Greta Thunberg or Bill Gates?

Date: 28‑04‑2021

Source: Project Syndicate by Adair Turner

Adair Turner, Chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, was Chair of the UK Financial Services Authority from 2008 to 2012. He is the author, most recently, of Between Debt and the Devil. 

While rapid technological progress is our best hope for mitigating climate change, today’s living standards in rich countries threaten both catastrophic climate change and local environmental destruction. Responsible consumer choice matters as well.

LONDON – Some people say that to avoid the threat of catastrophic harm to human welfare posed by global warming, we must radically change our behavior – cease flying, use bicycles, and give up red meat. Others believe that new technologies can deliver carbon‑free growth. So, who is right: Greta Thunberg, who advocates the former course, or Bill Gates, who just wrote a book advocating the latter?

In the long run, techno‑optimism looks justified. As two new reports from the Energy Transitions Commission describe, zero‑carbon electricity and hydrogen, which today account for only 20% of energy use, could account for 75% by mid‑century, and clean energy will be cheaper by then than dirty energy is today. Solar electricity already costs less than coal power; battery costs have collapsed and will keep falling. The cost of producing hydrogen from electrolysis will plummet in the next ten years, too.

No Time to Waste

Date: 18‑02‑2021

Source: Project Syndicate by Bill Gates and Connie Hedegaard

Bill Gates, Founder and Technology Adviser of the Microsoft Corporation, is Co‑Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Connie Hedegaard served as European Commissioner for Climate Action (2010‑14), and as Denmark’s Minister for the Environment (2004‑07) and Minister for Climate and Energy (2007‑09).

Saving the planet from catastrophic climate change will require not only a dramatic increase in funding for clean‑energy research and development. We need innovation in policy just as much as in technology.

This month Bill Gates published his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.

BILL GATES interviewed by CONNIE HEDEGAARD

This month Bill Gates published his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.

Connie Hedegaard: Let me start with a confession: For years, I thought you were not particularly interested in climate change. I vividly recall a closed session at Davos some years back. The discussion turned to climate, instead of other sustainability issues, and you left the room.

Imperfect messenger‘ Bill Gates on what needs to change to avoid climate disaster

Date: 13‑02‑2021

Source: The Guardian

New book by Microsoft billionaire plays down impact of flying and driving and calls for focus on steel, meat and cement

Bill Gates: ‘I am aware that I’m an imperfect messenger on climate change … I own big houses and fly in private plane.’

The world is not lacking rich men with big ideas, Bill Gates has acknowledged. But having pumped $100m into Covid research, the Microsoft billionaire has turned to the climate emergency and the urgent need to slash carbon emissions to zero, undeterred by being a self‑confessed “imperfect messenger” for the cause.

With a personal fortune of around $120bn, the world’s former richest man reveals in his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: the Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, that he has poured more than $1bn into innovative approaches to achieving carbon neutrality, investing in zero‑carbon technologies and affordable and reliable clean energy.

Gates says he recognises he is not necessarily the best person to “lecture” people about the climate crisis. His own carbon footprint is “absurdly high”, but writing the book made him more conscious of his responsibility to shrink and offset his emissions, which he says is “the least that can be expected of someone in my position”.

Bill Gates Says Antibody Drugs Could Sharply Reduce Covid‑19 Death Rate

Date: 07‑10‑2020

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Effective vaccines could bring life back to normal by end of next year, he says

Bill Gates on Covid‑19 Vaccine Timeline

Antibody drugs that are in testing and were administered to President Trump could significantly reduce the death rate from Covid‑19 once they are approved by regulators and more widely available, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said Tuesday.

The drugs, in a class of medicines known as monoclonal antibodies, have shown promise in early‑stage patients with Covid‑19. “That’s actually pretty exciting,” Mr. Gates told The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit. “The reduction in death rate there could be pretty high, and those will be out in volume by the end of the year, at least in the rich countries.”

