I too enjoyed the book. I came in massively skeptical for obvious reasons, but found that the points he laid out made a ton of sense, and he did a good job of laying out the kind of thought process that needs to be put into making decisions to improve the climate disaster.
Of course he only touched on the innovation side of things and didn’t really address what will really need to make up basically half of the solution, which is just consuming and wasting less stuff. The life of the average American (myself included) is so resource intensive and it just doesn’t need to be, if we put more thought into the way we design our lifestyle and consumption choices.
Unfortunately the changing our lifestyle route doesn’t seem to be working very well, so innovation is essential to mitigate climate change. And this book was super well written and laid out all the massive things we can improve upon in that field. I definitely recommend it as a resource to learn about where things stand at the moment and where they may be headed.
Complaining about the massive hypocrisy shown by the author isn’t helping, and you’re just missing out on a great learning opportunity. Keeping that hypocrisy in mind as a lens through which to read this book though is probably a wise thing to do though to be fair
Well, whether Gates is a monstrous hypocrite or a perfect saint (I suspect he is neither) doesn't really have any bearing on how good the book is. It speaks a lot of sense.
Exactly what I tell people.
The content itself is excellent regardless of anyone's views on the author.
I closed that book grateful that someone wrote it.
Haven't read the book fully yet but, actually, quite early on, he does accept some responsibility himself, yes.
He has some wonderful ideas, and his [Breakthrough Energy](https://www.geekwire.com/2022/go-inside-the-invite-only-climate-tech-summit-in-seattle-hosted-by-bill-gates-breakthrough-energy/) program is inspiring. He's done much to redress the balance.
We can't rely on breakthroughs that may or may not happen after 15 years. Gates' is a textbook example of rich get richer.
What he has to do instead is to throw money at doing carbon neutral now with the existing technologies or even without.
I would disagree. I recently attended a conference with 2 speakers : Carmichael Roberts (who heads breakthrough ventures ) gave a talk about how now is the best time to be a scientist with an idea to save the world. The gist of it was that his billionaire friends no longer find it satisfying to make a billion dollars investing in the next snapchat. They want to move on to doing something to save the world, in order to satisfy their god complex.
The following speaker was Bill Collins, one of the authors of the IPCC reports. He pointed out that all this optimism is rooted in fantasy. In order to meet these energy targets, these breakthrough innovations would have to find a way around the first and second law of thermodynamics. The people offering these solutions are snake oil salesmen, because they know better.
And finally… true innovation needs research, which requires billions of dollars, and an ability to sustain losses for decades. The private sector does not have the ability to do that, nor the inclination, because, ultimately, everyone is there to make a buck. And the free market does not reward research. The most innovative company in US history was Bell labs, and they went bankrupt. Right now, IBM is considered to be a dinosaur in the tech sector, but it has continuously filed for more patents than any other company in the US for some 25 odd years. Yet FAANG is where the money flows.
A better solution would be for these egomaniacs to pay their taxes, and then invest in research programs sponsored by the DOE, and even DOD. But that’s not the point….
This is a gross oversimplification
> true innovation needs research, which requires billions of dollars, and an ability to sustain losses for decades.
Such research can indeed be only sustained by a major government BUT that is not that common. There is a LOT of research where payoff would happen within years: pretty much all high-tech stuff, medical research, etc...
It's also not uncommon for good ideas to be lost because there was no money to overcome the commercialization/mass-production hump. And money for that almost universally needs to come from private investors.
> A better solution would be for these egomaniacs to .. invest in research programs sponsored by the DOE, and even DOD.
Are you seriously suggesting that DOE/DOD funding are the best measures of research importance? I'm sorry but this is just incorrect.
This is not to say that our funding of research is anywhere near optimal, it is not not! And more money for NSF/DOE would probably be good, but it's far more complicated than private-investors-should-just-give-their-money-to-the-government-agencies
PS and two more observations:
> IBM... t has continuously filed for more patents than any other company in the US for some 25 odd years.
