Bill Gates has just published his first book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster. It’s a good book. The beginning of the book explains the basis of the climate problem, and probably won’t provide much new information to anyone who has been attending even peripherally to this debate. But the remainder of the book makes three good points that seem to be missed by many activists:
1. Useful as they are, currently fashionable “green” technologies – primarily solar and wind, and electric cars – are not enough to make a significant difference, nor (as the Mark Mill’s paper we all studied a while ago made clear) is there any chance that they will follow some sort of “Moores Law” like microchips have, and evolve the 10-fold or 100-fold improvements that some activists are counting on.
2. To make the changes that would be required to make a significant difference will be far, far more difficult and painful than most people realize. Climate activist for the most part are pretty naïve about what would be required to really make a difference. In a world where we have trouble getting adults to wear simple masks in a pandemic, imagine how much harder it will be to get people to change their diets, curtail their traveling, downsize their houses, and give up most of their consumer goods. Or to get China or India to forgo further development.
3. The solution, Gates argues, is to invest far, far more into research into new technologies for how we use electricity, how we make things, how we grow things, how we get around, and how we stay cool and keep warm. The remainder of the book talks about possible developments in these five categories
Gates’ pragmatic approach is certainly refreshing, devoid as it is of ideological mythology. He is, however, a technologist, and sees the problem primarily as a technological problem. I am not nearly as optimistic as he is that governments can move quickly enough, that politicians and industry can be persuaded to do the difficult, unpopular and expensive things needed, or that the public can be persuaded to change their habits enough to make a difference in time.
Still, it is a good book, worth reading.
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