This is a review in the Guardian (UK) by a British writer living in NY. I was looking forward to reading the review, but much of it is an ode to the brilliance of the reviewer herself. Too bad.
The link is to the full (long & very pretentious) review and I have put some excerpts below it.
Bill Gates appears via video conference – Microsoft Teams, not Zoom, obviously – from his office in Seattle, a large space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Washington. It’s a gloomy day outside and Gates is, somewhat eccentrically, positioned a long way from the camera, behind a large, kidney-shaped desk; his communications manager sits off to one side. If one had to stage, for the purposes of symbolism, a tableau of a man for whom a distance of 3,000 miles between callers still constitutes too intimate a setting, it might be this. “As a way to start,” says Gates’ aide, “would it be helpful for Bill to make a couple of comments about why he wrote his new book?” It is helpful, and I’m not ungrateful, but this is not how interviews typically commence.
There is an urge towards deference, when speaking to Gates, which attends few other people of commensurate fame. Celebrity is one thing, but wealth – true, former-richest-man-in-the-world wealth – is something else entirely; one has a sense of being granted an audience with the Great Man, a fact made more surreal by his famously muted persona. The 65-year-old has the lofty, mildly longsuffering air of a man accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room, leavened by wry amusement and interrupted, on the evidence of past interviews, by the occasional peevish outburst – most memorably in 2014, when Jeremy Paxman questioned him about Microsoft’s alleged tax avoidance. (“I think that’s about as incorrect a characterisation of anything I’ve ever heard,” he said, practically squirming in his seat with annoyance.)
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All of these aspects come together in Gates’ new book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster, which, as he tells me, grew out of two things: his interest in the sciences and what struck him as an irresistible challenge – the fiendishly difficult problem of how to further global development while reducing emissions. For the past few decades, much of Gates’ focus has been on expanding access to electricity in the remotest parts of the world. “And yet,” he says, “the idea of adding new electricity capacity – you can’t just go build coal plants. And understanding how expensive it needs to be, and how this is going to work, had me doing a lot of reading.”
There’s another, greater obstacle to reaching zero emissions, which is the political challenge – part of which involves climate activists limiting their exposure to accusations of hypocrisy. Gates loves private jets; he calls them his “guilty pleasure”. He loves hamburgers and eating grapes year-round. A few weeks after we speak, it is reported that he is involved in a bid to buy Signature Aviation, which handles ground services for 1.6m private jet flights a year. Today he says, “I get sustainable aviation fuel that I use when I fly,” and mentions another, vaguely futuristic-sounding service: “I’ve paid to offset my carbon footprint – there’s this group Climeworks that does direct air capture up in Iceland.” On the subject of imported food, he says: “Well, growing food locally is often worse, because you’re putting things in greenhouses that have an insane climate imprint. I’m not the only one who eats out-of-season food, as far as I know. But if that’s people’s main objection and they’ll adopt my plan, then” – Gates smiles, in a rather glittering way – “I’ll cede my grape-eating.”
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The depressing part of the book is its account of the challenge ahead, which Gates presents as extremely urgent – and, in order to avoid defeatism, also just about doable. He points to a headline figure: 51bn. This is the amount of greenhouses gas, in tons, emitted globally each year, which we have to get down to net zero by 2050. The first step towards this is understanding what we’re dealing with. “Let’s have more literate climate articles, so people can understand if it’s a breakthrough that’s a big deal or a small deal.”
For example, the transport industry, on which so much attention is focused, accounts for only 16% of global emissions – which is why, as air travel has ground to a halt, greenhouse gases have gone down by only around 5%. As Gates points out, the future of car travel lies in electric vehicles; but if the electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, the switch is of limited value. Cars are a minor part of the problem compared with the juggernaut of emissions generated by the global cement and steel industries.
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“If this was all about a 20% reduction, it should be pretty easy. Rich countries could reduce our cars and big houses, and the ridiculous amounts of meat we eat by 20%. The thing that makes climate so hard is that it’s not about a 20% reduction – it’s about getting it to zero. So things like [changing] mass transit so you have 20% less miles driven in the city, that doesn’t go anywhere.”
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