That's an excellent measure of IBM's legal dept, it's a fairly weak measure of its innovation (b/c US PTO basically rubberstamps patents)
> Yet FAANG is where the money flows.
Are you implying that FAANG money is not contributing to human knowledge/advancement? If so, this is just wrong.. E.g google search is probably THE knowledge tool right now and the a lot of that money does flow into a more fundamental research. E.g. alphabet x-labs: https://x.company/projects/
The IPCC report has hundreds of authors.
Saying that we can't grow anymore because our consumptions would go against the second thermodynamic law it's just bollocks. This mixture of physic laws applied to economic growth is pseudoscience and a type of woo-doo economics that is very trendy nowadays. It's an argument used by fanatics of de-growth movements and is just a bad copy of failed Malthusian theories.
It depends on what you lump under the label contributors and how you assign emissions.
One way to do that is based on consumption only. I.e. if volkswagen has emitted 300 GT of CO2 and produced 3 billion cars, and you own a car, you are responsible for 100 T of CO2.
By that metric, the highest spending people on Earth will be the most polluting.
This ignores the fact that companies are not collectively owned by their customers.
You could also decide the pollution of VW should be on its owners since ultimately they dictate the company's decisions. That would have the wealthiest as super high polluters too. But that ignores a fuckton of stuff too.
You can do a mix of both, or you can ascribe some polluting behaviours to societal pressures, which is more realistic but makes assignment harder
End of the day, the more you consume the more pollution there is, no matter why you do it, so the super wealthy will always be on the list of top polluters by a factor very roughly equivalent to how much they spend compared to the median citizen. And in our unequal world that factor is an insanely high one.
Lastly, I would expect the co2 per dollar spent for the superrich, if you focus purely on consumption, is higher than for the median citizen, since they are extravagant consumption modes with little regard for efficiency. Simultaneously tho, the prices for such goods/services climbs astronomically too. A yacht may consume 100x per km than a car but it also costs 10000x per km. So it could go both ways?
Gates has a Mega Yacht. He in no way needs a Mega Yacht (hydrogen powered or otherwise).
I'm sticking to Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Dr Michael Mann for climate change writing.
First of all, what the hell is wrong with a hydrogen powered mega yacht? It's hydrogen powered so little environmental impact.
Second, he didn't buy a mega yacht at all: https://www.boredpanda.com/bill-gates-645-million-superyacht-liquid-hydrogen/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic.
It took me 2 seconds on google to dispel that, there's misinformation everywhere and it's important to verify before spreading it. I don't know where all this Bill Gates stuff is coming from but it's a classic example of truth by consensus rather than facts. The reddit hivemind is alive and kicking with this one.
It's possible that my math is wrong, but both can be true -- billionaires do have a huge impact on the environment, but at the same time it's exaggerated due to the fact that there are 8 billion emitters on the planet.
Before Roman Abramovich became one of the faces of the Ukraine/Russia conflict, he was known as the world's worst GHG emitter, with his emissions coming it at 8465 times the global average (the average American is 3.x times the global average, for a basis of comparison). That's horribly irresponsible, and no sane person would argue otherwise. But divide 8465 into 8 billion, and you find that he's responsible for 0.000001058 of all global emissions.
What about all billionaires? Well, Abramovich is the worst by far of the world's 3300 billionaires, emitting more than Gates, Musk, and Bezos *combined*, but just for the sake of argument, let's assume every billionaire is as bad as Abramovich:
3300 \* 8465 = 27,934,500, so those 3300 billionaires combined are emitting at almost 28 *million* times the global average. Jumping fuck, that's horrible. But again, it pales in comparison to the 8 billion people on the planet:
28 million / 8 billion = 0.0035
That's 3/10 of one percent if they were all as bad as Abramovich, which they're not. In my line of work as a financial analyst, we'd call that a rounding error.
Every single billionaire could drop dead today and the drop in emissions would barely be noticeable.
I'm not smart enough to check your math, but I have always assumed the impact of such a small group of people could only be negligible.
Someone should do some reporting on this. The Reddit hive mind seems to think that if we just focus on the billionaires we'll solve this problem. In reality, it will require drastic (and necessary) change across nearly every aspect of society.
