TCSE: Ted Corpus Search Engine

Recorded at	March 22, 2021
Event	Countdown
Duration (min:sec)	48:07
Video Type	Original Content
Words per minute	166.95 slow
Readability (FK)	54.77 medium
Speaker	Bill Gates
Country	United States of America
Occupation	entrepreneur, programmer, philanthropist
Description	American businessman, investor, and philanthropist (born 1955)


1	00:17	Bruno Giussani: Hello.
2	00:18	Bill Gates calls himself an imperfect messenger on climate because of his high carbon footprint and lifestyle.
3	00:26	However, he has just made a major contribution to our thinking about confronting climate change via a book, a book about decarbonising our economy and society.
4	00:37	It's an optimistic "can-do" kind of book with a strong focus on technological solutions.
5	00:44	He discusses the things we have, such as wind and solar power, the things we need to develop, such as carbon-free cement or carbon-free steel, and long-term energy storage.
6	00:56	And he talks about the economics of it all, introducing the concept of green premium.
7	01:02	The gist of the book, and really I'm simplifying here a lot, is that fighting climate change is going to be hard, but it's possible, we can do it.
8	01:12	There is a pathway to a clean and prosperous future for all.
9	01:17	So we want to unpack some of that with the author of the book.
10	01:20	Bill Gates, welcome back to TED.
11	01:22	Bill Gates: Thank you.
12	01:23	Giussani: Bill, I would like to start where you start, from the title of the book.
13	01:27	"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster," which, of course, presumes that we are heading towards a climate disaster if we don't act differently.
14	01:35	So what is the single most important thing we must do to avoid a climate disaster?
15	01:40	Gates: Well, the greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, particularly CO2, stay there for thousands of years.
16	01:47	And so it's really the sum of all those emissions are forcing the temperature higher and higher, which will have disastrous effects.
17	01:58	And so we have to take these emissions, which are presently over 51 billion tons per year and drive those all the way down to zero.
18	02:09	And that's when the temperature will stop increasing and the disastrous weather events won't get worse and worse.
19	02:18	So it's pretty demanding.
20	02:19	It's not a 50 percent reduction.
21	02:21	It's all the way down to zero.
22	02:25	Giussani: Now, 51 billion is a big number.
23	02:27	It's difficult to register, to understand.
24	02:30	Help us visualize the scale of the problem.
25	02:35	Gates: Well, the key is to understand all the different sources.
26	02:38	And people are mostly aware of the production of electricity with natural gas and coal as being a big source.
27	02:47	That's about 27 percent.
28	02:50	And they're somewhat aware of transportation, including passenger cars.
29	02:56	Passenger cars are seven percent and transportation overall is 16 percent.
30	03:01	They have far less awareness of the other three segments.
31	03:05	Agriculture, which is 19 percent, heating and cooling buildings, including using natural gas, are seven percent.
32	03:14	And then, sadly, the biggest segment of all, manufacturing, including steel and cement.
33	03:22	People are least aware of that one.
34	03:25	And in fact, that one is the most difficult for us to solve.
35	03:30	The size of all the steel plants, cement plants, paper, plastic, the industrial economy is gigantic.
36	03:38	And we're asking that to be changed over in this 30-year period when we don't even know how to make that change right now.
37	03:48	Giussani: So your core argument, and really, here I’m simplifying, is that basically we need to clean up all of that, right?
38	03:54	The way we make things, we grow things, we get around and power our economy.
39	03:58	And so to do that, we need to get to a point where green energy is as cheap as fossil fuels, and new materials, clean materials, are as cheap as current materials.
40	04:08	And you call that "eliminating the green premium."
41	04:11	So to start, tell us what you mean by green premium.
42	04:15	Gates: Yeah, so the green premium varies from emission sources.
43	04:21	It's the cost to buy that product where there's been no emissions versus the cost we have today.
44	04:30	And so for an electric car, the green premium is reasonably modest.
45	04:34	You pay a little more upfront, you save a bit on the maintenance and gasoline, you give up some range, you have a longer charging time.
46	04:43	But over the next 15 years, because the volume is there and the R and D is being done, we can expect that the electric car will be preferable.
47	04:54	It won't cost more.
48	04:55	It will have a much higher range.
49	04:59	And so that green premium that today is about 15 percent is headed to be zero even without any government subsidies.
50	05:08	And so that's magic.
51	05:09	That's exactly what we need to do for every other category.
52	05:14	Now, an area like cement, where we haven't really gotten started yet, the green premium today is almost double the price.
53	05:22	That is, you pay 125 dollars for a ton of cement today but it would be almost double that if you insisted that it be green cement.
54	05:32	And so the way I think of this is in 2050 we'll be talking to India and saying to them, "Please use the green products as you're building basic shelter, you know, simple air conditioning," which they'll need because of the heat increase or lighting at night for students.
55	05:54	And unless we're willing to subsidize it or the price is very low, they'll say, "No, this is a problem that the rich countries created, that India is suffering from and you need to take care of it."
56	06:11	So only by bringing that green premium down very dramatically, about 95 percent across all categories, will that conversation go well so that India can make that shift.
57	06:24	And so the key thing here is that the US's responsibility is not just to zero out its emissions.
58	06:31	That's a very hard thing, but we're only 15 percent.
59	06:34	Unless we, through our power of innovation, make it so cheap for all countries to switch all categories, then we simply aren't going to get there.
60	06:47	And so the US really has to step up and use all of this innovative capacity every year for the next 30 years.
61	06:58	Giussani: What what needs to happen in order for these breakthroughs to actually occur?
62	07:03	Who are the players who need to come together?
63	07:07	Gates: Well, innovation usually happens at a pace of its own.
64	07:12	Here we have this deadline, 2050.
65	07:15	And so we have to do everything we can to accelerate it.
66	07:18	We need to raise the R and D budgets in these areas.
67	07:23	In 2015 I organized, along with President Hollande and Obama, a side event to the Paris climate talks where what Prime Minister Modi had labeled "mission innovation" was a commitment to double R and D budgets over a five-year period.
68	07:42	And all the big countries came in and made that pledge.
69	07:47	Then we need lots of smart people, who, instead of working on other problems, are encouraged to work on these problems.
70	07:55	So coming up with funding for them is very, very important.
71	08:00	I'm doing some of that through what I call Breakthrough Energy Fellows.
72	08:04	We need high-risk capital to invest in these companies, even though the risks are very, very high.
73	08:12	And that's -- There is now -- Breakthrough Energy Ventures is one group doing that and drawing lots of other people in.
74	08:21	But then the most difficult thing is we actually need markets for these products even when they start out being more expensive.
75	08:30	And that's what I call Catalyst, organizing the buying power of consumers and companies and governments so that we get on the learning curve, get the scale going up, like we did with solar and wind across all these categories.
76	08:47	So it's both supply of innovation and demand for the green products.
77	08:54	That's the combination that can start us to make this change to the infrastructure of the entire physical economy.
78	09:05	Giussani: In terms of funding all this, the financial system as a whole right now is essentially funding expansion of fossil fuels consistent with three degrees Celsius increase in global heating.
79	09:19	What do you say to the Finance Committee, beyond the venture capital, about the need to think and act differently?
80	09:27	Gates: Well, if you look at the interest rates for a solar field versus any other type of investments, it's not lower.
81	09:34	You know, money is very fungible.
82	09:36	It's going to, you know, different projects.
83	09:40	But, there's no, sort of, special rate for climate-related projects.
84	09:47	Now, you know, governments can decide through tax incentives to improve those things.
85	09:53	But you know, this is not just about reporting numbers.
86	09:58	It's good to report numbers.
87	10:00	But the steel industry is providing a vital service.
88	10:04	Even gasoline, for 98 percent of the cars being purchased today, allows people to get to their job.
89	10:10	And so, you know, just divestment alone is not going to be the thing that creates the new alternative and brings the cost of that down.
90	10:22	So the finance side will be important because the speed of deployment -- Solar and wind needs to be accelerated dramatically beyond anything we've done today.
91	10:34	In fact, you know, on average, we'll have to deploy three times as much every year as the peak year so far.
92	10:43	And so those are a key part of the solution.
93	10:48	They're not the whole solution.
94	10:50	But you know, people sometimes think just by putting numbers, disclosing numbers, that somehow it all changes or by divesting that it all changes.
95	11:03	The financial sector is important, but without the innovation, there's nothing they can do.
96	11:09	Giussani: A lot of the current focus is on cutting emissions by half by 2030 and on the way to reaching that zero by 2050.
97	11:17	And in the book, you write that there is danger in that kind of thinking, that we should keep our main focus on 2050.
98	11:25	Can you explain that?
99	11:27	Gates: Well, the only real measure of how well we’re doing is the green premium, because that's what determines whether India and other developing countries will choose to use the zero emission approach in 2050.
100	11:40	The idea, you know -- If you're focusing on short-term reductions, then you could say, oh, it's fantastic, we just put billions of dollars into natural-gas plants.
