Bill Gates recently wrote his annual letter and it's getting some attention because he addressed the climate problem this year (a Vox interview with Ezra Klein). The target audience was high school students. The letter contained a simple mathematical formula describing why solving the climate problem is very hard. Here it is, with Bill's explanation.
Bill Gates: Yeah, it's important for people who care about climate to not think it's easy to solve.
The equation is: How many people are there? And that's P, which today is about 7 billion, and will grow to be bigger than 9 billion.
Then you take how many energy-related services each person takes advantage of — that's heating, cooling, transport, lighting. We call that S, and that will go up quite a bit as poor people in India are getting lighting, air conditioning, refrigeration. The average number of services used by a person will increase, and it should — that's a very good thing.
Then you have E, the energy used per service. In some areas, like lighting, that number can go down a lot. In some, like transport, planes, making fertilizer — those processes are extremely optimized, and so there's not that much room to innovate on the energy-per-service front. Even if you're optimistic about that, maybe you'll get to 0.6. That is, 40 percent more efficient across all services.
And so if we take these first three factors — 7 billion going to 9 billion, double the services per person, and efficiency at about 0.6, that's increasing [emissions].
The last factor is C, the carbon per unit of energy. And so if you multiply today, you get 36 billion tons. And if you multiply in the future, you need to get zero.
And so the first three factors are not going [to change] — the first one is going up; the second one, hopefully, is going up; the third one is going down, but not enough to offset those other two.
You have to take transport, industry, household, electricity — and, at least in the middle income and rich countries, put it into a zero emission mode.
Gates believes we need a "miracle" to get to zero carbon emissions in a world of 9 billion people, most of whom are wealthier (a doubling in terms of services S) than they are now.
But Bill also has a rose-colored take on what the word "miracle" means (Bloomberg interview).
When I say “miracle,” I don’t mean something that’s impossible. I’ve seen miracles happen before. The personal computer. The Internet. The polio vaccine. None of them happened by chance. They are the result of research and development and the human capacity to innovate.
In this case, however, time is not on our side. Every day we are releasing more and more CO2 into our atmosphere and making our climate change problem even worse.
We need a massive amount of research into thousands of new ideas—even ones that might sound a little crazy—if we want to get to zero emissions by the end of this century.
Bill is of course a techno-optimist of the usual sort. From Bloomberg again—
Ever the optimist, Gates expects just such a miracle to arrive within the next 15 years, and he expects it just might come from one of today's teenagers...
I think it is irrational not to be optimistic, but I admit I am disposed to be optimistic. So maybe I would misconstrue the facts if they were against me. But I think, honestly, you have to be optimistic.
Maybe I would misconstrue the facts if they were against me. An astonishing admission in Flatland. I'm almost impressed.
Look at what we are doing with food production. Look at what we are doing with health. Would you rather have cancer 10 years ago or 10 years from now?
Well, Bill, speaking of humanity as a whole, we've got cancer now. And worse, from an Earth biosphere (non-anthropocentric) point of view, humanity itself can be viewed as the cancer.
It seems never to have occurred to Bill that the terms P (population) and S (services) might be negotiable. (Given P and S, E (energy) follows from the laws of physics.)
And thus Bill believes a technological "miracle" (a product of human ingenuity) is the only possible solution.
Sigh. Flatland marches on.
"It seems never to have occurred to Bill that the terms P (population) and S (services) might be negotiable"
- Well he knows that for sure, but as soon as he tells that in public...
Posted by: batalos | 02/24/2016 at 11:50 AM