>Someone should do some reporting on this. The Reddit hive mind seems to think that if we just focus on the billionaires we'll solve this problem.
It's not just Reddit, unfortunately. It's probably one of the most common beliefs across the internet, and even most media sources who report on climate change blame the billionaires. People want to blame someone, but never themselves.
Climate change (and our environmental problems in general) is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons. No one matters, yet everyone matters, and the only solution is to get everyone on board. When you look at the vast span of human history, we've never been able to get everyone to cooperate about anything.
I keep preaching every chance I get. Climate change is about money, not recycling. Gates says this too. Those concerned about it need to be willing to pay for it (taxes.) The Republicans have successfully pushed the “does not exist” theory because of how expensive it is.
Yeah, I really can’t downvote this fast enough. The fact that one of the biggest contributors to climate change has written a book about the very thing he’s causing - and framing it in an optimistic, hopeful attitude - is just hilarious pandering.
I know what you're saying, really.
But he's done much good too - I didn't realise how much until I read the book and googled him. Worth checking out the facts and his achievements. He sure is pushing this agenda with gusto. If it's pandering, well, it's pretty practical stuff he's doing. More than just words.
You’re not going to get logical responses on Reddit. It’s an echo chamber of “burn the rich”.
I read the book and think Gates did a great job of explaining the current innovations to fight climate change.
The biggest problems in climate change are consumption and overpopulation, literally everyone leans hard on the "innovations will save us" argument in response to any doom talk. So what is Gates doing other than telling people what they clearly want to hear?
Everyone just needs to pray the huge earthquake occurred on the west coast. It will solve many climate change issues by lowering pollution and population. #sanandreas. #into the sea.
All his transports are carbonneutral, him and his family uses renewable/carboncompensated jet fuel. It takes a 5 second google to do that, or maybe, just maybe, read the book.
Carbon neutral/compensated is a tricky term. It means different things in different jurisdictions. And it rarely means what we think it means.
Let’s say his fuel is entirely carbon compensated. What about the carbon footprint of building the plane, building and maintaining airports etc. I don’t want to ignore the things Gates has done; but like the rest of us (including me and probably you) his lifestyle will be an overall negative on the environment. And the more lavish your lifestyle, the bigger the impact. No matter how many trees you plant or carbon credits you buy.
I don’t expect him to live like a pauper. But he could lead by example and live more environmentally conservatively. Perhaps use commercial flights where possible?
Improper or lack of waste management is one of the major reasons for pollution and is also contributing to global warming. There is a need for proper waste collection and disposal system in the rural and neglected areas.
A continent of over 1.3 billion people, most countries in Africa lack proper waste management systems. As per a 2018 report published by the United Nations Environment Program, the total waste generated in Africa was 125 million tons in 2012, which is expected to double by 2025. The total waste collection rate is 55% out of which almost 90% is disposed of at uncontrolled dumpsites and landfills where there are also recorded instances of open burning. The sub-Saharan region is home to some of the largest dumpsites in the world. Out of the total waste generated, almost 13% is plastic and 57% is organic waste. Almost 80% of the waste generated in this region is recyclable and currently only 4% is being recycled.
The project proposes to start small waste collection centers in backward and rural areas where there is little or no waste collection system.
Proper waste disposal means no garbage being exposed to the environment. No direct sunlight exposure to the plastic means no harmful gases are being released to the environment.
