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Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy
An anonymous reader writes: A little over a month ago, Bill Gates made headlines when he decided to double down on his investments in renewable energy. Now, he's written an article for Quartz explaining why: "I think this issue is especially important because, of all the people who will be affected by climate change, those in poor countries will suffer the most. Higher temperatures and less-predictable weather would hurt poor farmers, most of whom live on the edge and can be devastated by a single bad crop. Food supplies could decline. Hunger and malnutrition could rise. It would be a terrible injustice to let climate change undo any of the past half-century's progress against poverty and disease — and doubly unfair because the people who will be hurt the most are the ones doing the least to cause the problem." He also says government is not doing enough to fund such research, and that energy markets aren't doing a good enough job of factoring the negative effects of carbon emissions.
Same answer to both questions.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering? Narf
well, yeah.
Guilt. That's why.
Does anyone remember when Bill Gates was evil?
Why use the word "dumping"? Sounds incredibly biased to me.
...he dumped a billion dollars into Windows Vista, Windows CE, Windows ME, and Zune. a) He's fallible. b) He has too much money to care about losing a billion large.
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
No sig today...
One of the richest farmland valleys in the world gave great wealth to its country and did so for "eons."
Then a change in the weather caused rainfall to drop by 30% and eventually by something around 80% and the farmland wealth 'evaporated.'
This all occurred a couple thousand years or more before Christ, when the inland valley that was originally a terrific growing area suffered a natural change of world weather which dried it up. That was not caused by man-made activity. It can and will happen again. Man has never had enough power to turn the weather "back" to reclaim the inland growing area of Egypt.
As long as he is dumping his own money, that is all fine and not even much of our business.
But, as recent history has shown, government politicians may choose to force the reset of us to follow his lead. And that should not be allowed.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Having consistent power to refrigerate vaccines and medicines, and sterilize needles is critical to curing diseases worldwide.
Moving to a more decentralized approach of clean power generation allows areas with major health problems from disease to leapfrog past other countries. And because they're not that useful in warfare, if done on a mass produced level and inexpensively, it makes it easy enough to maintain (just train people to fix them and install them, and set them on resupply and maintenance runs, with text messages for "out of supplies" or "power running low" or "diagnostic error code physical problem") using burst relay communications.
Same goes for water. The Gates Foundation has demonstrated they could mass produce clean water supplies from ... basically sewage (human wastes). They just need power supplies to run those. If you roll out solar worldwide in mass quantities you drop the cost to maintain and install low enough. And you can use such devices to charge phones that use low energy communications. Most diseases in poor nations involve lack of clean drinking water. If you can't get clean drinking water locally but you can get it free from one of these devices, you'll use that. Nobody wants their babies to die.
Doesn't matter if it won't charge your phone at night when it needs power to run the fridges, so long as you make it modular.
Very good idea.
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Yeah, I think it was less than two months ago when he announced he was still not going to divest from fossil fuels. http://www.washingtontimes.com...
So maybe he's moving from evil to hypocrite?
didn't we just have an article posted on here where someone pointed out that the efficiency from end-to-end of charging a mobile phone is something like *16* percent? ... so why is bill gates investing in an area of least efficiency? it makes me wonder, y'know - when people get a lot of money (like google throwing money at project ara to help create and entrench existing monopoly positions around the UniPro standard), they often don't think "how can this problem be solved in a way that *doesn't* need a lot of money?" not so as to be stingy, but so that creativity is applied instead of brute force, if you know what i mean. just because you *can* solve the *production* of energy doesn't mean that you shouldn't be looking at solving the reduction of energy *consumption*.
Just like most really rich guys. Trying like hell to clean his dark soul from what he did to get that rich.
Carnegie was a horrible horrible human being, he tried to buy his soul back with all the "giving back".
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I hope he is investing in storage technology. Too many solar panels don't help at night.