101	11:51	And even ignoring that there's a lot of leakage that doesn't get properly measured, you know, give them full credit and say that's a 50 percent reduction.
102	12:00	The lifetime of that plant is greater than 30 years.
103	12:05	You financed it, assuming you're getting value out of it over a longer period of time.
104	12:10	So to say, "Hey, hallelujah, we switched from coal to natural gas," that has nothing to do with reaching zero.
105	12:18	It sets you back because of the capital spending involved there.
106	12:22	And so it's not a path to zero if you're just working on the easy parts of the emission.
107	12:29	That's not a path.
108	12:30	The path is to take every source of emission and say, "Oh, my goodness, how am I going to get that green premium down?
109	12:38	How am I going to get that green premium down?"
110	12:41	Otherwise, getting to 50 percent does not stop the problems.
111	12:48	This is very tough because the nature is zero.
112	12:52	It's not just, you know, a small decrease.
113	12:56	Giussani: So getting the green premium down, so you mentioned India.
114	13:00	To make sure that the transition, the clean transition, is also an Indian story and an African story and not only a Western story, should rich countries adopt the expensive clean alternatives now, to kind of buy down the green premium and make technology, therefore, more accessible to low-income countries?
115	13:21	Gates: Absolutely.
116	13:23	You have to pick which product paths with scale will become low green-premium products.
117	13:31	And so you don't want to just randomly pick things that are low-emission.
118	13:35	You have to pick things that will come down.
119	13:37	So like, you know, so far, hydrogen fuel cells have not done that.
120	13:42	Now they might in the future.
121	13:44	Solar, wind and lithium-ion, we've seen these incredible cost reductions.
122	13:51	And so we have to duplicate that for other areas, things like offshore wind, heat pump, new ways of doing transmission.
123	14:02	You know, we have to keep the electricity grid reliable, even in very bad weather conditions.
124	14:08	And so that's where storage or nuclear and transmission will have to be scaled up in a very significant way, which we now have this open-source model to look at that.
125	14:20	And so the buying of green products that demand signal, what I call Catalyst, we're going to have to orchestrate a lot of money, many tens of billions of dollars for that, that is one of the most expensive pieces so that the improvements come in these other areas and some of them we haven't even gotten started on.
126	14:46	Giussani: Many people believe actually that the climate question is mostly a question of consuming less and particularly consuming less energy.
127	14:53	And in the book, you actually write several times that we need to consume more energy.
128	14:59	Why?
129	15:00	Gates: Well, the basic living conditions that we take for granted should be made available to all humans.
130	15:07	And the human population is growing.
131	15:11	And so you're going -- as you provide shelter, heating and air conditioning, which anywhere near the equator will be more in demand since you'll have many days where you can't go outdoors at all.
132	15:27	So we're not going to stop making shelter.
133	15:30	We're not going to stop making food.
134	15:34	And so we need to be able to multiply those processes by zero.
135	15:39	That is, you make shelter, but there's no emissions.
136	15:41	You make food, but there's no emissions.
137	15:44	That's how you get all the way down to zero.
138	15:46	Now, it's made somewhat easier if rich countries are consuming less, but how far will that go?
139	15:56	Giussani: So if I summarize in my head your book, you are basically suggesting that if we eliminate the green premium, the transition somehow can occur, the cost and technology, green premium and breakthroughs are the key drivers.
140	16:10	But, you know, you think of climate and climate is kind of a wicked problem.
141	16:13	It has implications that are social, political, behavioral.
142	16:16	It requires significant citizen involvement.
143	16:19	Are you focusing too much on tech and not enough on those other variables?
144	16:24	Gates: Well, we need all these things.
145	16:26	If you don't have a deep engagement, particularly by the younger generation making this a top priority every year for the next 30 years across all the developed countries, we will not succeed.
146	16:40	And I'm not the one who knows how to activate all those people.
147	16:46	I’m super glad that the people who are smart about that are thinking.
148	16:49	It's a necessary element.
149	16:51	Likewise, the piece that I do have experience in, innovation ecosystems, that's a necessary element.
150	17:00	You will not get there just by saying, "Please stop using steel."
151	17:06	You know, it won't happen.
152	17:10	And so the innovation piece has to come along and particularly encouraging consumers to buy electric cars or artificial meat or electric heat pumps, they're part of driving that demand, what I call the catalytic demand.
153	17:28	That alone won't do it, because some of these big projects, like green hydrogen or green aviation fuel require billions in capital expense.
154	17:38	But the demand signal from enlightened consumers is very important.
