Did Bill Gates Just Give the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year?

Thu Feb 18 09:08:55 CET 2010

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Did Bill Gates Just Give the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year?By
Alex Steffen, Worldchanging
Posted on February 16, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145694/

On Friday, the world's most successful businessperson and most powerful
philanthropist did something outstandingly bold, that went almost
unremarked: Bill Gates <http://www.thegatesnotes.com/> announced that his
top priority is getting the world to zero climate emissions.

Now, I'm not a member of the Cult of Bill myself (I'm typing this on a
MacBook), but you don't have to believe that Gates has superhuman powers of
prediction to know that his predictions have enormous power. People who will
never listen to Al Gore, much to less someone like me, hang on Gates' every
utterance.

And Friday, Gates predicted extraordinary climate action:
zero<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007879.html>.
Not small steps, not incremental progress, not doing less bad: zero. In
fact, he stood in front of a slide with nothing but the planet Earth and the
number zero. That moment was the most important thing that has happened at
TED.

What, exactly, did he say, and why is it so important?

Gates spoke about his commitment to using his massive philanthropic
resources (the Gates Foundation is the world's largest) to make life better
for people through public health and poverty alleviation ("vaccines and
seeds" as he put it). Then he said something he's never said before: that is
it *because* he's committed to improving life for the world's vulnerable
people that he now believes that climate change is the most important
challenge on the planet.

Even more importantly, he acknowledged the only sensible goal, when it comes
to climate emissions, is to eliminate them: we should be aiming for a
civilization that produces no net emissions, and we should be aiming to live
in that civilization here in the developed world by 2050.

Obviously, that's a big goal. Because he is the world's biggest geek, to
explain how he plans to achieve that goal, Gates put up a slide with a
formula (which we can call the Gates Climate Equation):

*CO2 = P x S x E x C*

Meaning this: the climate emissions of human civilization are the result of
four driving forces:

* Population: the total number of people on the planet (which is still
increasing because we are not yet at peak
population<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009107.html>
).

* Services: the things that provide prosperity (and because billions of
people are still rising out of
poverty<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002197.html> and
because no global system will work unless it's
fair<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007122.html>,
we can expect a massively increased demand for the services that provide
prosperity).

* Energy: the amount of energy it takes to produce and provide the goods and
services that our peaking population uses as it grows more prosperous (what
some might call the energy intensity of goods and services). Gates believes
it's likely cutting two-thirds of our energy waste is about as good as we
can do.

* Carbon: the amount of climate emissions generated in order to produce the
energy it takes to fuel prosperity.

Those four, he says, essentially define our emissions (more on that later).
In order to reach zero emissions, then, at least one of these values has to
fall to zero. But which one? He reckons that because population is going to
continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people
want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in
energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the
equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral
energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy.

To do that, we need an "energy miracle." We need energy solutions that don't
yet exist, released through a global push for clean energy innovation. That,
in turn, demands that a generation of entrepreneurs push forward new ideas
for renewable energy, unleashing "1,000 promising ideas." He described one
of his own investments, but went on to note that we need hundreds of other
ambitious companies as well, and he plans to put his own efforts into this
arena.

Why is this important? The news stories focused largely on the clean energy
aspect of the speech, and certainly the world's most successful businessman
announcing that clean energy is the next frontier is a big headline.
However, I think though that the real breakthrough was not Gates' answer to
the problem, but his definition of success: zero.

Bright green advocates understand that we need prosperity without planetary
impact <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010070.html>. In many of the
circles I run in, this is an uncontroversial idea, and, indeed, the
conversation has moved on, to discussing how we decouple better lives
from ecological
footprints <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006650.html> (or even go
beyond, and build a society that restores the ecosystems on which it
depends<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004509.html>
).

To say, however, that the standard of zero impact is not widely understood
and endorsed would be a whopping understatement. Most people rarely see the
things they do, buy and use as directly part of the living systems of the
planet. Few people who do think of their connection to nature have ever
conceived their lives designed to have no impact at all. For most people, a
ten percent or twenty percent improvement sounds like a big deal -- in large
part because the improvements they're most familiar with involve giving
things up. When they do encounter it, the idea of "zero" looms like a giant
wall of deprivation in front of them. The idea that zero might not be the
end of the good life, but in fact the beginning of a much better way of
life, is simply inconceivable to the vast, vast majority of them. When we
talk zero, we sound crazy.

But when Bill Gates talks zero, he sounds visionary. Gates, whatever else he
did Friday, just made the most important idea on the planet mainstream
credible. That's a big, big deal.

Was his articulation ideal? No. In fact, I think it has some big flaws. The
biggest flaw is that the Gates Climate Equation could lead to carbon
blindness <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008064.html>, a
self-defeating willingness to destroy critical environmental systems in the
name of saving the planet from climate change. Climate is not the only
absolutely vital planetary
boundary<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010551.html> we're
straining. The biosphere transcends the climate crisis.

What's more, protecting and healing the biosphere is essential to meeting
the climate crisis itself. Logging our
forests<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009545.html>
, over-burdening our oceans<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009389.html>,
converting land for agriculture and
grazing<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010586.html>,
all these are huge contributors to our climate problem, and restoring the
capacities of natural systems to absorb carbon dioxide is a critical part of
the solution.

In order to truly succeed, we need to improve the quality of our natural
systems at about the same rate at which we're converting the economy to
clean energy. Properly, Gates' Equation would include a value for nature:

*CO2 = P x S x E x C ÷ N*

There's another big gap here, though: the prosperity represented by S.

Now we might start with the energy use to deliver those services (E in the
Equation). The energy intensity of any given form of prosperity can, I
believe, be improved quite a bit; but the idea that E can be dramatically
improved without improving the kind of prosperity we're attempting to
provide is the very definition of what I call The
Swap<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010947.html>.
The Swap doesn't work.

And we don't need it to. The idea that contemporary suburban American
lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to,
thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and
fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we
could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.

We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process
both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the
quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply
improving efficiency.

The answer to the problem of cars and automotive emissions, for instance, isn't
designing a better car, it's designing a better
city<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007800.html>.
The answer to the problem of overconsumption isn't recycling cans or green
shopping, it's changing our relationship to stuff, so that everything we use
and live with is designed for zero
waste<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008176.html>,
and either meant to last ("heirloom design" and "durability") or to be
shared ("product service systems") or both. The best living we've ever had
is waiting beyond zero. What looks like a wall to many people from this side
of zero, looks to like a trellis from the other side, a foundation on which new
thinking <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006915.html> can flourish.

Cities are the tools we need for reinventing prosperity. We can build
zero-impact cities <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010941.html>, and
we need to. Any answer to the problem of climate change needs to be as
focused on reinventing the future as powering it.

*(Photo: Nancy Duarte<http://blog.duarte.com/2010/02/news-alert-bill-gates-is-officially-redeemed-from-presentation-purgatory/>.
Make her famous.)*

;) ... a foundation on which new thinking can flourish.

Henk Elegeert

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********