Bill Gates on How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And we return now to our story, which is, of course, the climate crisis. While billionaire philanthropist, Bill Gates, has been working hard to help end this pandemic, he has never taken his eye off the growing threat to our natural world. Gates does not believe that the situation is hopeless, but he does believe it requires action and fast. He has put together a plan to reach zero global greenhouse emissions in his new book, which is called “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” And here he is with our Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Bill Gates, welcome back to the show.

BILL GATES, AUTHOR, “HOW TO AVOID A CLIMATE DISASTER”: Thank you.

ISAACSON: What have we learned from the pandemic that’ll help us in the fight against climate change?

GATES: Well, the general idea that the government should think ahead about bad things, we expect experts to make those investments. So, you know, we have building codes to minimize earthquake damage. We’ve got the Defense Department to do war games and be ready for attacks. Sadly, in the pandemic category, we did not invest at all. And so, our ability to diagnose travelers coming into the country and get going was very slow. Likewise, for climate. You know, we haven’t up the R&D budget. There’s a lot of various of emissions that were really not making much progress on. So, sadly, the climate change, it will incrementally get worse and worse and there’s no tool like a vaccine that, all by itself, even if you make the mistake that helps you to get out of it.

ISAACSON: In the new book, you talk about how you first became interested in energy through the foundation work and the whole concept of energy poverty. Explain that to me.

GATES: Yes. So, near 2000, the Gates Foundation got going. And so, I was making trips to Africa, parts that I had never been to before and seen not only the lack of electricity but also the precarious nature of the ports (ph) there who are overwhelmingly farmers. And, you know, some years their crops are less productive, some years they fail altogether. And so, thinking about, gosh, let’s get electricity to this continent, but what is this constraint of climate change and how bad is it going to be? I had time to sit with the experts. I was very lucky that they put huge effort into finding the right people to educate me, and that got me super worried about what it means not just for Africa but for the entire world.

ISAACSON: But isn’t there some conflict between trying to make sure that places like Africa get the energy that they need in order to become productive and growing societies and the issue of the reducing the carbon emissions on this planet?

GATES: Yes, absolutely. At some level of wealth, the poorest countries, whatever the costs are for them to go green should get subsidized. The extra cost I call the green premium. Now, when you move up to middle income countries even including India, Brazil, China, we can’t afford the pay the green premium there. So, only through innovation are we going to be able to save India, please use the green approach as they’re building basic shelter, air conditioning, lights at night, you know, the very basic things that their citizens demand.

ISAACSON: But they are getting a lot of the energy from coal fire plants that are done cheaply in China, and China gets to export to them. What do you do to try to resist that?

GATES: Well, coal, sadly, is the cheapest form of energy right now in most of Asia. The renewable prices have come down, that’s fantastic. But often the — you know, where the renewable sources, when you need the power, they are far away. Even in China, you have to build the transmission. The Indian network getting capital into it is tough because you have a lot of financial debts there and electric bills that are not paid. And so, only by really bringing the cost down can we make the case to them that they should stop building new coal plants. Almost all of the new coal plants in the world are connected to India or China, and that is why China is so far only committed to reducing the emissions by 2060. And so, we’ll have to, you know, help to some degree, but mostly take the incredible power of innovation which the U.S. still is the — by far the leader in that and surprise people on how affordable we make it. Not just for electricity, but also for steel and cement where China in those categories has also got the biggest footprint.

ISAACSON: Well, look at what happened in Texas in the past few days. The grid has been a mess, it has not worked. Some people there are blaming it on the fact that they were depending on windmills and turbines. What went wrong and what should we learn from this cold snap we’ve just had and the electricity problems it caused?

GATES: Well, this particular problem had nothing to do with an overdependent on renewables. Although, some wind went down, the big drop was in the natural gas capacity in one of the reactors. These things can work in very cold weather but they just saved the money and didn’t weatherize them. I mean, natural gas plants and wind work in North Dakota, Alaska, Antarctica. And also, their grid structure where they’re pretty isolated from the west and the eastern grid, that meant that even when they had problems, they couldn’t import power. There are weather conditions that — you know, like cold fronts over the Midwest where the amount of wind does go down, but that wasn’t what we ran into this week in Texas.