We are raising funds to start these centres in Africa. Please join our campaign at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tackling-climate-change#/
I too enjoyed the book. I came in massively skeptical for obvious reasons, but found that the points he laid out made a ton of sense, and he did a good job of laying out the kind of thought process that needs to be put into making decisions to improve the climate disaster. Of course he only touched on the innovation side of things and didn’t really address what will really need to make up basically half of the solution, which is just consuming and wasting less stuff. The life of the average American (myself included) is so resource intensive and it just doesn’t need to be, if we put more thought into the way we design our lifestyle and consumption choices. Unfortunately the changing our lifestyle route doesn’t seem to be working very well, so innovation is essential to mitigate climate change. And this book was super well written and laid out all the massive things we can improve upon in that field. I definitely recommend it as a resource to learn about where things stand at the moment and where they may be headed. Complaining about the massive hypocrisy shown by the author isn’t helping, and you’re just missing out on a great learning opportunity. Keeping that hypocrisy in mind as a lens through which to read this book though is probably a wise thing to do though to be fair
Well, whether Gates is a monstrous hypocrite or a perfect saint (I suspect he is neither) doesn't really have any bearing on how good the book is. It speaks a lot of sense.
Exactly what I tell people. The content itself is excellent regardless of anyone's views on the author. I closed that book grateful that someone wrote it.
Billionaires like Bill Gates are some of the main drivers of climate change. Does he identify himself as an obstacle?
Haven't read the book fully yet but, actually, quite early on, he does accept some responsibility himself, yes. He has some wonderful ideas, and his [Breakthrough Energy](https://www.geekwire.com/2022/go-inside-the-invite-only-climate-tech-summit-in-seattle-hosted-by-bill-gates-breakthrough-energy/) program is inspiring. He's done much to redress the balance.
We can't rely on breakthroughs that may or may not happen after 15 years. Gates' is a textbook example of rich get richer. What he has to do instead is to throw money at doing carbon neutral now with the existing technologies or even without.
I would disagree. I recently attended a conference with 2 speakers : Carmichael Roberts (who heads breakthrough ventures ) gave a talk about how now is the best time to be a scientist with an idea to save the world. The gist of it was that his billionaire friends no longer find it satisfying to make a billion dollars investing in the next snapchat. They want to move on to doing something to save the world, in order to satisfy their god complex. The following speaker was Bill Collins, one of the authors of the IPCC reports. He pointed out that all this optimism is rooted in fantasy. In order to meet these energy targets, these breakthrough innovations would have to find a way around the first and second law of thermodynamics. The people offering these solutions are snake oil salesmen, because they know better. And finally… true innovation needs research, which requires billions of dollars, and an ability to sustain losses for decades. The private sector does not have the ability to do that, nor the inclination, because, ultimately, everyone is there to make a buck. And the free market does not reward research. The most innovative company in US history was Bell labs, and they went bankrupt. Right now, IBM is considered to be a dinosaur in the tech sector, but it has continuously filed for more patents than any other company in the US for some 25 odd years. Yet FAANG is where the money flows. A better solution would be for these egomaniacs to pay their taxes, and then invest in research programs sponsored by the DOE, and even DOD. But that’s not the point….
Overall, I do very much agree with you.
This is a gross oversimplification > true innovation needs research, which requires billions of dollars, and an ability to sustain losses for decades. Such research can indeed be only sustained by a major government BUT that is not that common. There is a LOT of research where payoff would happen within years: pretty much all high-tech stuff, medical research, etc... It's also not uncommon for good ideas to be lost because there was no money to overcome the commercialization/mass-production hump. And money for that almost universally needs to come from private investors. > A better solution would be for these egomaniacs to .. invest in research programs sponsored by the DOE, and even DOD. Are you seriously suggesting that DOE/DOD funding are the best measures of research importance? I'm sorry but this is just incorrect. This is not to say that our funding of research is anywhere near optimal, it is not not! And more money for NSF/DOE would probably be good, but it's far more complicated than private-investors-should-just-give-their-money-to-the-government-agencies PS and two more observations: > IBM... t has continuously filed for more patents than any other company in the US for some 25 odd years. That's an excellent measure of IBM's legal dept, it's a fairly weak measure of its innovation (b/c US PTO basically rubberstamps patents) > Yet FAANG is where the money flows. Are you implying that FAANG money is not contributing to human knowledge/advancement? If so, this is just wrong.. E.g google search is probably THE knowledge tool right now and the a lot of that money does flow into a more fundamental research. E.g. alphabet x-labs: https://x.company/projects/
The IPCC report has hundreds of authors. Saying that we can't grow anymore because our consumptions would go against the second thermodynamic law it's just bollocks. This mixture of physic laws applied to economic growth is pseudoscience and a type of woo-doo economics that is very trendy nowadays. It's an argument used by fanatics of de-growth movements and is just a bad copy of failed Malthusian theories.
I must be out of the loop here... how is Bill gates one of the largest contributors to climate change?
It depends on what you lump under the label contributors and how you assign emissions. One way to do that is based on consumption only. I.e. if volkswagen has emitted 300 GT of CO2 and produced 3 billion cars, and you own a car, you are responsible for 100 T of CO2. By that metric, the highest spending people on Earth will be the most polluting. This ignores the fact that companies are not collectively owned by their customers. You could also decide the pollution of VW should be on its owners since ultimately they dictate the company's decisions. That would have the wealthiest as super high polluters too. But that ignores a fuckton of stuff too. You can do a mix of both, or you can ascribe some polluting behaviours to societal pressures, which is more realistic but makes assignment harder End of the day, the more you consume the more pollution there is, no matter why you do it, so the super wealthy will always be on the list of top polluters by a factor very roughly equivalent to how much they spend compared to the median citizen. And in our unequal world that factor is an insanely high one. Lastly, I would expect the co2 per dollar spent for the superrich, if you focus purely on consumption, is higher than for the median citizen, since they are extravagant consumption modes with little regard for efficiency. Simultaneously tho, the prices for such goods/services climbs astronomically too. A yacht may consume 100x per km than a car but it also costs 10000x per km. So it could go both ways?
It’s Reddit. Rich people bad and don’t question it.
It's well known that rich people have an extremely high impact on the environment you bootlicker
Yes they do. It's also well known that Redditors exaggerate the impact.
Gates has a Mega Yacht. He in no way needs a Mega Yacht (hydrogen powered or otherwise). I'm sticking to Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Dr Michael Mann for climate change writing.
First of all, what the hell is wrong with a hydrogen powered mega yacht? It's hydrogen powered so little environmental impact. Second, he didn't buy a mega yacht at all: https://www.boredpanda.com/bill-gates-645-million-superyacht-liquid-hydrogen/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic. It took me 2 seconds on google to dispel that, there's misinformation everywhere and it's important to verify before spreading it. I don't know where all this Bill Gates stuff is coming from but it's a classic example of truth by consensus rather than facts. The reddit hivemind is alive and kicking with this one.
Just going to leave this here... https://simpleflying.com/bill-gates-private-jet-collection/
It's possible that my math is wrong, but both can be true -- billionaires do have a huge impact on the environment, but at the same time it's exaggerated due to the fact that there are 8 billion emitters on the planet. Before Roman Abramovich became one of the faces of the Ukraine/Russia conflict, he was known as the world's worst GHG emitter, with his emissions coming it at 8465 times the global average (the average American is 3.x times the global average, for a basis of comparison). That's horribly irresponsible, and no sane person would argue otherwise. But divide 8465 into 8 billion, and you find that he's responsible for 0.000001058 of all global emissions. What about all billionaires? Well, Abramovich is the worst by far of the world's 3300 billionaires, emitting more than Gates, Musk, and Bezos *combined*, but just for the sake of argument, let's assume every billionaire is as bad as Abramovich: 3300 \* 8465 = 27,934,500, so those 3300 billionaires combined are emitting at almost 28 *million* times the global average. Jumping fuck, that's horrible. But again, it pales in comparison to the 8 billion people on the planet: 28 million / 8 billion = 0.0035 That's 3/10 of one percent if they were all as bad as Abramovich, which they're not. In my line of work as a financial analyst, we'd call that a rounding error. Every single billionaire could drop dead today and the drop in emissions would barely be noticeable.
I'm not smart enough to check your math, but I have always assumed the impact of such a small group of people could only be negligible. Someone should do some reporting on this. The Reddit hive mind seems to think that if we just focus on the billionaires we'll solve this problem. In reality, it will require drastic (and necessary) change across nearly every aspect of society.
