At the annual TED conference in Long Beach, California, Bill Gates delivered a stirring speech in which he argued that energy innovation is the key to addressing climate change. During his speech, the billionaire businessman and philanthropist unveiled his vision for how the world can reduce carbon emissions to zero and pleaded “that we have to drive full speed” toward achieving this goal. “Until we get to zero [carbon emissions], the temperature of the planet will continue to rise,” said Gates, “so we need to get to zero.”
To explain his reasoning for focusing on reducing the carbon intensity of our energy production rather than improving energy efficiency, Gates relied on the “Kaya Identity” equation:
CO2 = P x S x E x C
(# of people) (services per person) (energy per service) (carbon per unit energy)
In order for us to achieve zero carbon emissions and stop global warming, “one of these numbers must get to zero.” The Earth’s population will continue to grow until it reaches its carrying capacity. The global population is expected to hit nine billion by 2050. Services per person will also continue to increase over time. “Getting rid of poverty means providing these services. It’s a great thing for this number to go up.”
“Efficiency, E, the energy for each service – here, finally, we have some good news. We have something that is not going up because of various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of creating buildings. There are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially; some individual services can be reduced by as much as 90 percent. There are other services like how we make fertilizer or how we do air transport where the room for improvement is far, far less. If we are optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three or even perhaps a factor of six. But for these first three factors, we have gone from 26 billion [tons of CO2] to at best maybe 13 billion tons. And that just won’t cut it.”
Gates argued that we will never be able to achieve perfect energy efficiency, so improvement in this area will never eliminate the problem of global warming. Instead, the solution must come from developing new carbon-neutral energy sources. “We need solutions, either one or several, that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability. I really only see five [technologies] that can achieve the big numbers”: carbon capture and storage (CCS), nuclear, wind, solar photovoltaic, and solar thermal.
“They all have significant challenges. We are going to have to work on each of these five, and we can’t give up any of them because they look daunting.” He said that we need hundreds of companies working on research and development to solve the problems associated with each, and that current investment in such research is lagging.
Gates closed by describing a new nuclear technology that he is backing, called TerraPower. “The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium, the one percent, which is the U235, we decided let’s burn the 99 percent, the U238. It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not. So, it’s through the advent of modern supercomputers that you can now simulate and see that, yes, with the right material’s approach, this looks like it would work. It breathes this uranium as it goes along. So it’s kind of like a candle often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today’s reactors. That would power the U.S. for hundreds of years.”
While most environmental advocates applaud Gates’ speech for raising awareness on the issue of climate change and advocating carbon-neutral sources of energy, critics are questioning whether his approach to this problem is too narrow-minded. World Changing wrote, “The biggest flaw is that the Gates Climate Equation could lead to carbon blindness, a self-defeating willingness to destroy critical environmental systems in the name of saving the planet from climate change. Climate is not the only absolutely vital planetary boundary we’re straining. The biosphere transcends the climate crisis. Logging our forests, over-burdening our oceans, converting land for agriculture and grazing, all these are huge contributors to our climate problem, and restoring the capacities of natural systems to absorb carbon dioxide is a critical part of the solution. The answer to the problem of cars and automotive emissions, for instance, isn’t designing a better car; it’s designing a better city.”
Others have argued that our focus should be on technology deployment, not research and development. Climate Progress wrote, “The technologies we have today, plus a few that are on the verge of being commercialized, can provide the needed low-carbon energy. Breaking down the barriers to their deployment now is much, much more important than developing new ‘breakthrough’ efficient TILTs [Terrific Imaginary Low-carbon Technology], since those would simply fail in the marketplace because of the same barriers.”
Backers of the deployment approach seek policy interventions to raise the price of high-carbon energy (presumably through a tax or cap & trade system) while simultaneously subsidizing low-carbon energy sources. This, in theory, would help low-carbon energy sources gain market share and speed up their movement along the learning curve.
Watch Bill Gates’ 2010 TED Speech