155	17:43	Their political voice is very important.
156	17:46	Their pushing the companies they work at is very important.
157	17:49	And so I absolutely agree that the broad community who cares about this, particularly if they understand how hard it is and don't say, "Oh, we can do it in 10 years," they are super important.
158	18:07	Giussani: You mentioned artificial meat and I know you love burgers.
159	18:10	Have you tried an artificial burger, and how did you find it?
160	18:14	Gates: Yes, I’m an investor in all these Impossible, Beyond and various people.
161	18:20	And I have to say, the progress in that sector is greater than I expected.
162	18:26	Five years ago, I would have said that is as hard as manufacturing.
163	18:30	Now it's very hard, but not as hard as manufacturing.
164	18:35	There is no Impossible Foods of green steel and the quality is going to keep improving.
165	18:41	It's quite good today.
166	18:44	You know, there's other companies coming in to that space covering different types of food.
167	18:50	And as the volume goes up, the price will go down.
168	18:53	And so I think it's quite promising.
169	18:57	I have to admit, 100 percent of my burgers aren't artificial yet, it's about 50 percent, but I'll get there.
170	19:06	Giussani: It’s a start.
171	19:07	You're already on 2030 on that on that front.
172	19:10	So you mentioned your expertise in innovation.
173	19:13	You have a couple of lines of -- how to say it? -- of exquisite modesty in the book where you say you think like an engineer, you don't know much about politics, but actually you talk to top politicians more than any of us.
174	19:25	What do you ask them and what do you hear in return?
175	19:29	Gates: Well, they’re mostly responding to voters interest.
176	19:32	Most of the countries we're talking about are democracies.
177	19:36	And you know, there are resources that will need to be put in like tax credits that encourage buying green products or government purchasing of green products at slightly higher prices.
178	19:55	Those are real trade-offs.
179	19:56	And, you know, making sure that the areas where there's lots of jobs in, say, coal mining, or things where the demand will go down, having that political sensitivity and thinking through, can we put the new jobs in that area and what are the departments that handle that.
180	20:18	This is a tough political problem.
181	20:22	And, you know, my admonition to people is not only to get educated themselves, but help educate other people.
182	20:30	And often, like in the US, if it's people of both parties, that's even better.
183	20:38	The level of interest is high, but it needs to get even higher, almost like a moral mission of all young people to go beyond their individual success, that they believe that getting to zero by 2050 is critical.
184	20:55	Giussani: Thank you.
185	20:56	Now, before we continue the interview, I would like to take a short detour for one minute because my colleagues at TED-Ed have produced a series of seven animated videos inspired by your book.
186	21:07	They introduce the concept of net zero emissions, they discuss other questions and challenges that we are facing relating to climate.
187	21:16	So I would like to share one short clip from one of those animations.
188	21:23	(Video) You flip a switch, coal burns in a furnace which turns water into steam.
189	21:29	That steam spins a turbine which activates a generator which pushes electrons through the wire.
190	21:36	This current propagates through hundreds of miles of electric cables and arrives at your home.
191	21:43	All around the world, countless people are doing this every second: flipping a switch, plugging in, pressing an "on" button.
192	21:52	So how much electricity does humanity need?
193	21:57	Giussani: The answer to that and to many other climate questions, of course, is in the seven animations available on the TED-Ed site, and the TED-Ed YouTube channel.
194	22:06	Bill, you mentioned the younger generation before.
195	22:09	How does the younger generation's role in solving this problem inspire you?
196	22:15	Gates: Well, they ... can make sure this is a priority.
197	22:23	And if we have, you know, it's a priority for four years, then it's not for four years, you can't ask the trillions of investment in the new approach to take place.
198	22:37	It's got to be pretty clear that even though political parties may disagree on the tactics, the same way they agree there should be a strong defense that they agree this zero by 2050 is a shared goal, and then discuss, OK, where does government come in, where does the private sector come in, which area deserves priority?
199	23:02	That will be a huge milestone where it’s a discussion about how to get there versus whether to get there.
200	23:10	And the US is the most fraught in terms of it being politicized, even in terms of, is this a huge problem or not.
201	23:19	So, you know, young people, they're going to be around to see the good news if we're able to achieve this.
202	23:30	You know, I won't be around.
203	23:33	But, they speak with moral authority and they have particular people who are stepping up on this.
204	23:41	But I hope that's just the beginning.
205	23:44	And that's why this year, I think, is so important.
206	23:48	All this recovery money being programed, people thinking about, do governments protect us the way they should, do governments work together?
