Bill Gates: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put in a spreadsheet?”
I totally love this. But is there only one smart billionaire? https://t.co/CDz76pVIm3
— Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow) May 21, 2019
Cheap renewables won’t stop global warming, says Bill Gates
“Electricity is just 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Gates. “There is no substitute for how the industrial economy runs today.”
When financial analysts proposed rating companies on their CO2 output to drive down emissions, Gates was appalled by the idea that the climate and energy problem would be easy to solve. He asked them: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put in a spreadsheet?”
“The idea that we have the current tools and it’s just because these utility people are evil people and if we could just beat on them and put (solar panels) on our rooftop—that is more of a block than climate denial,” Gates said. “The ‘climate is easy to solve’ group is our biggest problem.”
Similarly, he knocked down the idea that natural gas replacing coal for generating electricity is helping solve the energy and climate problem.
“The goal is not to take a bow because you use natural gas,” which emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, Gates said. “That contributes zero! In fact, because the forcing function is sooner on natural gas, converting coal to natural gas for the next 50 years and then shutting it down, that’s a net addition” to emissions.