I may hate Microsoft, and think Gates was over the top when he robbed Seattle Computer Products of DOS when IBM came looking for MS BASIC and mentioned that they needed an OS for their new PC after CPM shined them on, but his humanitarian efforts (probably due to the influence of his wife) have been 1st class. So, I don't hate him, and wish him and his family the best for the future.
Collecting and exploiting everyone's private data from most of the worlds desktop users requires energy... lots of it. Ask the NSA about their troubles with the grid. Bill is just doing his portfolio a favor by working to make more sources of energy available.
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"Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary."
What is the source for this "less predictable weather" claim? From what I have read they expect more persistent weather patterns to lead to more extreme weather (eg many days in a row of rainfall, etc). This is the opposite.
Weather changes naturally therefore human-caused weather change does not exist?
Lightning causes fire naturally therefore humans do not "have enough power" to create fire.
(a) he can afford it, (b) it keeps his name in the news. In a good way, I mean.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Philanthropy is great but this fixation of bringing food, water, and basic healthcare to 3rd-world countries concerns me. Sure it relieves suffering but it also fosters population growth without fundamentally improving the human condition on this planet. I'd rather see these dudes use their money to tackle education, develop new treatments for diseases like cancer, create technology to obsolete fossil fuels and solve global warming....
Invest in something new and quit bagging the low-hanging fruit.
Dammit!! Where the hell is MY check?? Cheapskates!!!
this seems like a noble thing to do. So why am I left with this feeling that he is still a crooked, slimy sleazeball? I've said this before but this is straight out of the Robber Baron playbook.
Act 1 - make as much money as humanly possible. If you have to screw people over or even break laws along the way, so be it.
Act 2 - turn into a philanthropist and give some of it back. Note: not ALL of it, SOME of it.
In the end, most people have short memories and will only remember the last act not the first.
I'm not saying that he hasn't done anything good with his money. He has. But he's still a crook.
And renewables have probably hit the point where they're profitable. We know this because power companies have called them out as a risk factor in their SEC filings. It does bother me that we let the 1% toss that kinda money round willy-nilly though.
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The U.S. dollar is supported entirely by its hegemony as the only currency allowed to sell oil in. No country producing oil is allowed to sell oil in any currency other than U.S. dollars, on pain of assassination of its leaders. This forces the world to support a bankrupt U.S. currency if they want to buy oil. Providing an alternate energy commodity would remove the only support the U.S. currency has, making it as worthless as toilet paper and the U.S. bankrupt, unable to pay its bills or buy its necessities. No U.S. administration or the voters behind them will allow this to happen, and Bill Gates or anyone interfering with the hegemony of the U.S. dollar will be thrown under a bus.
Yo Bill Gates iz prob'ly investing another 1 billion bones into clean energy cuz he wants ta feel like he iz doin' somethin` important , wOrd!
Bill Gate must have some plan to make money on this, Bill Gates of all people has to know climate change is a scam. Government (Democrats) will only do something if they can profit or gain votes for it. It is an excuse to throw money and people who do them favors and get people to pay more for things then we should.
People in poor areas are the least effect by the "climate change" as they don't have government telling them they have to pay more for power for some made up "greater good".
So yea, Bill Gates has a way to make money on this.
Get tired of all this climate change stuff, and nothing ever happens year after year. Eventually the temp will start falling as is the natural cycle so this stuff can go away and democrats look like fools.
So I suppose dominating the world with Windows for all those years was worth it?
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
'Renewables' is a capitalist term and the fear monger has gone on long enough for it to be something worth investing in....
I for one welcome Bill Gates, our new overlord. So far he seems better than the old overlord.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Slashdot has turned into a hive of such a hateful bunch of old cunts. I'm done with you.
Hate anyone who thinks like that. F the coal miners or coal power plant workers. They can find a different job.
Just like most really rich guys. Trying like hell to clean his dark soul from what he did to get that rich.
The entrepreneur --- the empire builder --- has more fun than almost anyone and accomplishes more than most. He tends to exit the stage as exuberant and self-confident as when he entered it.