207	23:56	You know, the pandemic has teed this up, it’s OK, what's the next big problem we need to collaborate around?
208	24:03	And I'm hoping that climate appears there because of these activists.
209	24:10	Giussani: Yeah, we ought to come back to the pandemic question.
210	24:13	But I want to talk a moment about some specific technology breakthroughs that you mention in the book.
211	24:19	But you also just mentioned the organization you set up, Breakthrough Energy, to invest in clean tech start-up and advocate for policies.
212	24:26	And I assume somehow your book is kind of a blueprint for what Breakthrough Energy is going to do.
213	24:32	There is a branch in that organization, called Catalyst, that's prioritizing several technologies, including green hydrogen direct carbon-capture, aviation biofuels.
214	24:42	I don't want to ask you about specific investments, but I would like to ask you to describe why those priorities, maybe starting with green hydrogen.
215	24:51	Gates: If we can get green hydrogen that’s very cheap, and we don't know that we can, that becomes a magic ingredient to a lot of processes that lets you make fertilizer without using natural gas, it lets you reduce iron ore for steel production without using any form of coal.
216	25:17	And so there's two ways to make it.
217	25:20	You can take water and split it into hydrogen and oxygen.
218	25:23	You can take natural gas and pull out the hydrogen.
219	25:28	And so it's kind of a holy grail, you know, and so we need to get going.
220	25:36	We need to get all the components to be very, very cheap.
221	25:41	And only by actually doing projects, significant scale projects, do you get on to that learning curve.
222	25:48	And so Catalyst will fund the early pilot projects along with governments to go make green hydrogen, get the electrolyzers to get up in volume and get a lot cheaper, because that would be a huge advance.
223	26:11	Lot of manufacturing, not all of it, but a lot of it would be solved with that.
224	26:16	Giussani: So just for those who don’t know, green hydrogen is produced with clean energy sources, wind, solar and so, nitrogen produced from natural gas or fossil gas is called gray hydrogen.
225	26:30	The second priority that you have set is direct carbon capture, pulling carbon from the atmosphere.
226	26:36	And at least in theory, we can find a way to do that at large scale.
227	26:41	Together with other technologies the problem could be solved, but it's a very early-stage, unproven technology.
228	26:47	You describe it yourself in the book as a thought experiment at this stage.
229	26:52	But you are one of the main investors in this sector in the world.
230	26:55	So what's the real potential for direct carbon capture?
231	26:59	Gates: So there’s a company today, Climeworks, that for a bit over 600 dollars a ton will do capture.
232	27:08	Now it’s at fairly small scale.
233	27:11	I'm a customer of theirs as part of my program where I eliminate all of my carbon emissions in a gold standard way.
234	27:22	There are other people who are trying to do larger-scale plants like Carbon Engineering.
235	27:28	Breakthrough Energy is investing in a number of these carbon-capture entities.
236	27:34	In a way, the carbon capture is for the part that you can't solve any other way.
237	27:39	It's kind of the brute-force piece, and no one knows what that price will be.
238	27:45	If it's 100 dollars a ton, then the cost against current emissions would be five trillion a year.
239	27:53	Can we get below 100 dollars a ton?
240	27:57	It's not clear that we can, but it would be fantastic to take the final 10, 15 percent of emissions, and instead of making the change at the place where the emission takes place, just do this, direct air capture.
241	28:13	To be clear, direct air capture means you're just filtering the air, and you're pulling out the 410 million current parts per million and putting that into a pressurized form of CO2 that then you sequester in someplace that you know it'll stay for millions of years.
242	28:32	And so this industry is just at the very, very beginning.
243	28:38	But it's a necessary piece for the tail of emissions.
244	28:43	Giussani: And a third priority is aviation biofuels.
245	28:47	Now flying over the last several years has become a symbol of a polluting lifestyle, let's say.
246	28:52	Why aviation biofuels as a priority?
247	28:55	Gates: Well, the great thing about passenger cars is that even though batteries don't store energy as well as gasoline does, there's dramatic difference, you can afford to have the extra size and weight of those batteries.
248	29:15	On a plane that is a large plane going a long distance, there's no chance that batteries will ever have that energy density.
249	29:26	I mean, there's some crazy people who are working on it, and I'll be glad to fund them, but you wouldn't want to count on that.
250	29:32	And so you either have to use hydrogen as a plane fuel, that has certain challenges, or you just want to make today's aviation fuel with green processes, like using plants as the source of how you make those.
251	29:50	And so I'm the biggest individual customer of a group that makes green aviation fuel.
