Did
Bill Gates Just Give the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year?
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By
Alex Steffen, Worldchanging
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On
Friday, the world's most successful businessperson and most powerful
philanthropist did something outstandingly bold, that went almost unremarked:
Bill Gates announced
that his top priority is getting the world to zero climate emissions. |
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Now,
I'm not a member of the Cult of Bill myself (I'm typing this on a MacBook),
but you don't have to believe that Gates has superhuman powers of prediction
to know that his predictions have enormous power. People who will never
listen to Al Gore, much to less someone like me, hang on Gates' every
utterance. |
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And
Friday, Gates predicted extraordinary climate action: zero.
Not small steps, not incremental progress, not doing less bad: zero. In fact,
he stood in front of a slide with nothing but the planet Earth and the number
zero. That moment was the most important thing that has happened at TED. |
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What,
exactly, did he say, and why is it so important? |
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Even
more importantly, he acknowledged the only sensible goal, when it comes to
climate emissions, is to eliminate them: we should be aiming for a
civilization that produces no net emissions, and we should be aiming to live
in that civilization here in the developed world by 2050. Obviously,
that's a big goal. Because he is the world's biggest geek, to explain how he
plans to achieve that goal, Gates put up a slide with a formula (which we can
call the Gates Climate Equation): |
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CO2 = P x S x E x C |
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Meaning
this: the climate emissions of human civilization are the result of four
driving forces: |
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Population: the total number of people on the planet (which is still
increasing because we are not yet at peak
population). |
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Services: the things that provide prosperity (and because billions
of people are still rising out of poverty and because no global system
will work unless it's fair, we can expect a massively increased demand
for the services that provide prosperity). |
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Energy: the amount of energy it takes to produce and provide the goods and
services that our peaking population uses as it grows more prosperous (what
some might call the energy intensity of goods and services). Gates believes
it's likely cutting two-thirds of our energy waste is about as good as we can
do. |
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Carbon: the amount of climate emissions generated in order to produce the
energy it takes to fuel prosperity. |
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Those
four, he says, essentially define our emissions (more on that later). In
order to reach zero emissions, then, at least one of these values has to fall
to zero. But which one? He reckons that because population is going to
continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people
want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in
energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the
equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral
energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy. |
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To
do that, we need an "energy miracle." We need energy solutions that
don't yet exist, released through a global push for clean energy innovation.
That, in turn, demands that a generation of entrepreneurs push forward new
ideas for renewable energy, unleashing "1,000 promising ideas." He
described one of his own investments, but went on to note that we need
hundreds of other ambitious companies as well, and he plans to put his own
efforts into this arena. |
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Why
is this important? The news stories focused largely on the clean energy
aspect of the speech, and certainly the world's most successful businessman
announcing that clean energy is the next frontier is a big headline. However,
I think though that the real breakthrough was not Gates' answer to the
problem, but his definition of success: zero. |
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Bright
green advocates understand that we need prosperity
without planetary impact. In many of the circles I run in, this is an
uncontroversial idea, and, indeed, the conversation has moved on, to
discussing how we decouple better lives from ecological
footprints (or even go beyond, and build a society that restores
the ecosystems on which it depends). |
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To
say, however, that the standard of zero impact is not widely understood and
endorsed would be a whopping understatement. Most people rarely see the
things they do, buy and use as directly part of the living systems of the
planet. Few people who do think of their connection to nature have ever
conceived their lives designed to have no impact at all. For most people, a
ten percent or twenty percent improvement sounds like a big deal -- in large
part because the improvements they're most familiar with involve giving
things up. When they do encounter it, the idea of "zero" looms like
a giant wall of deprivation in front of them. The idea that zero might not be
the end of the good life, but in fact the beginning of a much better way of
life, is simply inconceivable to the vast, vast majority of them. When we
talk zero, we sound crazy. |
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But
when Bill Gates talks zero, he sounds visionary. Gates, whatever else he did
Friday, just made the most important idea on the planet mainstream credible.
That's a big, big deal. |
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Was
his articulation ideal? No. In fact, I think it has some big flaws. The
biggest flaw is that the Gates Climate Equation could lead to carbon
blindness, a self-defeating willingness to destroy critical environmental
systems in the name of saving the planet from climate change. Climate is not
the only absolutely vital planetary
boundary we're straining. The biosphere transcends the climate crisis. |
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What's
more, protecting and healing the biosphere is essential to meeting the
climate crisis itself. Logging
our forests, over-burdening our oceans, converting land for agriculture
and grazing, all these are huge contributors to our climate problem, and
restoring the capacities of natural systems to absorb carbon dioxide is a
critical part of the solution. |
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In
order to truly succeed, we need to improve the quality of our natural systems
at about the same rate at which we're converting the economy to clean energy.
Properly, Gates' Equation would include a value for nature: |
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CO2 = P x S x E x C ÷ N |
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There's
another big gap here, though: the prosperity represented by S. |
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Now
we might start with the energy use to deliver those services (E in the
Equation). The energy intensity of any given form of prosperity can, I
believe, be improved quite a bit; but the idea that E can be dramatically
improved without improving the kind of prosperity we're attempting to provide
is the very definition of what I call The Swap.
The Swap doesn't work. |
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And
we don't need it to. The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles
(the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to
Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food
chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly
invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous. |
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We
can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both
reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of
our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving
efficiency. |
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The
answer to the problem of cars and automotive emissions, for instance, isn't
designing a better car, it's designing a better city. The answer to the
problem of overconsumption isn't recycling cans or green shopping, it's
changing our relationship to stuff, so that everything we use and live with
is designed for zero waste, and either meant to last ("heirloom
design" and "durability") or to be shared ("product
service systems") or both. The best living we've ever had is waiting
beyond zero. What looks like a wall to many people from this side of zero,
looks to like a trellis from the other side, a foundation on which new
thinking can flourish. |
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Cities
are the tools we need for reinventing prosperity. We can
build zero-impact cities, and we need to. Any answer to the problem of
climate change needs to be as focused on reinventing the future as powering
it. |
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(Photo:
Nancy Duarte. Make her famous.) |
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Alex
Steffen is the executive editor of Worldchanging.
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© 2010 Worldchanging All rights reserved |