ISAACSON: You know, after reading your new book, I became so much more convinced of how critical it is to actually get nuclear power more into the mix. Tell me, what are you doing and what should we be doing to make it safer, cheaper and to make it so it doesn’t frighten people?

GATES: Yes. Part of the beauty of nuclear is that on a long-term basis it actually has been quite safe. I mean, Chernobyl was horrific, you know, some awful mistakes were made. The biggest problem with nuclear today, besides these challenges at the public acceptance, are the economics. Westinghouse went bankrupt because their reactors had such big cost overruns, and there’s very few plants, only two being built in the U.S., because natural gas is so cheap. It’s outcompeted existing nuclear and coal very effectively. In fact, only the renewables in a complimentary fashion are what is really being built in the U.S. right now. The exciting thing is that if we start from scratch and we stop using high- pressure water and we do digital simulations of all the safety and how to minimize the size of everything, we can build a reactor that is competitive and is dramatically more safe. The government had a funding round that TerraPower and some other companies, TerraPower is the nuclear fusion company I helped back. So, we won the funding, 50 percent from the private side, 50 percent from the government to take five years and build a demo to show that it is dramatically different. And so, that, you know, gives me a lot of hope that nuclear can play a role. I got involved just because, because of the need of climate reasons to have that as a very scalable green non-weather-dependent way of making electricity.

ISAACSON: Tell me why this nuclear power is safer.

GATES: Today’s reactors have a lot of high pressure. And if you get a leak, then things want to get out. The fundamental problem is that you split the uranium atom and that gives you an immense amount of energy. The remaining pieces are radioactive. And so, you need to basically guarantee that the waste is not going to get out particularly up in the air and, you know, Chernobyl was where that was so awful. Now, we’ve known that we can build reactors that just by physics principles, there is no pressure in the reactor, there is nothing that wants to leave the site boundary. You have to move away from water and use a sodium metal coolant that many experimental reactors have used. And so, that’s the TerraPower approach. It means that there’s enough new there that — you know, it’s a big engineering budget, but we get huge reductions in the cost. And so, you know, even just in terms of having low-cost electricity, it is a big contribution.

ISAACSON: I was surprised to read in your book that transportation, which I always thought was a big emitter of the greenhouse gases, is actually much smaller than things like cement as you say or steel. Is there some way to try to handle the problems of cement and steel?

GATES: Those are particularly hard. And if you look at the cost of doing it in a green way, for cement, you have to double the price. With cement, you start by heating limestone and that’s a chemical reaction that releases CO2 to free up the calcium. And the heat you need, you need very high heat, 1,400 degrees. And so, you generally burn natural gas. You have two reasons why that’s CO2 emitting, replacing the chemical reaction is going to require either capturing that CO2 or some ingenious approach, and we are backing to break through energy venture group I created, we are backing a lot of ideas about new ways of doing cement. But cement and steel, I would put at the top of the list of the things that are very, very hard to make the green product without a huge green premium.

ISAACSON: You have always been focused on solving the problems through technical innovations. But when you were doing the global poverty work, it seemed to me that you eventually began to think it’s not just about innovation, it’s about government and getting involvement of policy as well. That got you a bit out of the comfort zone, and you start having to deal with the policy and politics, not just making a new vaccine. Explain how that worked?

GATES: Yes, I thought that if the Gates Foundation funded the creation of new vaccines, that the uptake could be handled by others and I could stick to the meeting with scientists and what we know about biology. In fact, what I found out early on as we looked at all the cost of childhood death, there were — the two biggest killers, pneumonia and diarrhea, the rich countries had vaccines. Now, they didn’t need to be invented. In fact, they were getting to the kids at the lowest risk of those diseases. And so, instead, it was about finance, it was about delivery, how you staff a primary health care system. And so, amazingly, two of the things I am most proud are the Gates Foundation funding of Gavi, which was to buy and deliver those vaccines and the global fund which was focused on malaria and TB and HIV, and those — our partners are completely the other governments. So, you know, I am, you know, a friend of governments. You know, recently, we have been raising money for coronavirus vaccines. I’m on the phone a great deal not only with the U.S. government people, but, you know, government leaders all over the world. And so, yes, that is a turnaround from what I thought, hey, just science, just innovation, you know, leave the government alone was the way to go.

ISAACSON: And in your book you talk about having to do that turnaround when it comes to climate as well, you can’t just deal with the technology, you realize you have to deal with government. Tell me, in that dealing of government, how much of a change has it been dealing with the Trump administration and now dealing with the people around President Joe Biden?

GATES: Well, certainly on climate, the Trump administration was trying to stop things from being cancelled. And so, you know, the tax credits, which ad been very helpful, largely staying intact. The energy R&D budget stopped going up, which it had done under Obama, but it was maintained even though the executive branch said to cut it, Congress kept it flat. Now, under Biden, they’re prioritizing climate. The R&D budget will go up quite a bit, including support for things like nuclear. The regulations around how do we get transmission out. Hopefully, this builds back better initiative, will include climate-related things like better transmission capability. The tax credits, we need to apply them to new areas like carbon capture and storage. And so, the dialogue is now very, very intense. And I think that some good things will come out of that. Having said that, we don’t want climate to be a purely partisan issue where, you know, when one party is in power, you make progress, some of the other ones in power you don’t. Because when you’re saying to people build steel mills or power generators, you know, every once in a while these policies will be in place and then they won’t, you can’t make the hundreds of billions of investments in going green unless the core of the issue is agreed upon, even though, you know, it is good, actually healthy to have disagreement over the tactics of the role of the government and private sector in how we get to the goal.

ISAACSON: A lot of the companies and individuals are reducing their carbon footprint by buying offsets. How do you do that personality and how does one do it in a way that’s not just green washing or like buying indulgences for some pope and it’s actually a real — it actually does cover the carbon emission?

GATES: Yes. So, there is quite a variety of quietly of offsets. I’m paying Climeworks, which up in Iceland, does direct air capture and takes the CO2 and puts it mineral deposits for millions of years. I’m buying clean — green aviation fuel for my plane, and it wasn’t available up in Washington State. So, now, I’ve made the largest individual commitment to them that they have gotten. And so, I have that available. You know, obviously, using solar panels, electric cars. Another one that’s interesting is that when they are doing a new low-cost housing project, I can put up the capital so it’s electric heating and cooling, they benefit by having lower monthly bill and I take the credit for the fact that that’s a much lower carbon footprint. So, overall, I paid $7 million a year, which averages out about $400 a ton. Now, it just shows that it’s not scalable, you know, that’s way too expensive. And so, you know, innovating down green premium, you know, so, I’m buying these products, hopefully, that gets that going. In fact, we want to create an overall buying program called Catalyst where we get governments and companies, and maybe individuals, to get the money in, because when you buy green products, if it’s the one that can, with volume, get very cheap, you are not only to that specific carbon reduction, but by bringing the price down, you’re causing that whole sector to accelerate its transition.

ISAACSON: At the end of the book, you talk about what we can do, including people like us who are not worried particularly about jet fuel for their jets. What is it, each one of us should be doing each day?

GATES: Yes. Well, we really all have three roles. We’ve got our political voice and educating other people about why we care about this, hopefully on a bipartisan way. We’ve got our dollars as consumers. So, buying electric car even though it still has a bit of a tradeoff, contributes to the cause. You know, likewise, these new types of meat production products. And all the products you buy, you’ll have a green rating over time, and will get the qualities of those to be (INAUDIBLE) direct your dollars according to your beliefs. Finally, you know, wherever you work, they can make a contribution, whether it’s their buying power, their skillset and, you know, we see the finance sector or the tech sector all coming in and saying things like, OK, we can afford to buy green steel and cement. And so, let’s — we’ll help get that market going or we can make our data center so it’s not just sort of green, but it really never takes any hydrocarbon generation to help power that data center. And so, you know, as companies — it’s great that they’re kind of competing to say, OK, we care about this cause because we are a good citizen, because our employees want us to, you know, that can help to get even the hard parts of the problem on that learning curve.

ISAACSON: Thanks, Bill, and thanks for the book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” Thanks for being with us.

GATES: Yes. Great to talk to you.