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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.
Does anyone remember when Bill Gates was evil?
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! --
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.
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.
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."
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.
It does if the power is being used for water purification, or to run simple productive machines like saws and drills. Most of the places that are in desperate poverty have very little productive capacity beyond the healthy person. the goal is a sustainable way to replicate industrial revolution.
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?