The drugs, developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., Eli Lilly and others, are designed in laboratories to mimic antibodies that the immune system produces to fight off viruses and other pathogens. They are injected intravenously and have the potential to work soon after a person is infected and only mildly ill. Scientists believe they also hold promise as a preventive tool, blocking infection temporarily.

By invitation: Bill Gates on how to fight future pandemics

Date: 23‑04‑2020

Source: The Economist

The coronavirus will hasten three big medical breakthroughs. That is just a start, says Bill Gates

When historians write the book on the covid‑19 pandemic, what we’ve lived through so far will probably take up only the first third or so. The bulk of the story will be what happens next.

In most of Europe, East Asia and North America the peak of the pandemic will probably have passed by the end of this month. In a few weeks’ time, many hope, things will return to the way they were in December. Unfortunately, that won’t happen.

I believe that humanity will beat this pandemic, but only when most of the population is vaccinated. Until then, life will not return to normal. Even if governments lift shelter‑in‑place orders and businesses reopen their doors, humans have a natural aversion to exposing themselves to disease. Airports won’t have large crowds. Sports will be played in basically empty stadiums. And the world economy will be depressed because demand will stay low and people will spend more conservatively.

Bill Gates lays out three‑point plan for US on brink of coronavirus catastrophe

Date: 01‑04‑2020

Source: South China Morning Post

Subject: Ÿ    Gates introduced a three‑point plan that includes a ‘consistent nationwide approach’ to lockdowns

Ÿ    He urged leaders to help by ‘not stoking rumours or panic buying’

Microsoft co‑founder Bill Gates urged world leaders to prepare for a pandemic in 2015.

Microsoft co‑founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, who urged world leaders to prepare for a pandemic situation in 2015, laid out a three‑point plan on how the US could make it through the coronavirus pandemic.

Gates penned an op‑ed for The Washington Post on Tuesday, making recommendations based on expert consultations he has had through his work with the Gates Foundation, which is funding research for a treatment for the virus, which causes a respiratory disease known as Covid‑19.

“There’s no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus,” Gates wrote. “But the window for making important decisions hasn’t closed.”

“The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of Covid‑19.”

As of April 1, the coronavirus has infected nearly 190,000 in the US, and the countrywide death toll has surpassed 4,000.

Gates said the first point is calling for a “consistent nationwide approach” to lockdowns that are being imposed to contain the spread of the disease in the country. He called the fact that some states are not being shut down completely a “recipe for disaster”.

Bill and Melinda Gates publish their annual letter

Date: 15-02-2019
Source: The Economist

“Miraculous” progress in global health, frustration over education

Getting killed in a video game, receiving unfair treatment from a teacher, seeing a relative go to jail: the teenagers taking part in Chicago’s Becoming a Man (bam) initiative admit to a variety of frustrations, some trivial, some tragic, that can stir their anger. The initiative, which teaches young men how to regulate their emotions, aims to lower crime rates and improve graduation rates. Recently one bam group invited an unusual guest into their counselling circle: Bill Gates, the second-richest man in the world. So what pushes his buttons?

Mr Gates answers that question in his latest annual letter, written with his wife Melinda, describing the work of the $50bn charitable foundation they oversee. He admits to being “pretty harsh” with his parents as a child and “tough” on people at Microsoft. (“Over the decades I’ve mellowed out on that,” he says.) He also remembers “getting mad” at a meeting when he learned that polio cases were increasing.

In his first letter ten years ago, Mr Gates argued that a “maniacal focus on drawing in the best talent and measuring results” would make a difference in the foundation’s fields of interest: global health, development and American education. In health, he feels vindicated. The progress in research, vaccine delivery and statistical monitoring to which they have contributed is “more miraculous than the digital revolution,” Mr Gates says.

But in education, results are less striking: test scores have been harder to budge. Even in health, the eradication of polio has proven maddeningly elusive. In 2003 he thought the disease would be gone in a couple of years. But it lingers.

Bill Gates: How Paul Allen Changed My Life

Date: 21-10-2018
Source: The Wall Street Journal By Bill Gates

Gates describes the moment Allen showed him a new computer called the Altair 8800, which marked the end of Gates’s college career and the beginning of Microsoft

I met Paul Allen when I was in 7th grade, and it changed my life.

