.BillGates: 'I have not seen anything that’s worthy of the word 'plan'' to fight climate change
Photo: Intelligencer/Getty Images On September 23, the United Nations will open its Climate Action Summit here in New York, three days after the Global Climate Strike, led by Greta Thunberg, will sweep through thousands of cities worldwide.
On August 5, in Seattle, I talked to him about balancing the prerogatives of adaptation and mitigation, the scale of the challenge of climate change and whether we have any realistic chance of avoiding catastrophic levels of warming, and just how punishingly unequal the impacts of climate change will be when they do arrive.
If we are imagining a world in which we take some dramatic action and engineer some kind of meaningful solution to this challenge, what does that look like to you? How big a part of it is nuclear power? How big a part of it is carbon capture? How big a part of it is new cement? How do you see that big picture?
The international picture there is so important because each individual nation, with the possible exception of the U.S. and China, is contributing only so little, and so they have less motivation to act dramatically.
If people keep their current seeds, then agricultural productivity will go down a lot. Monsanto has different seeds for different parts of the U.S. depending on the temperature, and, already, the seeds that they used to give to Texas, they now give to the Midwest. The beef lots — they used to fatten cows down in Texas, now nobody does it anymore because it’s too hot there, and so all the meatpacking is moving north. It’ll be in Canada.
We also need to get air conditioning into the equatorial regions, particularly urban equatorial regions, and we need to get the crops so that they can withstand drought and that your good years you have a lot more productivity. You’re going to have bad years. There are years where rain doesn’t come, and there’s no seed in the world that can do a damn thing about that. There’s a few things that are miraculous. Like, we came up with this form of rice. Usually when rice gets flooded, it dies.
There’s two issues on GMOs. One is, is there a commercial problem that you become dependent and that U.S. seed manufacturers charge too much money? Then there’s, is there a health risk involved? But the stuff we’re talking about doing is all public-domain stuff, so we have to tell people, “Hey, this is not Monsanto.” Now, I have nothing against Monsanto. In fact, they’ve contributed more to the base understanding of these things than any company in the world.
Nigeria’s a very scary one where the South is way better than the North. The population growth is almost entirely in the North, with a broken-down primary health-care system. The North of Nigeria is really bad. The state is almost not there. They just don’t raise enough money, and they don’t spend the tiny amount they raise very well at all. So these differentials are really gigantic.
If you trust government to spend money well, then you’re willing to be taxed. If you think that money is totally misspent, you aren’t. And so you get these equilibrium conditions either within a country or within regions of a country, where people have so little expectation that the government will work on their behalf. Everybody joins a gang, and you hope that your gang gets elected because they won’t grow the pie for everybody, but you’ll just get a disproportionate share of a very small pie.
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