weather changes okay? If you're lucky if you live in an affluent part of the world, maybe, you know, you turn on the AC more. But if you're out, if you're a creature that has to evolve in response to that, that's your only option is this very slow, painstaking as it were process of evolution.Share
Rashida Jones
15:30
Yeah, I often think about the fact that it's inevitable that this will only get worse. Am I right?
Share
Bill Gates
15:37
Well, the best case that we're aiming for is to drop greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. And because of the legs in the system, we'll not only have increased heating through 2050, but for many decades after that, almost to the end of the century.
Share
15:55
So even in the best case of reducing these emissions, which has the term mitigation, we still also need what's called adaptation to try and avoid the poor farmers starving to death, to avoid the damage to human life from hurricanes, or to be ready for the sea level rise that is definitely coming. So yes, some adaptation is required. The more you do mitigation, the less of that is required.
Share
16:30
In a really extreme case. You could say, "okay, humans aren't going to be completely wiped out because, you know, somebody up in Canada will still be able to grow food". But as we're messing up these natural ecosystems, that's very bad for us as well. As you said, we depend more on nature to grow food and, you know, our appreciation of where we live. And if people lose sight of that and we're not making investments now, then it gets really, really bad towards the end of this century.
Share
Rashida Jones
17:04
How do you get people to understand the impact and how it's going to change their lives, or do you have to just wait until it does change their lives?
Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
17:12
I think that's a really good question and that's why climate scientists have been beating this drum, you know, since for 30 years now saying like, "look, don't wait until you get the climate that you don't like". Because as
Bill
was saying, there's a big time lag in the system to get the climate that you don't like. There's no going back, or at least not for many generations. let 's put it that way.Share
17:33
And now we are seeing very big impacts. The huge fires this summer and fall in
California
and in Oregon,
and fires in Colorado
, record breaking fires in the Rockies
, the hurricane season, really unprecedented almost, hurricane season. So we're we are seeing these impacts right here, you know, in the US
today.Share
17:55
And I think that you're seeing, if you look at public opinion polls, that people are increasingly cognizant and aware of what's going on. And we really need to start laying the groundwork for, you know, as
Bill
is saying, for tremendously cutting our emissions and also adapting to those impacts that we cannot avoid at this point.Share
Rashida Jones
18:15
Let me just ask you this frankly. Are
climate change
deniers dangerous?Share
Bill Gates
18:20
There's less climate denial now. The oil companies who backed some of those things in... the data about this is so strong at this point that I'd say we have, the main groups we have to worry about now are people who don't prioritize this problem because they see other problems. Are they worried that the global cooperation required won't take place, and so why should we make a sacrifice if the other countries aren't willing to do their part?
Share
18:53
Let's call those people who minimize the problem and don't prioritize it. Then we have people who believe in the cause, but they think it's a simple thing to solve that. Okay, you know, in 10 years we can have solved this problem. And if they think that, they're going to become fairly cynical as they realize, "oh my goodness, changing the way we make steel and cement and air travel".
Share
19:19
The number of innovations, like a dozen really amazing breakthrough things, to go along with the breakthroughs we've already made like low cost solar energy. So, During the financial crisis of 2000 and 2009, people's interest in climate went down a lot. The good news on this one is that even during this pandemic, which, you know, is so awful economically and health, the interest, particularly in young people, in
climate change
has remained very high.Share
19:55
So in a way the great books that people like
Elizabeth
do, the constant discussion, the fact that the oil industry is no longer trying to confuse people about this, I'd say there's a bit of hope in terms of the political will, which, you know, I'm trying to make sure we map that will into a concrete plan and that's why I wrote a book. It's not to convert the unconverted, it's to tell the converted, okay, what does a real plan look like?Share
Rashida Jones
20:27
You both work in this area that I could imagine at times can be very disheartening and very depressing. What gets you fired up in the morning? I mean, what's the thing that keeps you going when you feel overwhelmed with what's happening
? Bill
, let's start with you.Share
Bill Gates
20:45
Well, science has achieved so much and, you know, the scientists who are studying these problems are doing fantastic work. The scientists who are working on the different approaches in how do you store energy, how do you do a next generation of nuclear? I get to meet with those scientists and not all of them will succeed.
Share
21:07
That's why we need a lot of redundant efforts. You know, hundreds of efforts to get maybe a dozen that actually work. And so I am hopeful, you know, for individuals. I'd say there's two things that really count. One is your political engagement, because the government will fund the R&D and will have the policies that will drive up the scale of electric cars or clean cement. And so political is number one.
Share
21:36
Number two is when there is a product that's a lower emission product, you as a buyer are as you drive that product up in scale, the price will come down. And so your willingness to buy an electric car, to buy meat that was made with the no emissions, that is very helpful. Because we want to get that extra cost of all those products down to zero. So even the people who don't care so much will switch over at that point.
Share
22:08
So I am enthused because I believe in innovation and this is a more of a priority in
Europe
, it's a priority in China
. It's somewhat of a priority and it's in the dialogue and young people are increasingly learning about it and speaking out.Share
Rashida Jones
22:28
And when you do when you are an individual and you buy something, you're also signaling to the marketplace that there is a market for said thing, so you're contributing to this idea that people will innovate around that and create products that people want, right? I mean, that's how electric cars became popular.
Elizabeth
, what about you?Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
22:47
Well, I think that the point that
Bill
makes is really crucial. And I think a very good example is solar panels, which have dropped in price tremendously. That was not so much because of US Government
policy, unfortunately, but it was because of government policy in China
and in Europe
.Share
23:06
And there was panels came down in cost, they were, you know, subsidized for a long time now, they've come down in cost tremendously and Americans are installing them in large numbers and it's become really the cheapest source of new energy right now, additional, you know, energy.
Share
23:23
And that's a huge victory for trying to grapple with
climate change
, and we need that on every level, as Bill
suggested, we need that around all forms of decarbonization, and it is going to be both government policy and the world embracing a certain amount of change that we're going to need to tackle this problem.Share
23:46
And unfortunately, one of the things we've seen particularly here in the
US,
and this sort of gets back to your question earlier about climate denialism, is a resistance to anything that challenges this notion that we can go on with things the way they are right now. And I think a really key message, I guess if I could impart any message to people, it is, you know, change is coming.Share
24:09
It's coming in the form of
climate change
. You can either try to minimize that, how much the climate is going to change, or we can, you know, stick to some of these outmoded ways of doing things and cause really potentially a climate disaster.Share
24:29
Elizabeth
, do you have any burning questions for Bill
? Big or small?Share
24:35
You're a really smart, really tech-savvy person,
Bill
. But I'm really interested in whether there was like a moment or someone presenting you with the evidence, what do you think the best argument is for why people should care about this issue?Share
Bill Gates
24:52
Yeah, I got drawn into this issue through the work of the
foundation
in helping developing countries, particularly in Africa
. And as I would fly in, I would see no lights at all, just burning fires at night, even in Lagos
, Nigeria
, which is better off than most parts of Africa
. And so I thought, okay, we've got to electrify the entire world.Share
25:17
And then as I looked at that, I realized that repeating the building of coal plants or natural gas, like the rich countries have done, was going to make the
climate change
work even worse. And so I wanted to study, okay, is that really that big of a problem getting poor people electricity, come on! They deserve basic living standards, and you know, sadly I realized, yes, this is not an overblown thing. It is in fact because it just gets worse and worse as time goes on.Share
25:53
Is actually understated if you can empathize with people in future generations. And so my normal sort of instinct of "well, we can innovate our way out of any problem" kicked in. And I did meet people who work in nuclear, people who work on batteries. You know, I've lost a lot of money on battery companies that, you know, I've got a nuclear power company that just won a big
US Government
award.Share
26:19
So it's the hope to accelerate a lot of innovation including in the very hardest areas like steel and cement, where there's less ideas about how to make those things in a clean way than passenger cars where we can see, ok, it's a slight premium still, but that will come down over time. And so I feel like people haven't focused on the tough areas, but I do bring us a real optimism to any time we can unleash human ingenuity.
Share
Rashida Jones
26:54
I mean, that's true, people like to show that they're smart and innovative. So if we can help tie that to solving the very, very dangerous problem at hand, hopefully, hopefully we'll get somewhere.
Bill
, do you have any final questions for Elizabeth
?Share
Bill Gates
27:08
Yeah, I'm curious. Tell us a little bit about the next book.
Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
27:10
Well, the next book looks at exactly some of these questions, you know, where do we go from here? So, I visited, for example, I wrote about coral reefs in the last book, and how coral reefs are really suffering from
climate change
. And in this new book, I go talk to people who are trying to think of ways to innovate their way out.Share
27:29
And it's really tough when it comes to the natural world, in many ways. The corals are not necessarily as innovative as you might hope. But I go places like that where people are trying to say, what is the next step here?
Share
Rashida Jones
27:42
Do you explore anymore of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere? Is that in your book too?
Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
27:46
There is a chapter on people who are trying to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. In fact, I go visit some of my own emissions, which I paid to have pulled out of the air and turned into stone, I should add.
Share
Rashida Jones
28:00
Do you have that stone? Do you own that stone now or did you give it away?
Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
28:06
Well, they didn't give me the stone because this stone is about half a mile underground. So they spent a lot of money to sort of pull up this court, to show people like me and really to show the scientific community that it was actually, you know, solidifying. But I didn't get to take it home with me.
Share
Rashida Jones
28:24
That's very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us and talking to us. I really hope that between these two big brains and thoughtful people that we can, you know, get people to care. So thank you so much,
Elizabeth
.Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
28:39
Oh, thanks for having me.
Share
Bill Gates
28:41
Yes, great talking to you and I look forward to reading the book.
Share
Rashida Jones
28:44
Me too. Me too.
Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
28:45
I look forward to reading your book!
Share
Bill Gates
28:47
Alright!
Share
Rashida Jones
28:47
Me too.
Share
Elizabeth Kolbert
28:49
Take care.
Share
Bill Gates
28:50
Bye bye.
Share
Rashida Jones
28:52
I love her writing because it's so evocative, It's so illustrative and, you know, it just reminds us of how we have no contact with most of the species on the planet in a day-to-day way. And that speaks to me in an emotional way, because I, on my best days, I feel connected to everything. On my worst days, I feel selfish and I'm stuck in my head.
Share
29:15
But is there anything about her writing that speak to an emotional way or, how do you respond to her? The way that she writes and the things she writes about, is it just the impact?
Share
Bill Gates
29:26
Well she gets out in the field and shows like, people seeing how the ice is melting and going, wow! This is a bit scary. And she gets out in the field and sees people who are seeing the species die off, and you know, tells their stories of how committed they are and how worried they are. So humanizing the problem is super necessary.
Share
29:50
And I would say she's been one of the most articulate, and you know, it's a field that can confuse people with all of its terminology. But her books are very approachable and we need a mass consensus on this, because we are asking governments to put a lot of resources in, and there will be some short term sacrifice to switch over so many of these physical activities.
Share
30:18
And for a period you'll actually have to pay a premium price to get cement and steel and aviation fuel and then bring that extra cost down, so that we can even turn to the developing countries like
India
and say: "okay, either we got rid of that premium or it's only a small premium". So as you build buildings for your poor and give them electricity at night and give them air conditioning, which they'll need even more, please use the clean way of doing it.Share
30:50
Which right now that would be unreasonable, It's just too expensive, we can't subsidize them. And asking them to pay for it and build less buildings or have less light, that's unfair, because they haven't done the emissions, you know, per capita, they've done 1/20 of the emissions of the rich countries. So without innovation, you get into this deadlock.
Share
Rashida Jones
31:14
Let's talk about this idea of a green premium. This is an idea that the cost of doing things in a zero carbon, zero emissions way actually costs more, right? That that extra cost is the green premium, and that the premiums being so high makes it kind of impossible to move forward.
Share
31:31
So the idea is to invest and innovate around technologies and ideas that lower this green premium, right? So that everybody can afford it and eventually not have to pay an extra price to be green and to do things in a clean way.
Share
Bill Gates
31:44
Right. And when people say, are we really going to get to zero by 2050? Just looking at the parts where we've made progress, like electric cars for passenger cars, or some of the electricity generation being solar wind, that doesn't say that you've solved all the categories. The best measure is to look across all the categories heating - buildings, cooling buildings, making steel, making cement - and see how expensive the clean approaches and that that is this green premium.
