Gates to the Future?
Bill Gates' new book about energy and climate is worth reading, with caveats
Bill Gates has published an important book on the largest of topics, How to Avoid Climate Disaster. It’s mostly about energy, as it should be, and about the U.S., so I want to talk about it. Caveat lector (beware reader): what follows isn’t a review or summary, but something closer to constructive criticism.
The book, I feel, deserves a serious look, not because of who wrote it but because of what’s in it. And, I would add, what’s not. Mr. Gates is a smart man with important friends, a great deal of money, and a furious ambition to make the world a better place than before he gained his fortune. He has spent a lot of time, and no small currency, learning about energy and investing in projects, successful and non. In my opinion, he is worth listening to.
Gates is a boundless believer in the transformational powers of technology (how could he not be?). This is appropriate, up to a point. He knows what that point is—technology may not be the end-all answer, but without it there will be no answers at all. He’s right. Modern energy means technology, and an energy transition will only happen with technological change. We have key tools now; we need to advance them and create more.
The book’s style is simple and direct, embodying an intent to reach people of all education levels, high school to grad school. It succeeds more than 95% of the time, which is about as good as it gets and impressive given the span of subject matter he touches on. An example is his terminology. The areas we must focus on for reducing emissions are these: “how we plug in, how we make things, how we grow things, how we get around, how we keep cool and stay warm.” It’s an effective distillation.
It is also to Gates’ credit that he begins and ends by staking a claim for reality: the energy transition will be difficult and will not be completed quickly. There are many highly trained and committed people working on advancing things, but none of them are sorcerers (or their apprentices). Those who demand or predict massive changes in a single decade or so are just as likely to hinder progress as help it. Realism is needed; angst or panic-driven policies tend to underestimate fact.
The author declares he will avoid politics. It isn’t what he knows or, apparently, wants to know. Politics, he says, muddy the waters and the mind. They are a distraction, like a shouting voice. Here he is wrong. There are no energy issues without politics. Gates proves this himself, repeatedly, and well. He speaks for generations of scientists (incl. yours truly) in stressing, for instance, how government support for energy R&D is urgently needed.
Mr. Biden, however, has made epochal moves to reverse 40 years of squander in this domain. Beginning with Reagan, energy R&D withered under the acids of conservative belief that all such work is best left to the private sector. There are also the minor political points about OPEC and oil, China and rare earth metals, Russia and natural gas supply to Europe, and long-term opposition to any real action on climate change by Republicans. Gates shouldn’t hide behind geekery; energy is part of the local and larger world of policy and power relations.
What Mr. Bill Gets Right
This being said, Mr. Bill gets a great deal right about energy reality. He knows that electricity is a growing part of the future, that it needs to expand into transport, heating/cooling, and also industry and manufacturing, which will be a real challenge.
I commend Gates especially for a point he makes regarding the future of electricity. The tendency to erect a green wall between renewables and nuclear power is damaging to serious progress. Treating them as death enemies makes no scientific or climate sense. Both, together with other non-carbon technologies, are urgently needed. Mr. Bill provides some standard (but necessary) comments about the massive amounts of electricity reliably produced by nuclear, its small environmental footprint, and its new era of advance today. He might also have mentioned that fear without knowledge about the main source of non-carbon power in the U.S. seems less than justified given what’s at stake.
Some more truths that Mr. Bill brings forward can be listed for brevity:
1. Advanced, wealthy nations have the historical responsibility to innovate and bring new non-carbon technologies to market. They are the ones with the most sophisticated science and technology, thus the sources of new knowledge. This must be their role.
2. Electricity is not the final answer. Not everything can be affordably electrified in industry or transport before 2050. This includes some high-temperature (>1,000oC, 1,830oF) processes (e.g. for cement-making), as well as powering jet aircraft, large ships, vehicles in mining, agriculture, the military, and commercial trucking. Gates admits we may have to rely for a time on carbon fuels for some uses. Net zero by 2050 is the goal.
3. Technology, markets, and government policy need to work together if decarbonization is to happen effectively. This will not always happen, but it can occur often enough for real gains, if government policy doesn’t radically alter with each new president.
4. One reason the energy transition will take timed is that there are serious barriers, in public opposition to major new infrastructural projects. This includes transmission lines, power plants, offshore wind farms, and the like. I would add high-speed rail (California) to this list. Failures of trust and a frayed social fabric may need to be overcome.
5. Changes in psychology and culture, then, are required. They will even be important in moving from gas-powered to electric-powered vehicles. Car companies understand the core lesson from Tesla’s success: the “cool” factor in design (not the “clunk” approach of the early Prius) sells. [Sorry, this is something Gates doesn’t say, but I couldn’t resist.]