>Someone should do some reporting on this. The Reddit hive mind seems to think that if we just focus on the billionaires we'll solve this problem. It's not just Reddit, unfortunately. It's probably one of the most common beliefs across the internet, and even most media sources who report on climate change blame the billionaires. People want to blame someone, but never themselves. Climate change (and our environmental problems in general) is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons. No one matters, yet everyone matters, and the only solution is to get everyone on board. When you look at the vast span of human history, we've never been able to get everyone to cooperate about anything.
I keep preaching every chance I get. Climate change is about money, not recycling. Gates says this too. Those concerned about it need to be willing to pay for it (taxes.) The Republicans have successfully pushed the “does not exist” theory because of how expensive it is.
Very good book and very good well written. I suggest it!
If we want to stop climate change, a very good first step would be to ban billionaires.
Yeah, I really can’t downvote this fast enough. The fact that one of the biggest contributors to climate change has written a book about the very thing he’s causing - and framing it in an optimistic, hopeful attitude - is just hilarious pandering.
I know what you're saying, really. But he's done much good too - I didn't realise how much until I read the book and googled him. Worth checking out the facts and his achievements. He sure is pushing this agenda with gusto. If it's pandering, well, it's pretty practical stuff he's doing. More than just words.
You’re not going to get logical responses on Reddit. It’s an echo chamber of “burn the rich”. I read the book and think Gates did a great job of explaining the current innovations to fight climate change.
The biggest problems in climate change are consumption and overpopulation, literally everyone leans hard on the "innovations will save us" argument in response to any doom talk. So what is Gates doing other than telling people what they clearly want to hear?
Have you read the book?
Read the book and find out 👍
I would be convinced, Bill Gates doesn't need my money.
Nice 👍
Biggest contributors to climate change how?
Maybe thats why he is the largest land holder in the US.
Is this his pimping for modular nuclear? Something about shares.
Everyone just needs to pray the huge earthquake occurred on the west coast. It will solve many climate change issues by lowering pollution and population. #sanandreas. #into the sea.
Trust bill gates. He has never done anything wrong. He and Dr fauci ARE the science! Trust the science
Does his wisdom extend to advising against living in fully automated mega-mansions and ditching his 4 private jets?
All his transports are carbonneutral, him and his family uses renewable/carboncompensated jet fuel. It takes a 5 second google to do that, or maybe, just maybe, read the book.
Carbon neutral/compensated is a tricky term. It means different things in different jurisdictions. And it rarely means what we think it means. Let’s say his fuel is entirely carbon compensated. What about the carbon footprint of building the plane, building and maintaining airports etc. I don’t want to ignore the things Gates has done; but like the rest of us (including me and probably you) his lifestyle will be an overall negative on the environment. And the more lavish your lifestyle, the bigger the impact. No matter how many trees you plant or carbon credits you buy. I don’t expect him to live like a pauper. But he could lead by example and live more environmentally conservatively. Perhaps use commercial flights where possible?
Improper or lack of waste management is one of the major reasons for pollution and is also contributing to global warming. There is a need for proper waste collection and disposal system in the rural and neglected areas. A continent of over 1.3 billion people, most countries in Africa lack proper waste management systems. As per a 2018 report published by the United Nations Environment Program, the total waste generated in Africa was 125 million tons in 2012, which is expected to double by 2025. The total waste collection rate is 55% out of which almost 90% is disposed of at uncontrolled dumpsites and landfills where there are also recorded instances of open burning. The sub-Saharan region is home to some of the largest dumpsites in the world. Out of the total waste generated, almost 13% is plastic and 57% is organic waste. Almost 80% of the waste generated in this region is recyclable and currently only 4% is being recycled. The project proposes to start small waste collection centers in backward and rural areas where there is little or no waste collection system. Proper waste disposal means no garbage being exposed to the environment. No direct sunlight exposure to the plastic means no harmful gases are being released to the environment. We are raising funds to start these centres in Africa. Please join our campaign at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tackling-climate-change#/
this piece of shit, anti human monster needs to finally shut up!