Share
32:26
And the progress then is: are those coming down as we invent green cement, as we start to get people to buy green cement? Is it getting to be so cheap that you can call up Indians, say: don't use the dirty stuff at all, just use this clean stuff?
Share
32:48
And so in a way the responsibility of the rich countries, particularly
United States
, isn't just to get our own emissions to zero, because our share of the risk taking, innovation, science power in the world is still half or more. And so we owe the world not just to get to zero. You know, maybe we could do that by brute force. We own the world to innovate to bring those green premiums down.Share
33:15
So of all the measures of how far are we away from zero, I think the green premiums should be something more focused on, because otherwise the hard parts nobody wants to go to work on those if it's just short term progress metrics.
Share
Rashida Jones
33:32
Right. I'm actually very interested in concrete and cement. I want to understand what about that industry creates emissions, and then what, just conceptually, what would a green concrete look like, or be like, what makes it more green?
Share
Bill Gates
33:50
You know, I love industrial processes and the way that these things work. Cement is amazing because limestone, which is the primary ingredient of cement, is available all over the world. It's just super cheap. And limestone, called calcium carbonate, what you do is you heat it up and it releases
CO2
as you heat it up.Share
34:13
And so there's actually two reasons why cement emits greenhouse gasses. One is the energy you use to do that heating and what's called the kiln, and the other is just that chemical process of knocking out the
CO2
to make calcium oxide, which is the primary component of cement.Share
34:35
And so this solution would look something like source that heat energy for the kiln from a green source. And the other thing would be to capture the
CO2
as it comes out. You know, you have a lot of hot gas leaves the kiln. Can you have something that grabs the CO2
out of that flu before it goes out into the atmosphere?Share
Rashida Jones
35:02
And then what do you do with that? Can you dissipate
CO2
once it's captured?Share
Bill Gates
35:06
Yeah, once you have
CO2
, if you're willing to pressurize it and cool it down, you can inject it into the Earth,
and actually it will calcify, it will combine and become a mineral like calcium carbonate. And so it will be permanently stored with no risk that it would come back up later. At a very small scale, a company called Clime Works is doing this today, but the cost per ton Is more than 10 times, it's over $600 a ton, more than 10 times what we need it to be to make it practical.Share
Rashida Jones
35:44
So, putting stone deep into the
Earth
like that, that's not going to have like any negative impact later, or are we just going to create little stone underground cities later?Share
Bill Gates
35:53
Now, the amount of space in the
Earth
as you dig down is kind of mind blowing. You know, there's tons of water and rocks and so, if we're all careful, the re injection of CO2
back into the Earth
where over time it will mineralize, that will work. That will be very, very safe and not leaving some huge burden to future generations.Share
36:19
And that storage piece, you know, we need lots of people to work on because it's very daunting. But you know, if we pursue all these breakthroughs, some will work out, and we're just not putting enough money or IQ into it right now to give us the best chance of solving it by 2050.
Share
Rashida Jones
36:40
That's what I was gonna ask you. Do you think that we will ever convince people to be committed to zero emissions because it's the right thing to do, or do you think it's going to have to be a financial thing?
Share
Bill Gates
36:52
There will be areas where we don't get the green premium down to zero, and so the government will have to have a requirement to reduce emissions, or they'll have to subsidize the green approach so that it out competes the dirty approach. So government will, for some of these things, have to have regulations. The ideal would be to have as little of that as possible, to get the green premium to zero.
Share
37:24
Which I'm quite confident we'll get there in passenger cars. So people won't complain about a mandate that at some point in time all cars be electric because they won't be paying some huge premium or giving up the range or worried whether they can find a charging station, because we'll have lots of those. So the last thing we can do is the brute force tacks that disadvantages the dirty approach.
Share
Rashida Jones
37:52
Okay, so while we're waiting for this kind of greener everything, I'm just going to fire a bunch of questions at you, and you just tell me simply yes or no, if doing this thing will actually help to stop or slow down
climate change
, kay?Share
38:08
If I become a vegetarian and I eat meatless meat, will that help?
Share
Bill Gates
38:13
Yes. The demand for the new meat products, things like
Beyond Meat
, Impossible
. That's going to help them scale up and reduce that source of emissions.Share
Rashida Jones
38:24
Okay, great. Buying
carbon offsets
? Does that help?Share
Bill Gates
38:28
Oh, that helps fantastically. That's a huge thing that we hope people will do more of.