6. Global emissions have been falling in advanced nations (slowly) while rising in Asia, above all China and India, on a total volumetric basis (see graph below). Despite claims made by Mssrs. Xi and Modi, there are as yet no signs that this will soon cease. The task of decarbonizing the world is itself planetary in scale.
7. There is a necessity for optimism: we can do this, we will do it. Such may be Mr. Bill’s best claim, since he also appreciates how difficult lies the road ahead. He might have said: the world is rich enough and has on its surface enough people with the right kind of smarts to do what has to be done. The hurdles are high, but the goal far higher.
What He Might Have Done Better
What, besides the role of politics, did Mr. Bill get wrong? I wouldn’t pose the question this way. Instead, I’d ask what he decided not to include that’s important and what he might not emphasize enough. The following is my list of answers to this.
1. He evades, though hints at, the truth that the current historical era has moved away from global collaboration and consensus-building. Despite the Paris Agreement and attendance at COP (Conference of the Parties) meetings, autocracy is ascendant and liberal democracies are in trouble. How this will play out for non-carbon energy is far from clear. President Biden has turned the U.S. in a good direction, but there are no guarantees this will be true in 2028.
2. Any book on energy change also needs a few words about how humanity itself is changing. Mr. Bill touches on urbanization; this is essential. But there are also, as I’ve stressed in earlier posts, the facts of ageing societies, falling fertility, an expanding global middle class, educational advancement. Some of these trends will likely aid the needed energy changes. Others may or may not.
3. Mr. Bill’s adoption of moralizing energy-speak—”clean,” “dirty,” “green,” etc.—does a disservice to his desire for objectivity. Saying that “a dirty electron will run your lights just as well as a clean one” is both silly and scientifically absurd.
4. An unfortunate flaw is the author’s dismissal of geothermal energy. I must assume Gates has been talking to the wrong people. MIT’s Energy Initiative has done informed work on this topic, concluding: “Geothermal energy… represents a large, indigenous resource that can provide base-load electric power and heat at a level [with] major impact on the U.S., while incurring minimal environmental impacts.”
5. There are a few errors or disagreements with respected sources. Perhaps the most important is the figure on page 134 showing light-duty vehicles responsible for 47% of transport emissions. A majority of studies put this figure closer to 59% - 60% (see this example). Most other examples (there aren’t many of them) are ok to ignore.
Impolite Truths
In the end, Bill Gates is a polite person who prefers to inform rather than judge. He is more apt to confess his own failings than highlight those of others. As a result, though he talks about the troubling energy choices made by certain nations, he reigns himself to a halt at the windy edges of indictment. I interpret this as Mr. Bill’s way of modeling the cooperative behavior needed for trust and collaboration. Admirable as this may be, it eludes questions of responsibility.
Consider the graph below. A blunt-force conclusion reveals itself. Had China not sought to fully modernize 1.35 billion people at break-neck pace, condensing over a century of development into barely two decades, the world would be at a far earlier stage of emissions and warming in decades ahead. In 1995, China’s emissions weren’t much more than half those of the U.S. By 2018 they were twice the US total. Indeed, they were equal to the US, EU, and India combined—2.3 billion people.
As emissions fell in most developed nations, esp. after 2007, China’s surged, pausing briefly in 2014-16 (Mr. Xi ordered a slow-down in industrial growth, partly to reduce urban pollution levels, source of widespread public dissent) before advancing again. In the early months of the pandemic, emissions plunged 25% when many factories were closed. But they came roaring back with reopening, going beyond all previous levels by late summer. They have continued rising in 2021, as economic growth has returned. Meantime, India’s own emissions are rising steadily, as it modernizes more slowly than did China but no less relentlessly and on a comparable overall scale.
Americans worried about climate action may be pissed off at Republicans, Exxon, frackers, meat-eaters, and science deniers from Monterey to Maine. But if they’re not seriously—seriously—concerned about what China and India are doing, then their climate compass has lost its needle. Statements about China leading a “global green revolution” are not credible. The country continues to build new coal capacity in 2021.
What of the claim that we in the West are to blame for China’s emissions, since we buy so many of its products? Horse pucky. China chooses what sources to use in manufacturing the goods it makes and sells. Westerners held no economic knife to the arteries of Chinese industry, demanding use of coal über alles. Neither did we demand that China become an industrializing juggernaut unmatched in all of history.
Bill Gates does not want to say such things in his book, though I’m sure he understands them very well. It is a sharp fact that if China and India are not truly on board about climate change, whatever the U.S. does may not matter very much. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster avoids this point.
Let me end by saying, again, you will find many things of value and guidance in Mr. Bill’s book. You can blame me for injecting a few ugly shards of reality that he has the good taste to leave aside.