Bill and Melinda Gates explain their charitable priorities for the coming year
Up, up and away
SINCE 2009 Bill Gates has written an annual open letter setting out priorities for the charitable foundation he leads with his wife, Melinda. Some have highlighted specific causes: the first picked out reducing child mortality, improving agricultural productivity and raising the standard of education in America. Others have tackled big themes, such as how innovation could be fostered across the global economy. This year’s letter, signed jointly, strikes a down-to-earth tone. On a visit to schools in Kentucky the couple were videoed for a school project. The youngsters asked them: “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” Mr Gates answered “more energy”; his wife, “more time”. On the way home, they decided that the two things they wanted more of were what the world’s poor needed, too. In the run-up to the publication of this year’s letter on February 22nd, they talked to The Economist to explain why.
Much of the foundation’s work is with people, mostly in Africa and India, whose nights are lit by only kerosene lamps or candles. Their lives would be improved by even modest amounts of electricity—and transformed by reliable electricity from a grid, which would allow them to irrigate crops, start businesses and perhaps get jobs in factories. As for time, the value of poor women’s is often set at naught, meaning they must carry out back-breaking, low-productivity work such as fetching water and wood. Freed from these, women could care better for their children and homes, and, above all, seek paid work.
Mr Gates says his wish for more energy for the world encompasses three broad issues. The first is getting energy to people who do not have it. The second is limiting climate change—which will hit many of the same people hardest, since they are subsistence farmers in semi-arid regions, which will become drier and perhaps also more prone to extreme weather events. The third, since some climate change is now inevitable, is finding ways to mitigate its impact.
People in the rich world often think that tackling climate change is a matter of switching to somewhat more energy-efficient lighting, transport and so on, says Mr Gates. Such actions are valuable, but will add up to nothing like enough. The letter works through a simple equation: to keep climate change within bearable limits, total carbon emissions must fall to zero. That means either cutting energy use to zero, or finding a carbon-free way to get all the energy we need.
No one knows—yet—how that could be done. But he describes himself as optimistic that it can be. Will the breakthrough come from harnessing wind energy in the high atmosphere? From some novel type of nuclear fission or fusion? Solar energy twinned with geothermal? Some combination of all these, and more? What’s needed is “perhaps a dozen research efforts, going down each of ten paths,” he says. The investors who fund these efforts will need to be a bit more patient than those who invest in software or pharmaceuticals, two other fields where big bets into unproven technologies are routinely made. Governments, foundations and endowments will probably have to play a part. But considering the prize at stake, he says, what’s needed is not beyond imagining: “a matter of billions, not hundreds of billions”.
Without energy innovation, the world is on course for well above 2°C of warming: “it would be unfortunate to run that experiment.” As people get richer they will use more energy, and other poor countries, notably India, could be expected to follow China’s coal-driven development path. Even with snazzy new options they may, unless prices fall fast enough: poor people need cheap power. Rich countries would then need to change all the faster. And whatever happens next, the amount of carbon humanity has already emitted means that some climate change is already “baked in”. Poor farmers will need better farming techniques and new seeds to raise productivity, and more access to credit, to carry them through rough patches.
Time and energy are linked, says Mrs Gates: much of women’s unpaid labour is on tasks Bill and Melinda Gates explain their charitable priorities for the coming year | The Economist:
