According to Bill Gates, the world will be unable to avoid exceeding the goal set in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. On Wednesday, Bill Gates addressed questions from Reddit users, and a few of them were about climate change. Other than owning G. Microsoft, Gates has since founded the nuclear innovation company TerraPower and an investment firm, Breakthrough Energy, to support various climate change ideas, as well as published a book about climate change, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
“The pace of innovation is picking up, even though we won’t make the current timelines or avoid going over 1.5,” Gates responded in answer to a query about how the globe is responding to climate change.
Climate mitigation efforts, according to Gates, will “slow down the progress we make on enhancing the human condition.” He stated that in some regions of the world, more than 10% of children die before the age of five, and more than 30% go hungry.
TerraPower’s revolutionary nuclear reactors employ liquid sodium as a coolant and uranium as a fuel supply.”We are making excellent progress,” Gates added while admitting that the Ukraine crisis has thrown a wrench in TerraPower’s plans because the reactors meant to run on Russian fuel are no longer practical.
Other than providing clean energy, Gates has supported multiple startups aiming to create meatless meat products, including Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. He’s also supported Memphis Meats (which has subsequently rebranded as Upside Foods), which uses cells from genuine animals and develops the products in laboratory surroundings, according to Gates.
“I think these goods will be really good ultimately, even though their share is minimal now,” Gates said on Reddit. It’s critical to develop alternate methods of producing meat alternatives that are also environmentally friendly, since “for those who want to go vegan, that’s fine, but I don’t think most people would,” Gates added.
Aside from diet, Gates believes that developing cost-effective clean-energy alternatives is the best approach to combating climate change. “The solution to climate change is to make clean things as cheap as dirty things in every area of emission — planes, concrete, beef, and so on,” Gates wrote on Reddit.”This is the only way we can ask all countries to change.” “We will not succeed if it is prohibitively expensive.”
However, countries that need to adapt to environmentally friendly electricity lack the resources to do so. They frequently lack the funding and institutional capacity required to carry out necessary adaptation activities. Furthermore, some of the countries most vulnerable to heat waves, droughts, storms, and sea-level rise frequently face additional severe development requirements. That means investing in resilient growth is more important than ever, with adaptation fully integrated with other sustainable development goals.