I looked up to him right away. He was two years ahead of me in school, really tall, and proved to be a genius with computers. (Later, he also had a very cool beard, the type I could never pull off myself.) We bonded over the teletype that some students’ mothers had bought for the school and had connected to a remote mainframe.

Eventually we were spending just about all our free time messing around with any machine we could get our hands on. At an age when other high school kids were sneaking out of the house to go partying, Paul and I would sneak out at night to go use the computers in a lab at the University of Washington. It sounds geeky, and it was, but it was also a formative experience, and I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do it without Paul. I know it would have been a lot less fun. (“Borrowing” computer time illicitly would become something of a theme for us. Later, when I was a student at Harvard, I got in trouble for letting Paul use the campus computer lab without permission.)

Even in high school, before most people knew what a personal computer was, Paul predicted that chips would get super-powerful and would eventually give rise to a whole new industry.

The African youth boom: what’s worrying Bill Gates

Date: 18-09-2018
Source: The Guardian

The philanthropist warns that stability in Africa makes a huge difference to the world, and that investing in the health and education of its young people is vital

What worries Bill Gates most? The booming population of Africa looms over his foundation’s latest global survey. By the end of this century there will be 4 billion more people on Earth – and 3 billion of these extra souls will be born in Africa. The challenge, he says, is that “Africa must almost quadruple its agricultural productivity to feed itself. That’s very daunting.”

The philanthropist is torn between sending out a message of hope and a message of fear when I meet him at his foundation’s spacious campus in the heart of his hometown, Seattle.

He is reaching for what works best to revive the west’s faltering conscience in the face of “America first” nationalism and rising pull-up-the-drawbridge populism in Europe. The spirit of generosity is under assault as government aid budgets come under constant sniper fire from right-wing politicians and their media.

Half of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spending goes to Africa. The funds put into the foundation by themselves and fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett now amount to more than than $50bn (£38bn). Until last year Gates, the Microsoft founder, was the world’s richest man. He has now been overtaken by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Gates’ first instinct is optimism. Just consider the astonishing story of how far and how fast people have been brought out of abject poverty in a very short time. Since 2000, a billion people have been taken well over the line of $1.90-a-day wretchedness (£1.45), with the same uplift among those previously living on $3.20 a day.

The foundation’s report bursts with remarkable data – too few people know about the galloping progress of humankind. Take India, where only 18 years ago almost one in five children were not enrolled in primary school – now, 97% attend classes. Look at the indicators on the report’s global scorecard for the UN’s sustainable development goals for 2030, and most things are improving almost everywhere. But there is a marked variation in the future trajectory: progress depends on the level of future investment.

Certified Insane

Date: 18-05-2018
Source: The Guardian
Subject: Bill Gates: Trump twice asked me the difference between HIV and HPV

Microsoft co-founder tells foundation meeting it was ‘kind of scary’ how much Trump knew about what Gates’ daughter looked like

Bill Gates said Donald Trump once left an event before returning 20 minutes later in a helicopter, presumably in order to make a ‘grand entrance’.

Bill Gates, the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, has claimed Donald Trump twice asked him the difference between HIV and HPV and knew a “scary” amount about Gates’s daughter’s looks.

The remarks were recorded at a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation meeting, where Gates took questions from staff, according to MSNBC’s All in with Chris Hayes show, which broadcast the footage on Thursday.

Gates told the audience how Trump had encountered his daughter Jennifer, now 22, at a horse show in Florida. “And then about 20 minutes later he flew in on a helicopter to the same place,” the Microsoft co-founder said. “So clearly he had been driven away but he wanted to make a grand entrance in a helicopter.”

Gates himself met Trump for the first time in New York in December 2016, he recalled: “So when I first talked to him it was actually kind of scary how much he knew about my daughter’s appearance. Melinda [Gates’s wife] didn’t like that too well.”