It’s 20 years since I had my one and only fleeting conversation with Bill Gates, at a press conference at Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters.
I asked the co-founder of the world’s largest software company what he thought the next game-changing technology would be.
“Artificial intelligence,” he responded, before explaining how AI would change software, entire industries and the face of society. Two decades later, Gates is one of the richest men in the world and probably the most generous philanthropist ever.
AI has indeed been a game changer, in everything from the algorithms dictating what appears in social media news feeds to the software used to detect tumours in mammogram images.
But these days Gates is thinking bigger, devoting his time and many of his billions to the complex and some would say impossible task of getting the world’s wealthy countries to emit zero net carbon emissions by 2050, and helping the middle-income countries do the same shortly thereafter.
Gates seems an unlikely climate crusader. He was widely considered a ruthless businessman who built and aggressively defended a monopoly in software for running personal computers.
He was single-minded in his goal of putting “a computer on every desk and in every home”. In his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Gates admits that getting to zero by the middle of the decade is a vastly more difficult task.
But after spending a decade reading the scientific literature and with his understanding of innovation, he presents a compelling plan for how to have a decent crack at getting there.
He advocates more use of wind and solar, better energy efficiency, incentives to go green and putting a price on carbon. All of those things are being pursued now. But Gates argues that a scientific revolution to fuel innovation in clean energy is also required and the building blocks need to be in place by the end of this decade.
The breakthroughs must come in green hydrogen, grid-scale electricity storage, zero-carbon cement, steel and fertiliser, next generation nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, carbon capture and storage, pumped hydro and drought and flood resistant crops.
We aren’t far along in some of those areas because we’ve relied for over 100 years on cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Now, says Gates, the focus needs to be on reducing what he calls the “green premium”.
A gallon of gasoline in the US, he points out, currently costs about US$2.43. A zero carbon option using advanced biofuels costs US$5 a gallon, more than double the price. Reducing that gap is everything.
Gates calls for a five-fold increase in renewable energy research in the US and a reorganisation of basic and applied research around the zero emissions goal. It requires every country to do the same and get the resulting innovations working as soon as possible.
That’s an almighty task. But I admire the clarity of Gates’ thinking. Science and innovation are central to us solving this problem we’ve created for ourselves.
Originally published on Stuff.co.nz.
PETER GRIFFIN 