252	29:58	So that's what I'm using now, costs over twice as much as the normal aviation fuel.
253	30:06	But as the demand scales up, that's one of those green premiums that we hope to bring down so that at some point lots of consumers will say, "Yes, I'll pay a little extra on my plane ticket," probably through Catalyst or through the airline to make sure that we're building up that industry and trying to get the costs, that green premium down quite a bit.
254	30:36	So this is a super important area that, you know, I was amazed when I went to buy that I was by far the biggest individual customer.
255	30:50	Giussani: It’s also, of course, a very symbolic area, right?
256	30:52	People think of cars and think of airplanes when they think of pollution and emissions.
257	30:59	There is a fourth technology that I want to bring up because you are an advocate of and an investor in nuclear power, which is also not universally accepted as clean energy because of the risks, because of radioactive waste.
258	31:12	Can you make the case, briefly, but can you make your case for nuclear?
259	31:16	Gates: Well, one thing that needs to be appreciated is that energy has to come from somewhere.
260	31:21	And so as you stop using natural gas to heat homes and gasoline to power cars, the electric grid will have to grow dramatically.
261	31:34	And even in the case of the US, where electricity demand has been flat the last few decades, will need to be almost three times as large.
262	31:44	As you do that with weather-dependent sources, the reliability of the electricity generation goes away, that as you get big cold fronts that for 10 days can stop most of the wind and solar, say, in the Midwest.
263	32:01	So the question is, how do you use massive amounts of transmission and storage and non weather-dependent sources which at scale nuclear as the only choice there, to maintain that reliability and not have people, say, freeze to death.
264	32:19	And nuclear -- People will be pretty impressed with how valuable it is to create that reliability.
265	32:30	Now, 80 percent, at least in the US, will be wind and solar.
266	32:34	So we have to build that faster than ever.
267	32:38	But what is that piece that's always available is where nuclear would fit in.
268	32:45	Giussani: Now, you talk a lot about scaling up technologies in the book.
269	32:48	I want to ask you a question about scaling down, because one thing that's absent from your book is a discussion about scaling down fossil fuel production, maybe starting with at least not expanding it anymore, with adopting a sort of fossil fuel nonproliferation approach, because right now we are talking about a green transition, but at the same time we are building out further fossil fuel infrastructure.
270	33:11	What's your view on that?
271	33:13	Gates: Well, it’s all about the demand for fossil fuels and the fact that the green premium is very high.
272	33:20	If you want to restrict supply, then you'll just drive the price up.
273	33:26	People still want to drive to their job.
274	33:28	If you know, say you made fossil fuels illegal.
275	33:34	You know, try that for a few weeks.
276	33:37	My view is you have to create a substitute because the services provided by the fossil fuel are actually quite valuable.
277	33:46	Electricity is valuable.
278	33:48	Transportation is valuable.
279	33:52	And are you willing to drop demand for those things to zero?
280	33:59	So the capitalistic economy will respond.
281	34:02	If it's clear, you know, how you're going to do your tax policies and your credit, you're going to drive innovation, then the infrastructure investments in those things will go down.
282	34:14	We see that with coal already today.
283	34:17	But ... Just speaking against something when you haven't created an alternative isn't going to get you to zero.
284	34:27	Giussani: OK, I want to shift topics.
285	34:29	You mentioned before the pandemic, and your main focus since you set up the Gates Foundation has been on global health.
286	34:35	I actually read the letter, the annual letter you wrote with your wife, Melinda, in January 2021, which was very much about the COVID-19 pandemic.
287	34:44	And I found myself marveling at how what you write resonates with the climate challenge.
288	34:50	What lessons from the pandemic can be actually applied to climate?
289	34:54	Gates: Well I think the biggest lesson is that governments got to, on our behalf, avoid disastrous future outcomes.
290	35:02	And individual citizens aren't equipped to either do those evaluations or think through that R and D and deployment plan that's necessary here.
291	35:17	And so we have to make it an imperative that governments, hopefully of any party, join in to this.
292	35:26	The pandemic, we did eventually get global cooperation.
293	35:30	The US didn't play its normal role there, but the private sector innovation created the vaccine.
294	35:38	Now, sadly, with climate, the pain it's causing gets worse over time.
295	35:43	So with the pandemic, we had all these deaths, and people were like, "Wow, OK, we should do something."
296	35:49	With climate you can't wait.
297	35:51	You know, the coral reefs will have died off, the species will be gone.
298	35:56	And so if you say, "OK, well, let's, when it gets bad, we'll invent something like a vaccine."
