Peter: Gates to a better future

Summary

Justin Rowlatt
interviewing Bill Gates

In “Bill Gates: Solving Covid easy compared with climate”, Justin Rowlatt (2021) says that when he interviewed him, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates expressed optimism that humanity would be able to solve it, despite climate change being far more challenging than Covid-19 has proven. According to Rowlatt, Gates thinks that the “moral conviction” of concerned young people can help push governments to adopt the policies needed to encourage greener economic decisions so that the full cost of the energy and goods we consume is paid for, rather than being inflicted on the environment as in the past. Responding to the conspiracy theories some level at him, Gates, who recently published How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, said he has and will continue to ignore them as he now raises his voice to speak on the urgency of climate change in addition to his work of many years on global health issues. 

You can view both the Google Doc in which I composed this summary and a pdf print of the planning I did in MS OneNote. 

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Response

Family meal at my brother's
home on my last visit

I wish I could be so optimistic about our species’ future as Bill Gates is, but I’m not sure that history favours Gates’ confidence that we will overcome the challenges posed by the climate change crisis that is already affecting us. In my own country, Australian, for example, scientists attribute the increasing severity of bushfires that destroy homes and bush habitats to climate change. They predict this will only increase in coming years. In 2019, my brother’s farm near the city of Lismore, was smothered in smoke from bushfires for almost two months. And it was dry. His usually lush, green grass and trees turned brown. He was very lucky that the bushfires only came close. Several of his neighbours were not so lucky, although only a couple of homes in the area were lost to fire. Other rural and semi-rural areas of Australia were not so lucky. And because the rain is less reliable, he's had another dam dug on his property. 

As Gates correctly identifies, a cause of global warming and related harm to the Earth and the living things on it, plants and animals such as ourselves, is that our economic systems since at least the time of the Industrial Revolution a couple of hundred years ago have allowed polluters not to pay the economic cost of their factories and extraction of resources. Electricity plants used to spew smoke from coal into the air that everyone must breathe. Paper manufacturers could flatten forests to get the raw materials they needed, and car drivers could make the air of Bangkok disgusting for the rest of us who live here. I agree with Gates that the full economic cost of these practices should be paid for by consumers. I’m not sure how radically Gates wants to change things, perhaps not as much as I think they should be changed. Car manufactures and sellers, for example, should be taxed at a high enough rate to fully pay for the government to undo the pollution that they cause. That would mean that fuel for cars should be much more expensive. I realize that this would slow economic growth, but such radical action might also save our planet, and therefore save our species from extinction. 

But I often read in the news of people who do not believe in climate change, or who don’t believe that humans cause it. This willful ignorance or rejection of the consensus of science is irrational and dangerous, as most unreason is, whether from the greedy denial that smoking causes cancer or the strange stories that religions tell to justify violating other people in other groups. 

Cattle (and a sister)
on my brother's farm

And that seems to me the deeper problem. Humans have always preferred their own interests of the interests of their group over fair sharing with others. As Gates says, the people of India naturally want, and deserve equally, the same standard of living enjoyed by people like my family in Australia. That means a lot of construction. I agree with Gates that technology can provide answers where religion and other ideologies, such as unregulated capitalism, fail or make things worse. I liked, for example, Gates’ example of meat grown in laboratories as an alternative to meat from cows, pigs, chickens and so on, but I fear that some, such as the US beef industry, will reject it as being unnatural. Actually, my brother raises beef cattle on his farm, and I’m not sure how he feels about cultured beef steaks replacing steaks from his delicious cattle, or his wonderful free-range ducks that I always enjoy on my visits.  

Technology is not the problem. We humans seem to me the real threat to our continued existence on a sustainable Earth. 

As I expected, the 600 words in my response took only about 35 minutes to write. It was much easier than the short summary paragraph. Then I had some fun finding and adding a few images.

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Question

Singapore has approved
lab-grown chicken for sale

Now that cultured meat grown more efficiently in factories without killing animals is becoming available, should traditional meat taken from slaughtered animals be taxed at a high rate to encourage consumers to switch to lab-grown meat? 

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Reference

• Rowlatt, J. (2021, February 15). Bill Gates: Solving Covid easy compared with climate. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56042029