Is Bill Gates a sage figure who can help save the world from climate change? Or is he a dreadful old hypocrite who likes to lecture us on climate while flying around the world by private jet, and who pushes certain technologies because he has personally invested in them? There are plenty of people who take the latter view.
Gates was reported to have taken 59 flights in 2017 and admits to have flown to the 2015 Paris climate conference by private jet. Moreover, he claims to have invested $1 billion (£818 million) of his own money in green technologies, so he is not exactly neutral on the subject – he is as much a vested interest as is ExxonMobil.
Britain, with its rigid net zero targets, is very much on the hairshirt track
Nevertheless, he does make a good point in an interview with the website Our World in Data. Rich countries, he said, not only owe it to the world to get their own carbon emissions down to zero, but to drive ‘green premiums to zero’ in order to help poorer countries to decarbonise. In other words, it is our responsibility to develop zero carbon technology so that it is no more expensive than current, carbon-intensive technologies. Then, the whole world can decarbonise without suffering an economic hit.
This is diametrically opposed to the approach currently being taken by Britain. We only really care about getting our own emissions to zero, at whatever cost to our own citizens. Inasmuch as we have a policy for the developing world it seems to consist of bunging them aid money in order to persuade them to stop doing things like burning coal. If that makes them poorer it doesn’t seem to bother us.
Take Britain’s net zero target. As it stands, this is purely a ‘territorial target’ – it involves only emissions physically spewed out in Britain. It doesn’t include emissions created elsewhere in the world in the name of growing food and manufacturing consumer goods for UK consumers. Come 2050, Britain could declare that it had reached net zero – when all we had really done is offshore our emissions by closing down our agriculture and heavy industry and importing food and consumer goods instead. This wouldn’t help the planet, only earn our own government virtue points. And it would come at tremendous cost to Britain.
By Gates’ reasoning, we should be less obsessed with getting our own emissions down to net zero – and become rather more proactive in developing, and reducing the cost of, green technologies which would help the whole world decarbonise. Gates raises the case of steel and cement-making, which account for around 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2015, he says, the world did not have the means to decarbonise either of these industries, but now he says it is looking a lot more promising. He cites the example of a cement-making process which involves injecting carbon dioxide into cement so that it absorbs some of the emissions involved in its manufacturing process (a technology which, by the way, he says he has invested in).
Gates may turn out to be a bit Panglossian on this. Cement can only absorb so much carbon dioxide, and after the scandal of aerated concrete we should be a little wary of the long-term effects of novel materials like this. There is no guarantee that green steel or cement will ever match traditional processes on cost – at present they are a long, long way off.
But it is hard to escape his overall point, that if we want to decarbonise the world we are not going to achieve it by hairshirt means – telling people they can’t do things. We are going to get there by developing technology which allows emissions to be cut without compromising economic growth.
At the moment, Britain, with its rigid net zero targets, is very much on the hairshirt track. Our leaders are trying to fool us that net zero policies will save us money, while simultaneously loading households with tens of thousands of pounds of costs.
Comments