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Mean while should we just keep giving out money that we don't have to make Gates feel better? What is our country's debt again?
First hoard up lots of money in exchange for clogging the computing ecosystem with shoddy foundational software that's been holding technology back for decades, now dole it out parcel-wise in truly faux-philantropic fashion, as in, every time is an excuse to trot out his public philantropism when if he'd been doing the job right in the first place, we'd never have had to know his name so well.
There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming'. Why is 'Climatedot' continually posting this 'climate change' bullshit every single day?
www.wattsupwiththat.com
www.climatedepot.com
Why can't ./ reliably use the Bill the Borg icon he earned over the years? What has happened to ./? Is anyone left over there?
Just like other oligarchs such as Buffett and Musk, he's learned it's less risky and there's more money to be made from government intervention/subsidies than from actually selling a product that people may or may not find useful.
Sadly -- and I do mean sadly -- the effect of CO2 on "the poor" is never accurately or fairly tallied.
If it were, the tally would have to begin with the massive amount of greenhouse research on the positive effects of CO_2 on plant growth, research that demonstrates (for example) that it is easily cost-beneficial to buy apparatus to maintain a CO2 concentration over 1000 ppm in actual greenhouses. By raising atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 400 ppm, we have in fact raised crop yields worldwide by between 10 and 15%. Close to 1 billion people dined last night on the extra crop yields (all things being equal) produced by the extra carbon dioxide. It is difficult to put a price tag on this generally neglected benefit, simply because it is so enormous. It is a benefit not only to humans -- it pervades the entire biosphere with very few exceptions. Different types of plants don't all respond equally to increases in CO2, but they all respond positively and everything from the grass in your front yard to food crops to trees are growing faster and more every year. It also has secondary benefits -- plants raised in a CO2 rich environment tend to be more drought resistant as the extra carbon dioxide causes the plant's need to respire to reduce, so it retains water longer. There is evidence that this is already impacting deserts by greening their edges.
Then there are the benefits of the electricity produced. So far, the benefits of making electricity (and other products) burning coal have included things like "building civilization". The lack of the benefits of electricity are one of the fundamental things that make the global poor (the poorest third of the world's population) poor in the first place. Cheap and abundant electricity means clean water, sewage treatment, inexpensive fertilizer, cooking on something other than dried dung or charcoal, light after dark, refrigeration, transportation, jobs and manufacturing, health care, and access to communication, education, information, and entertainment. At the very least, the lack of reliable and affordable sources of electricity means the general lack of most or all of these things. The people reading this post (many of whom will, I'm sure, already be gathering their nuclear device flames:-) would, I would wager, forgo flaming this post if the cost of dong so would be spending one single month living in a mud hut in north India without electricity or one single one of the products electricity enables (such as clean water).
Anything that raises the cost of electricity and imposes barriers to its cost-effective implementation in the world's poorest countries has the direct and immediate effect of hurting the poorest people of the world far more than all of the "climate change" that has thus far been attributed to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even if you are willing to attribute every single storm or heat wave to climate change instead of acknowledging that the data on storms itself (over a pitifully short interval of accurately recorded history) provides almost no evidence for change, let alone attributable negative impact.
One can easily understand why China and India are investing in coal burning power plants at a ratio of something like two parts new coal generation capacity to one part everything else (including nuclear) put together. Unlike Mr. Gates, they can do the human arithmetic. Even though their coal plants are comparatively dirty and have directly observable negative impacts, those impacts pale beside the benefits of the reliable electricity they produce, and like it or not, wind and solar are thus far neither reliable (in terms of having a high quality of service duty cycle) nor (generally) cost effective when directly compared to the delivered cost of coal generated electricity. If they were, China would invest even more heavily in them as they are doing the math without the saving-the-world sentiment.
With all of that said, it is still absolutely
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
In other words the infrastructure is there but political corruption somewhat prevents it from taking form....but they're alot better off than most first world countries technology-wise...
Funding research is giving money out? Hmm... Not sure if intelligent.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."