299	36:02	That doesn't work, because to stop the emissions, you have to change every steel plant, cement plant, car, things that have massive lead times and literally trillions of dollars of investment.
300	36:17	And so with the pandemic, we messed up.
301	36:20	We didn't pay attention.
302	36:23	You know, people like myself said it was a problem.
303	36:27	But, now we're getting our way out of it through innovation.
304	36:34	But climate's harder, much harder problem.
305	36:36	And so the political will to get it right needs to be unprecedented compared to the pandemic or almost any other political cause.
306	36:48	Giussani: I want to correct you about private-sector innovation, because, of course, a lot of public money went into funding research and guaranteed purchases.
307	36:58	And so for the vaccines.
308	36:59	But that's a separate interview.
309	37:01	Gates: Well, the Pfizer vaccine used no government money.
310	37:04	Giussani: That’s absolutely true.
311	37:07	Bill, still related to our reaction to these big challenges, over half of the total greenhouse gas emissions since 2017, 50 or 51 have gone up in the atmosphere in the last 30 years.
312	37:19	And we have known for more than 30 years that they have pernicious effects, to say the least.
313	37:25	So if we could mobilize such enormous resources and policies and collaborations and global collaborations against COVID-19, what's the lever we can use to mobilize the same against climate?
314	37:36	Gates: Well, until 2015, nobody pushed for the R and D budgets to go up.
315	37:41	So, you know, there are times when I think "Wow, are we serious, are we not?"
316	37:48	You know, that R and D question just wasn't discussed.
317	37:51	And you could read every paper on green steel and there were hardly any.
318	37:59	And so we are just starting to get serious about climate.
319	38:04	And you know, we've wasted a lot of time that we should have used to work on the hard parts of climates, just having short-term goals and not focusing on the R and D piece, you know, the last 20 years, we don't have much to show for the hard categories.
320	38:24	Now, there's still time to get there.
321	38:28	We will have to fund adaptation a great deal because the 2050 goal is not because that's a goal that gives you zero damage.
322	38:39	It's simply the goal that is the most ambitious that has a chance of being achieved.
323	38:47	And we are causing problems for subsistence farmers and sea-level rise and wildfires and natural ecosystems.
324	38:56	And so the adaptation side is even more underfunded than the mitigation side.
325	39:01	For example, helping poor farmers with seeds that can deal with the droughts and high temperatures is funded at less than a billion a year, which is deeply tragic.
326	39:15	Giussani: Bill, we’re getting towards the end.
327	39:17	I mentioned at the beginning, in the book you describe yourself as an imperfect messenger on climate.
328	39:23	What changes have you made in your personal and family life to reduce your footprint?
329	39:28	Gates: Well, I’m certainly driving an electric car, you know, putting solar panels on the houses where that makes sense.
330	39:40	Using this green aviation fuel, I still can't say that I've stopped eating meat or that I never fly.
331	39:51	And so it's mostly by funding at over seven million a year the products that although their green premiums are very high today, like the carbon capture or like the aviation fuel, by funding those, you actually get those on to the learning curve to get those prices down very dramatically.
332	40:15	One area that I do is I fund putting in electric heat-pumps into low-cost housing.
333	40:22	And so instead of using natural gas, they get a lower bill because it's done with electricity.
334	40:28	And I paid that extra capital cost as an offset.
335	40:33	So, you know, accelerating those demand things.
336	40:38	I've tried to get out in front of that.
337	40:40	Giussani: You also talk in the book about paying more than market value or the current market price for offsets, and you hinted to them before, talking about the golden standard.
338	40:52	Tell us about what kind of -- offsets can be kind of confusing and controversial.
339	40:57	What are the right offsets?
340	41:01	Gates: Well, first of all, it’s great that we’re finally talking about offsets, and any company that actually looks at their emissions and pays for offsets is way better than a company that either doesn't look at their emissions or looks at them and doesn't pay for offsets.
341	41:19	And so the leading companies are now buying offsets, some of them spending hundreds of millions to buy offsets.
342	41:27	That is a very, very good thing.
343	41:29	The ability to see which offsets actually have long-term benefit that really keep the carbon out for the over thousands of years that count.
344	41:40	There are now organizations that I and others are funding to label offsets as either gold standard or different levels of impact.
345	41:51	And the price of offsets range from 15 dollars a ton to 600 dollars a ton.
346	41:57	Some of the low-cost ones may be really legitimate, like reducing natural gas leakage.
347	42:06	That is pretty dramatic in some cases in terms of the dollars per tons avoided there.
