Video: Bill Gates at TED: I Believe in Energy Miracles, Sexy Things!
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Thursday, Feb 18, 2010
Everyone knows super philanthropist Bill Gates has been hating on poverty and disease the way Windows hated on sleekness. But the geek Bono’s TED talk outlined a new agenda item. His one wish for the next 50 years? Not to be able to pick the next 10 presidents or a miracle vaccine. He would ask his genie for energy that is half as expensive as coal and doesn’t warm the planet. (Never mind that he could probably pick the next fifty presidents and develop a vaccine anyway.)
The big takeaway was zero, as in, if we want to stop the warming of the earth, the source of all kinds of havoc and the big hurdle to making the world not poor, we can’t stop using energy, we can’t stop people from doing things, we can’t kill people. We have to bring CO2 emissions to zero, period. Not many people really take that number seriously. Just try using it on your friends. Alex Steffen called Gates’ speech the most important energy speech of the year, mainly because of who delivered it.
But innovating energy technology to achieve zero carbon, even with his own efforts and the power of the TED attendees (who are there to help wishes come true), is a tall order. But there’s another solution: all the freaking energy technology we already have. Answer’s blowin’ in the wind, people, and in the sun too, and in the smart grids, and the energy efficiency. We’re just not really using it yet.
Of course it makes sense that this tech guru would be gunning for a big tech breakthrough. And yet, the irony: Microsoft itself was built on low-cost, un-dramatic solutions, deployed across the world at massive scale. It wasn’t built on leapfrogging other companies, on super inventions or on tons of R&D.
But Gates doesn’t seem to believe that that kind of thinking would work when it comes to energy. Instead of wind, solar, biofuels and smarter energy use, he’s putting most of his money behind controversy-soaked nuclear and more dramatic “energy miracles” that don’t quite exist yet. (Cue the 70s music, you sexy thing.)
Looks like the leader of the Cult of Bill is falling for the old tech trap: fetishizing the sexy things that exist yet while ignoring the kind of old stuff that does. In the face of what he indicates is some heavy disaster-level danger, he is betting (lots of money) on hope. It’s like one of those thriller killer movies, where the victim is surrounded by weapons but doesn’t see them, and you want to scream at the screen, hey, wake up! Gates even praises Al Gore’s new book, but he doesn’t seem to have read the back cover: “It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve the climate crisis period. The only missing ingredient is collective will….”
Joe Romm at Climate Progress has called out Gates before on his dubious dissing of the power of will, renewables and energy efficiency, and so he smacks him upside the head again:http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/14/bill-gates-ted-speech-innovation-energy-miracles/:
We simply don’t have the time to wait for Energy Miracles, and Gates simply hasn’t proposed the best strategy to achieve his wish — dramatic improvement in performance and a sharp drop in price.
Gates (who also holds out the doofus possibility of geoengineering) also doesn’t talk about better urban design, which can make us more efficient and happier, and he misses the boat on protecting nature, which is generally a good thing for the environment and the economy, and helps reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And while he starts with the premise that we need energy miracles because we need the poor people in the world to be happy and healthy, he doesn’t ask his richie rich audience to rethink what that means. Because if everyone wants to live in a big house with a garage and stream TED on three computers at once over Coke and microwaved pizza, the chances of Gates’ wish getting granted start rapidly approaching you-know-what number.
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Email: alexp at motherboard dot tv. @pasternack,
