Slashdot Mirror
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.
well, yeah.
Does anyone remember when Bill Gates was evil?
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
No sig today...
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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?
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.
In fairness to Bill Gates, he's talking about poor farmers in poor countries where there is no real electrical grid.
He's not talking about whiny punks in rich countries and their damned cell phones. Or rich assholes with private yachts and jets.
Oddly enough, people in poor and remote areas are the ones who would stand to benefit from solar power the most, and they aren't the people who would be looking at reducing their energy consumption ... they're the people who don't have lights and really basic things.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
--
"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."
It's his own money. Who cares if it's a fallacy? The reality is, eventually we're going to need to switch to renewable energy. Non-renewable energy will run out by definition.
So if he wants to put his money into that, it might make the world a better place. And if it ends up with cheaper energy for everybody, it will make the world a better place. The cheaper energy becomes, the better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm pretty sure there are clear probable causes to the climate change in Egypt and they have to do with the end of the last ice age. Now, what causes ice ages? There's many theories but no one knows. Many theories, such as the changing of Earth's eccentricity, have a good reasoned basis supported by evidence. Others, like crustal displacement, are completely speculative. The truth is, nobody knows, and with regards to anthropomorphic planet warming: it doesn't matter. The question is: do emission from our industrial society impact the climate? I'm not an expert in the field, but nearly all the actual experts seem to agree that they do.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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.
That would be verified historical evidence.
What you are citing as rebuttal is speculation.
"Speculation?" That's a highly disingenuous dismissal of the efforts of thousands of scientists who have devoted their careers to uncovering the truth.
Science is hard. Dismissing what scientists say is easy.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Unless you take the money you've made and do something that contradicts conservative dogma (climate change), at which point your previously unimpeachable opinions are all wrong and you are wasting (i.e. dumping) your fortune. Obviously you have had some sort of mental breakdown. You and your projects are then open to endless criticism. All that stuff about the freedom to spend your money any way you want goes right out the window (or Windows in this case).
Hypocritical much?
Why is Snark Required?
Nothing happens for some plant types, and even the authors of this study said may. They had good reason to.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w518...
To quote from its abstract:
The consensus of many studies of the effects of elevated CO2 on plants is that the CO2 fertilization effect is real (see Kimball, 1983; Acock and Allen, 1985; Cure and Acock, 1986; Allen, 1990; Rozema et al., 1993; Allen, 1994; Allen and Amthor, 1995). However, the CO2 fertilization effect may not be manifested under conditions where some other growth factor is severely limiting, such as low temperature (Long, 1991). Also, plants grown in some conditions, where limitations of rooting volume (Arp, 1991), light, or other factors restrict growth, have not shown a sustained response to elevated CO2 (Kramer, 1981).
Note well that again they use the term may. This is because -- unlike you -- they seem to recognize that even though the effect is real and will have an impact in many locations and conditions, including those that generally hold in agriculture where one generally avoids growing plants in strongly resource constrained environments, one can certainly suppress the effect (or fail to observe it in the wild) in specific environments, and they go even further and note that the effect is differential according to plant type with some plant types more likely to exhibit a stronger response or be resource limited than others.
The bulk of this report simply works through specific food crop species and estimates their likely response to a mix of increased CO2 and the imagined climate changes that are predicted, or projected, or prophecied (as you wish) by the GCMs that so far haven't done a very good job of PP or P-ing the climate.
You would obviously like more papers:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...
http://www.nature.com/nclimate...
(Abstract: Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.)
Probably the best review article on the effect on trees, in particular, is this:
http://www.climateaudit.info/p...
where in laboratory experiments on trees increasing CO2 by 300 ppm increased growth by 50 to 60%. Idso remarks that the problem with laboratory experiments is the opposite of what you assert -- it is difficult to grow trees in the lab without constraining their roots and access to resources and work he cites (in less abundance as it was ongoing in 1993) suggested that the response in the wild is even higher.
In general, in the mean, increasing ONLY CO2 in the environments of most wild plants does, in fact, increase their biomass and the net biomass of the Earth has almost certainly substantially increased on average, allowing for changes in land use over the last century. The effect is pronounced and relatively enormous in trees (and yes, I can cite papers t
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.