Review of Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Crisis: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (New York, Alfred A Knopf, 2021) For everyone convinced that the world is on the verge of a climate disaster Bill Gates has written a sobering, well reasoned account of what it would take to eliminate that threat. Rather than just talk about somehow lowering greenhouse gases by a finite percent such as the goal of the Paris Accord, Gates widens the conversation. Reasoning that … [Read more...]
Renewable Energy’s China Problem
This past week as I was preparing to publish a webcast, Are Renewable Energy Mandates Effective, news dropped from the Wall Street Journal that the Biden Administration is pursuing a “BackDoor” Climate Plan that would bypass Congress. About the same time, on March 18, Annie Grayer of CNN tweeted that AOC is preparing to “re-rollout” the Green New Deal. When you control Congress and the White House, why do you need to use a backdoor to begin with? With so much zealotry behind net-zero by 2050, it … [Read more...]
The Gates of Hell (or Heaven) in Africa?
Agribusiness, Small Family Farms, or Both? According to many critics, Western billionaires do not make the best farmers. Perhaps it is their inability (or unwillingness) to downsize grandiose plans from a Western-style agribusiness model to merely helping millions of subsistence farmers that dot the African landscape succeed in providing nutritious diets for their families and communities. That’s the conclusion of a major report from Germany entitled False Promises: The Alliance for a … [Read more...]
Two Surprising Voices on Climate Change and Renewable Energy
Stereotyping is easy. One can predict people’s worldviews and policy positions based on their social and political identities. That generally holds true for people’s views about climate change and climate and energy policy—among the hottest issues in the world today. Yet some people prioritize the pursuit of truth over how they wish things were. Two in particular have been bold in the face of mass “group think” on climate change and renewable technology. Besides voicing their opinions, … [Read more...]
Does Bill Gates Fail to See Himself in the World’s Growing Billions?
Bill Gates is a brilliant man. His combination of tech and business savvy not only made him one of the world’s richest people (currently, with a net worth of about $90 billion, #2 behind Jeff Bezos’s $112 billion) but also gave him the opportunity to be one of the world’s biggest philanthropists, chairing, with wife Melinda, the world’s largest private charitable foundation. But brilliance in technology and brilliance in business don’t necessarily guarantee brilliance in other fields. I … [Read more...]
Bill Gates Gets It on Wind and Solar
In an interview published in The Atlantic, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates had two very astute observations about wind and solar energy: On the limits of wind power and solar photovoltaic cells: Wind has grown super-fast, on a very subsidized basis. Solar, off a smaller base, has been growing even faster—again on a highly subsidized basis. But it’s absolutely fair to say that even the modest R&D that’s been done, and the various deployment incentives that are there, have worked … [Read more...]