348	42:17	A lot of the forestry things will probably not end up looking that good, as you really look at the lifetime of the tree or what would have happened otherwise.
349	42:26	But, you know, at least we're talking about offsets now.
350	42:30	And now we're going to do it in a thoughtful way.
351	42:35	Giussani: So some of the people listening to this interview may already be very involved with climate, others may be looking for ways to step up.
352	42:43	And at the end of your book, you have a chapter about individual action.
353	42:47	Give us maybe, say, two examples, two practical examples of things that individual citizens in the US, but also elsewhere, can do to play a meaningful role in tackling climate change.
354	42:59	Gates: I think everybody should start by learning more, you know.
355	43:04	How much steel do we make and where are those steel plants?
356	43:09	The industrial economy is kind of a miracle, although sadly, it's a source of so many emissions.
357	43:15	Once you really educate yourself, then you're in a position to educate others, hopefully, of diverse political beliefs about why this is so important.
358	43:26	And yet it's also very, very hard to do.
359	43:32	You have all your buying behavior, electric cars, artificial meat, you know, and you'll see for all the different products various things that indicate how green that product is.
360	43:43	And your demand doesn't just save those emissions, it also encourages the improvement of the green product.
361	43:55	Political voice, I'd still put it number one.
362	44:00	Making sure your company is measuring its emissions and is starting to fund offsets and is willing to be a customer for breakthrough storage solutions or green aviation fuel.
363	44:17	That is catalytic.
364	44:19	And a lot of those funds hopefully will go through this vehicle that's really identifying which projects globally are technologies that won't stay expensive but can do like what solar and wind did and come down in price.
365	44:35	So individuals are what drive this thing.
366	44:40	The democracies are where most of the innovation power is and they have to get activated and set the example.
367	44:48	Giussani: I would like to end on the outcome.
368	44:52	Maybe we should have started with the outcome, but let's imagine a world where we will actually have done all of what you describe in the book and everything else that's necessary.
369	45:02	What would that future everyday life look like?
370	45:07	Gates: Well, I think everybody will be really proud that humanity came together on a global basis to make this radical change and there's no precedent for it.
371	45:20	Even world wars, where we orchestrated lots of resources, it was, like, four or five year duration.
372	45:26	And here we're talking about three decades of hard work dealing with an enemy that the super bad stuff is out in the future.
373	45:36	And so you're benefiting young people and future generations.
374	45:40	In some ways, you know, life will look a lot like it does today.
375	45:48	You'll still have buildings, you'll have air conditioning, you'll have lights at night.
376	45:53	But all of those you'll multiply by zero in terms of what the emissions that come out of those activities are.
377	46:04	During the same time frame we'll have advances in medicine of curing cancer and finishing polio and malaria and all sorts of things.
378	46:14	And so by taking away this one super negative thing, then all the progress we make in other areas won't get reduced by this awful thing that, if it goes unchecked, the migration out of the equatorial regions, the number of deaths, it'll make the pandemic look like nothing.
379	46:35	I think so from a moral point of view and letting the other improvements not be offset by this.
380	46:43	It'll be a source of great pride that, hey, we came together.
381	46:50	Giussani: OK, let’s hope that we actually do.
382	46:52	Bill Gates, thank you for sharing your knowledge, thank you for this very, very important book.
383	46:57	And thank you for coming back to TED.
384	46:59	I want to close by showing another short clip from the TED-Ed animation series inspired by Bill's book.
385	47:04	This one is about material that's all around us, has a big carbon footprint and how to reinvent it.
386	47:11	Now, the series includes seven videos.
387	47:13	You can watch them all for free at ed.ted.com/planforzero.
388	47:19	That's planforzero, one single word.
389	47:22	And on the TED-Ed YouTube channel.
390	47:24	Thank you. Goodbye.
391	47:27	(Video) Look around your home.
392	47:28	Refrigeration, along with other heating and cooling, makes up about six percent of total emissions.
393	47:35	Agriculture, which produces our food, accounts for 18 percent.
394	47:39	Electricity is responsible for 27 percent.
395	47:44	Walk outside and the cars zipping past, planes overhead, trains ferrying commuters to work.
396	47:50	Transportation, including shipping, contributes 16 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
397	47:57	Even before we use any of these things, making them produces emissions, a lot of emissions.
398	48:04	Making materials, concrete, steel, plastic, glass, aluminum and everything else accounts for 31 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
399	48:14	[Watch the full animated series at ed.ted.com/planforzero and youtube.com/ted-ed]

Bill Gates: The innovations we need to avoid a climate disaster