Share
Rashida Jones
38:34
Oh good, okay. Buying a private island to escape to?
Share
Bill Gates
38:38
Probably not. You know, islands just flying there generates a lot of carbon.
Share
Rashida Jones
38:44
Ok. Buying paper straws?
Share
Bill Gates
38:46
Not really. There's the other problem of the plastics getting into the ocean, which is mostly from countries that don't click their garbage fairly well. In the
US
, most those plastic straws get to the dump, they don't get to the ocean. But you know, it's fine, but it's not really a climate change
thing.Share
Rashida Jones
39:03
Just sidebars, so in terms of like recycling and collecting garbage, I feel like there 's a lot of things recently that have told us that the plastic we think we're recycling is not actually going anywhere but a landfill. Does recycling help? Does it actually help?
Share
Bill Gates
39:19
Some recycling definitely does. Take like, aluminum cans. There, the amount of energy you need to make a new can from that recycled can is about a tenth as much as taking the box site the mineral that we make into aluminum. And so that huge energy reduction is helping with emissions.
Share
39:46
Paper sometimes, it's actually, is used to remake things. Plastic in a few cases was used, but in a lot of cases it's a such low grade plastic that they can't go back and make a new plastic bottle out of it. So it's a mix.
Share
Rashida Jones
40:01
The answer is just to make less plastic things, right?
Share
Bill Gates
40:05
Well, you can recycle plastic or you can use less plastic. You know, packaging, there are people are trying to innovate to have less packaging. And that's definitely a good thing.
Share
Rashida Jones
40:19
Ok, a couple more questions. Does eating organic produce help?
Share
Bill Gates
40:26
No. Organic produce requires more land than typical farming techniques. I know that's not a popular answer.
Share
Rashida Jones
40:36
So it doesn't help, it actually harms. Okay, hot take! Hot take,
Bill
. Okay. Flying on planes less often?Share
Bill Gates
40:44
Definitely. We do hope to have green aviation fuel, but we don't have that today. So for a lot of people, their flying would be a significant category of emissions that they're connected to. In my case, it's by far the largest category. And so I've gone out and funded green aviation fuel to offset, and it's very expensive. But you know, I want to set a good example.
Share
Rashida Jones
41:11
Great. When I buy fuel, I'll make sure it's green fuel.
Share
Bill Gates
41:16
Well, some of the airlines are going to give you a chance to pay a little more for your ticket as they move to try to buy this. We're in very early days. I mean, like 1% of aviation fuel is green today, and so it will take decades to get that number up. But the airlines are starting to think about it. They don't want to be the bad guys.
Share
Rashida Jones
41:35
Right, of course. Okay, what about obsessively turning off my lights or my air conditioning or my heater when I leave my house and my room?
Share
Bill Gates
41:43
Quite modest benefit, but it 's a good practice.
Share
Rashida Jones
41:47
So what is the single not, to put any pressure on you, but the single most important thing that an individual can do to help stop or slow
climate change
?Share
Bill Gates
41:59
The biggest thing is their political voice to tell the government: this is something we want you to hire the best scientists, the best Modelers, you know. In the same way you should have gotten us ready for the pandemic, this one is 100% sure to come. We want you to take all the brains in the country and activate them to solve this problem. That is the biggest thing.
Share
42:28
Without the governments, you know, we could get slight reductions through changes in individual behavior, but not significant. Particularly when you look at the developing countries where just providing basic shelter and lighting and a little bit of transport, you know, at a tenth of the energy usage that Americans are used to, the demand is going to go up. And so unless we can multiply some things by zero with innovative approaches, we're not going to bring the 51 billion tons of emissions down dramatically.
Share
Rashida Jones
43:03
Great, okay, yeah. Political voice, influence. I mean, it does feel like that we live in an era where the individual feels like, the American individual feels like they do have a voice and they can call their local government, their federal government and apply pressure, speak openly to apply pressure on people. What do you think is the one area, if you had to, that we are most likely to innovate in the fastest?
