(2021-02-17) The Big Idea From Bill Gatess New Climate Book

The Big Idea from Bill Gates’s New Climate book. Bill Gates has been thinking about what he calls the “hard stuff” of climate change.

he means the vital processes of industrial society for which we still have no zero-carbon alternative

Making concrete, for instance, causes 8 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide pollution, and we have no way to do it cheaply in a climate-friendly way—that’s one of Gates’s hard problems. Heating and cooling buildings, which together emit 7 percent of greenhouse-gas pollution, are another. As is agriculture, responsible for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse-gas pollution each year.

he expounded on a principle that I will, with journalistic presumption, now call “the Gates Rule.”

This is the Gates Rule: If given a choice of cutting emissions directly or reducing the cost of net-zero technology, the U.S. should choose the latter. American climate policy, in other words, should optimize for cost-reducing innovation, not for direct cuts in carbon pollution.

The prime goal of American climate policy is to harness that machine for the planet’s sake—to reduce the cost of climate-friendly technologies so that the rest of the world can adopt them.

Which brings us to the central and, I suspect, most enduring idea in Gates’s book—something he calls a “green premium.” A green premium is the cost difference between a newer, no-carbon technology and its older, dirtier equivalent. The electric Chevrolet Bolt, for instance, costs 10 more cents a mile to drive than a Chevy Malibu. Gates predicts that this premium will go to zero by 2030.

More concerning: Conventional jet fuel costs $2.22 a gallon but advanced biofuels cost $5.35, he says. This means aviation carries a green premium of 141 percent, so it requires more attention

Green premiums allow a restatement of the Gates Rule: The goal of American climate policy should be to zero out green premiums as fast as possible, in as many industries as possible. To reach that goal, he is calling for government spending on energy and climate-related R&D to quintuple.

Bill McKibben criticized Gates for failing to grasp that wind and solar energy are now cheaper than fossil alternatives, meaning they carry negative green premiums—and yet are not being deployed anywhere near fast enough. Gates overlooks the importance of fossil-fuel opposition to net-zero energy, alleges McKibben.