February 24, 2021
'Business-as-usual', but make it zero emissions
Bill Gates' new book, 'How to avoid a climate disaster', offers a technical blueprint to preserve Earth's habitability but overlooks the politics of climate change.
Let's start with addressing the elephant in the room: Gates is an 'imperfect messenger', a 'rich man' with an 'absurd carbon footprint' and 'big ideas on what other people should do'—his own words.
But his tone is quite frank, too; his personal interests clearly disclosed throughout the book—his own investments in nuclear power come to mind, for example. He has a lot of experience working on global issues and has had the opportunity to chat with quite a roster of climate experts and government heads so, surely, his message is worth listening to.
What can we learn from him?
From the onset, Gates argues that in order to avoid a climate disaster, we have to 'get to zero'—not only reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but squash them altogether. This, he believes, is possible, partly because some of the innovations we need to get there'—solar and wind, for example'—already exist and merely need to be deployed more aggressively. To 'take us the rest of the way', we still need to create what he refers to as 'breakthrough technologies'. The book details what these technologies are along five axes'—how we plug in, how we make things, how we grow things, how we get around and how we keep cool and stay warm'—and outlines a plan for how to get these innovations funded and scaled.
For these technologies to succeed at scale, Gates advocates for collaboration along all three 'levers' and highlights the importance of government intervention in funding and deploying innovation at scale—a lesson learnt the hard way during his time at Microsoft, where the US government's antitrust lawsuit against the company made him realise he 'should have been engaging with policymakers all along'. Gates recommends a number of goals for governments to put their policy-making experience to work, from bridging the investment gap and overcoming non-market barriers to planning for a just transition and more.
Gates argues that any milestone we set for 2030 is only useful if it feeds into a broader vision that can effectively get us to zero by 2050. Achieving an emissions reduction goal on the short-term without the long-term vision in mind may lock us into infrastructure and technologies that may not be fit-for-purpose for the following two decades, eventually setting us back further and proving counter-productive.
I believe all these principles hold true, regardless of the plan we follow to get to zero.
But what of this plan he proposes?
By his own admission, Gates is 'a technophile'—show [him] a problem, and [he]'ll look for technology to fix it.' This transpires throughout the book, not only in its focus on breakthrough technologies but also in its treatment of alternative solutions. Innovation in business models gets a single perfunctory sentence in the last couple of chapters, for example. The problem of overproduction is never mentioned. The notion of reduction is reluctantly addressed in the case of energy, where the road to clean electricity at scale has proven to be more challenging than anticipated and in which case 'anything that reduces the scale we need to reach is helpful', but not crucial. I could go on.
To be clear, the priorities for action he highlights in the book are significant; they cover a lot of ground and are in line with other global agendas'—Project Drawdown comes to mind, for example, or Circle Economy's latest Circularity Gap Report. Reading through the innovations being researched at the moment'—from capturing carbon directly from the air to Black Mirror-esque geoengineering techniques'—part of me is also thrilled for the innovations yet to come.
But, just as Gates makes the case for investing in different types of technologies, should we not also invest in different types of solutions? What about 'reducing the scale we need to reach' more seriously? After all, slowing down consumption may not be as exciting as genetically modified, nitrogen-fixing microbes, but couldn't it buy us valuable time as we figure out the breakthrough technologies we need (keeping in mind point #3 above)?
Perhaps Gates is not so concerned with slowing down production or consumption because, when he speaks of a 'system-wide change', he does not really speak of transforming the way we do things in any radical way, but rather, of transformational technologies that allow us to do the things we do, roughly the way we currently do them, but with zero emissions attached. These technologies may be radical from an engineering standpoint and may indeed help us avoid a climate disaster—which is not a small feat. But they still make for an underwhelming vision for the future, one where all the root causes of 'business-as-usual' are left largely unaddressed and where we can expect the same winners to continue winning and the same losers to continue losing.
To be fair, I don't actually believe Gates is out to preserve the status quo and all its inequities. Beyond his on-the-ground work with the Gates Foundation, he also makes crucial points throughout the book to ensure his recommendations do not divert funding away from the very solutions that the Most Affected Peoples and Areas need in order to adapt to the most severe impacts of climate change going forward, like drought- or flood-resistant agricultural products, for example. He demonstrates a fair understanding of the different stakes different people have in the climate change issue, from low- and middle-income countries’ right to progress to the concerns of workers in threatened industries like fossil fuels, meat or dairy. He highlights the need for a 'just' transition and repeatedly hammers the point that other countries' progress is 'a good thing', despite the flawed blueprint for said progress we have all followed so far.
Still, the hurdle he openly admits to not having a solution for may just be the most important to overcome:
'I think more like an engineer than a political scientist, and I don't have a solution to the politics of climate change. Instead, what I hope to do is focus the conversation on what getting to zero requires.'
Boiling down the entire climate conversation to a single metric—51 billion tonnes of CO2e that we need to squash—is tempting for the focus it brings and indeed for the noise it cuts through. It narrows the scope of the problem to be solved. Coupled with the promise that 'the countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades', Gates' plan seems like an appealing, no-nonsense package for rich countries to take on.
But the omission of all else that is wrong with the way we currently grow and make things seems too significant a detail to gloss over for the sake of focusing the conversation. Where on the priority list does climate change go? After decent working conditions for workers but before fair wages? What about resource depletion? Does the omission simply imply 'this should come first', at the expense of anyone that does not currently benefit from things as they currently stand?
With only 30 years to go, I understand the appeal of cutting through the noise and focusing on what will get us where we want to go most efficiently. But the way we do things now is flawed in ways that go beyond emissions, and a true, systems-wide approach would aim to tackle these issues together, not in silos—or so I am told.
In narrowing down the problem to 'How might we get to zero?', Gates has allowed us to better understand where to spend our time and money when it comes to the technologies that could get us there. With these solutions in mind, it is crucial we now find synergies with other high priority issues to make this plan fit for purpose in the political arena and move towards answering the question 'How might we get to zero, whilst improving the lives of the people that most suffer from the current status quo?'—so that we can make sure getting to zero also means leaving no one behind.