Share
Bill Gates
43:31
Well, passenger cars, even though less than 2% of the sales today are electric cars, the volume is increasing, so that the batteries will come down in cost, that will bring the green cream down, the batteries are getting better, ao the range of the car will be better. I think that passenger cars even by 2040, overwhelmingly, thy'll be electric. And then if we couple that with the electric generation becoming clean, that's a whole area.
Share
44:05
Now, within transport, that's one of the big five areas, you'll still have planes and boats and trains and trucks. Passenger cars are the easiest of the transportation areas. Planes are the most difficult, because the energy density of that fuel is, you know, 20 times the energy density we can get in the battery. So we're not gonna be able to stick batteries on the plane. We'll have to probably still make fuel, but make it in a way that we drew carbon in to make it net zero.
Share
Rashida Jones
44:41
I appreciate how detailed and determined you are in all these areas. But listening to
Elizabeth
, do you feel like, I mean, she's talking about a mass extinction. Do you really think that focusing on this, in focusing on the innovation, is going to prevent a mass extinction?Share
Bill Gates
45:03
Well, we are already seeing species die off and there's a variety of environmental things like invasive species that we can't forget those, those go beyond
climate change
. You know? So environmentalists should put a lot of their time into climate change
, but they can't give up on other issues like overfishing or polluting the ocean, those count as well.Share
45:28
There's a lot of humans and we have disturbed the natural environment, and figuring out how to minimize that will cut down those extinctions a lot. But-
Share
Rashida Jones
45:40
Would you consider yourself an environmentalist? I mean, I know you believe in innovation and I don't necessarily think that's diametrically opposed with having respect for and preserving the environment. But do you, is that like a part of you? Do you feel connected to nature in that way? And do you have an environmental preservation thing?
Share
Bill Gates
46:02
Yeah, I've been super lucky. So I've gotten out to see the chimpanzees and the gorillas and I've, you know, seen the lemurs in
Madagascar
. And so the mind-blowing beauty of the Earth
, you know, going to the Great Barrier Reef
and seeing all the different species there, I've had that experience.Share
46:21
And you know, movies like
Planet Earth
show you even more of the miracle of the natural world. And so the idea that we're completely messing that up is appalling and, you know, on the record of human behavior belongs there, of how can we avoid this? The fact that the population will peak gives us a chance.Share
46:45
But that alone, the amount of damage we will have done by the time it peaks is way too much unless we change this. So yes, although that term often means people who hate nuclear energy, which, that's not me or hates, you know, advanced seeds, that's not me. It's a label that I'd embrace.
Share
Rashida Jones
47:04
But you think those two things can coexist? You think that you can be a fan of innovation, an actual creator and innovator yourself, and also work to preserve natural ecosystems? We've been heading in one direction for so long where man made innovation has been pushing against, you know, nature in a way that's making species extinct and endangered. Can we all get along and live together? Is what I'm asking.
Share
Bill Gates
47:36
Well, the hopeful story is that in the rich countries, the level of air pollution and water pollution is far less than 30 years ago. And so, as we become better off, we do prioritize taking care of the environment.
Share
47:58
Now, a lot of countries, these developing countries, we don't want them to go through the same phase of local pollution or
CO2
emissions that we went through. So innovation now is aimed exactly at not disturbing the environment.Share
Rashida Jones
48:15
That makes me feel hopeful. I'm still very concerned about the fact that people are selfish and won't take this seriously until they're forced to take this seriously and it's impacting their immediate environment. But I hope.
Share
Bill Gates
48:29
Yeah, well, if that's what happens, we're in real trouble. Because this is one where you cause the problem today and you pay the price decades later, and there's no easy fix. If you wait until the problem's there, there's nothing like a vaccine that, you know, magically goes out and gets rid of it.
Share
Rashida Jones
48:48
So between buying
carbon offsets
and using political power and having your voice be heard, if we could get enough people to do those two things, do you think we have a chance?Share
Bill Gates
49:00
Absolutely. That 's why I worked in the field and I'm quite hopeful.
Share
Rashida Jones
49:05
Okay, I'm gonna let you take the hope on that one because I am still very concerned. But I'm, I'm so happy to talk about it and know that people are thinking about it in these kind of large scale ways.
Share
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Rashida Jones
Bill Gates
Elizabeth Kolbert