According to Bill Gates, rich countries will have to increase their expenditure to speed up the research, development, and deployment of technology that will assist the world cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The majority of these emissions that cause global warming are caused by developing economies, but Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and founder of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a leading climate-technology investment firm, believes that low- and middle-income countries should not be expected to slow economic development in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
According to Gates, it is the obligation of the wealthiest countries, such as the United States, which owe most of their current wealth to the use of fossil fuels, to fund the innovation process of technology to decarbonize all sectors of the economy.
This judgment is laid forth by Gates in an essay titled “State of the Energy Transition,” which was published on his personal blog on Tuesday. In the essay, the Microsoft co-founder provides a brief overview of how the world has responded to global warming in the 15 years since he first learned about it.
His opinion is both hopeful and pessimistic in various ways. He is usually encouraged by how certain governments and business companies have recognized the importance of climate change and begun to invest accordingly. But he’s also honest about how the world isn’t moving fast enough or being united enough to confront the problem, which he sees as the greatest difficult and existential challenge humanity has ever faced.
“The world still has to cut annual greenhouse gas emissions from 51 billion tons to zero,” Gates said in his piece, which was released as the Breakthrough Energy Summit kicked begin in Seattle.
“If you’ve been following the annual IPCC reports, you’ve seen as the scenarios for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius become increasingly remote,” Gates said, referring to the seminal Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports published by the United Nations that serve as a benchmark for global progress.
To halt global warming and the extreme weather events that come with it, all countries must stop emitting greenhouse gases that trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane gas, he said.
“The ultimate measure of success is global greenhouse gas emissions: we must reduce them from 51 billion tons per year to zero over the next three decades,” Gates wrote.
To do so, the world must develop and deploy technology that allows for the same economic activity as burning fossil fuels but emitting no greenhouse emissions.
Manufacturing (which includes everything from steel to cement and plastic) is the most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 30% of total emissions. According to Rhodium Group estimates from 2019, power production accounted for 26% of global emissions, agriculture for 21%, transportation for 16%, and buildings for 7%.
According to Gates, the only solution is to develop better and less expensive alternatives that do not generate greenhouse gases.
Even if developing economies are responsible for the majority of emissions, richer countries will have to lead this process.
“Low- and middle-income countries are vigorously developing to achieve the standard of living that their people desire — and they should be.” Many countries in Europe and North America pumped carbon into the atmosphere to attain wealth, and it is impractical and unfair to demand everyone else to sacrifice a more pleasant existence because that carbon turned out to impact the climate,” Gates wrote.
The cost gap between cleaner alternatives and conventional, legacy sources is referred to by Gates as the “green premium.” To reduce global emissions, the green premium must be reduced to zero — that is, clean alternatives must be provided at the same cost as the fossil-fuel-burning option.
Government involvement may be required to accelerate this process.
“I have more faith in markets than many others, but even I don’t believe the market can reset an entire economy in a few decades,” Gates remarked. “We need a strategy to expedite the process.”
