In response to climate change, Gates promised to fly less and eat less meat

Share with friends and circle of friends with wechat scan QR code on March 20, US local time Friday, Microsoft co-founder bill · < a target = "_ blank" href=" https://news.163.com/news/search?keyword=%E7%9B%96%E8%8C%A8 "> Bill Gates < / a > (Bill Gates) participated in the" ask me any questions "activity for the ninth time on the social networking website reddit, and answered the questions related to < a target ="_ blank" href=" https://news.163.com/news/search?keyword=%E6%B0%94%E5%80%99%E5%8F%98%E5%8C%96 "> climate change < / a >, vaccines, conspiracy theories, artificial meat burgers and other related issues. the following are highlights of Gates' Q & A activities: meat eating question question: which emerging technologies do you think can play an important role in addressing the challenges of climate change in the future? Gates: we need a lot of technical support, such as artificial meat, energy storage, new methods of manufacturing building materials, etc. we hope to be open to those seemingly unreliable ideas. Q: what are you personally doing to help reduce meat consumption? Gates: personally, I've made a lot of efforts. I drive an electric car and have solar panels at home. I sometimes eat artificial meat and buy environmentally friendly aviation fuel. Novel coronavirus pneumonia has been shown to reduce travel and tide over difficulties. Q: do you think laboratory grown artificial meat will popularize and replace livestock? Gates: if the cost of artificial meat falls, it can be very competitive even without considering the climate impact or animal welfare. There are two ways to make artificial meat: one is to use cell culture in the laboratory, the other is to use plant materials to make meat. At present, beyond and impact use the plant meat making method with lower cost. Q: which is the best hamburger in Seattle? Gates: I'm not picky about this, dicks, burgermaster, etc. Seattle has a lot of good choices, and I encourage more people to try artificial beef. conspiracy theory Q: how do wrong information, false information and false news do harm to society? Gates: this is a serious problem. Some false information is more interesting than the truth, so digital channels seem to amplify echoes with bad facts. I haven't seen as much creativity as we need to solve this problem. Q: what role do you think misinformation plays in the fight against climate change? Gates: the damage done in the past is enormous. Now that oil companies have stopped funding these things, I think there will be less denial of climate change. There are still many problems about how we can reduce emissions, but I hope all young people agree that this is a key goal. Q: what do you think of the conspiracy theory against you? Gates: I'm innocent! Everything about 5g and microchip vaccination sounds crazy. Why am I doing this? How do you deal with the hatred and conspiracy theories against you? Gates: wise criticism helps. If people have different ideas about how to solve climate problems, or if there are better global health solutions, I'd like to hear about them. However, personal attacks alone can't push things forward, but I won't let them stop me. views on the epidemic situation Q: will climate change make the epidemic disease more common or more serious in the future, and how to make it more serious? Gates: I won't connect them directly. The risk of a pandemic is hard to calculate, but it is already rising as humans increasingly destroy nature. Travel can lead to the rapid spread of disease, which makes respiratory diseases very terrible. tax the rich Q: what do you think is the reasonable tax rate that the super rich should pay? Gates: I've always been pushing for an increase in the inheritance tax, which I think is an effective tool to avoid the continuous concentration of wealth. The government must do more, including paying for medical expenses, recovering from the epidemic, investing in climate change and providing foreign aid. So I've been pushing for higher taxes on the super rich, but I don't agree with some of the more radical proposals. buy a lot of farmland Q: why do you buy so much farmland? Gates: that's the choice of my investment group, which has nothing to do with climate change. The agricultural sector is critical. With more productive seeds, we can avoid deforestation and help Africa cope with the climate difficulties that have emerged. It's not clear how cheap biofuels can be, but if they are cheap enough, they could solve the problem of air and truck emissions. Q: what makes you hope that we will achieve zero net emissions by 2050? Gates: there is more public support for major measures to avoid climate disaster than ever before. It's exciting to see that governments and companies around the world have set ambitious emission reduction targets. I'm optimistic about the global enthusiasm for new inventions. (Xiaoxiao) related reading: talking about environmental protection by private plane? Gates: I spend $7 million a year to offset my personal < a target = "_ blank" href=" https://news.163.com/news/search?keyword=%E7%A2%B3%E8%B6%B3%E8%BF%B9 "> carbon footprint < / a > 21 Financial app Zheng Qingting reports from Beijing on March 1 local time, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was in Cambridge < a target ="_ blank" href=" https://news.163.com/news/search?keyword=%E8%83%BD%E6%BA%90 "Style =" box sizing: inherit; color: rgb (0, 140, 210); text decoration: none; "> energy (IHS CERAWEEK) said that he has invested about US $2 billion in the development of clean technologies and is optimistic about the development potential of green hydrogen, carbon capture and other technologies. It is expected that there will be a lot of surprising technological progress in the next 10 years. The premium for electric vehicles will be reduced to zero and the cost of carbon capture will be reduced to less than $100 per ton. this year's CERAWEEK focuses on how to achieve the global emission reduction goal, that is, to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050. As a dialogue guest on the first day of the meeting, gates shared his views on global efforts to reduce emissions and introduced himWe are optimistic about and invest in green technology. Gates predicted in his 2015 Ted speech that the world will face another pandemic crisis after the Ebola epidemic, which will be fulfilled in 2020. But what others may not know is that earlier in 2010, he warned in another Ted speech that climate change would bring great disaster to mankind. Gates told CERAWEEK that for a long time after 2010, governments lack sufficient political will to deal with climate change. As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, although many countries participated in the mission to innovation global initiative, they promised to double government investment in green energy innovation over the next five years and encourage the private sector to play a leading role in this regard. But it was only in recent years that governments were really willing to work out concrete plans to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. despite this, gates still believes that the actions taken by countries are insufficient. "I only see short-term targets and pay too much attention to the parts that are easy to reduce emissions, such as passenger cars and power generation." In his view, such as cement, steel, aviation and other fields are really hard to crack, and a large number of innovative solutions are urgently needed. "People should know the real challenge of achieving net zero.". Gates said cheap green hydrogen would play a significant role in energy transformation and be widely used in chemical fertilizer manufacturing, steel decarbonization and other industrial applications, but added that the so-called "green premium" would become a key factor restricting its use. Green hydrogen is a kind of renewable energy (such as wind power, hydropower, solar energy) to produce hydrogen, which has no carbon emission. "green premium" is the additional cost that consumers pay to buy fuels or technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gates said this is particularly important in promoting sustainable aviation fuel and reducing emissions in industries such as cement. "Green premium is an important standard to measure the process of reducing emissions in 2050." He pointed out that the lower the green premium, the more mature the green technology is and the easier it is to be accepted and used by people. gates pointed out that at present, there is a green premium in the process of emission reduction in all walks of life. For example, buying and driving electric vehicles will be more expensive than ordinary cars. However, with the expansion of production scale and the introduction of incentive measures, "in the next 10 to 15 years, the green premium may drop to zero, and the government will require everyone to use electric vehicles at that time.". General motors of the United States has announced that it will stop production of all fuel vehicles in 2035 and turn to the manufacture of pure electric vehicles. recently, Gates also said in an interview that he hopes to work more with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to support the expensive early green alternative technology. He said that when the price of these new technologies is too high for ordinary consumers or the government, rich people like them can use their money to stimulate demand and reduce the price to a level that everyone can afford. Capital investment plays an important role in the development of green industry. Gates pointed out that in the whole innovation process, from R & D to verification, early deployment to large-scale deployment, all links need a lot of capital. In the early stage, it is mainly government investment, and in the later stage, it needs a lot of enterprise capital, even government subsidies. "You need someone to buy these green products, even if they're more expensive." He said that his original intention of setting up the "breakthrough energy" venture capital fund is to provide support in the development of green technology at all stages. in 2015, Bill Gates led the creation of the "breakthrough energy" venture capital fund to support the development of new energy innovation technology. Other investors in the fund include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Viking founder Richard Branson, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn founder reed Hoffman, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg and Alibaba founder Jack Ma. At present, the fund has completed two rounds of raising $1 billion each. Gates said he has invested about $2 billion in clean technology, with some successful start-ups, such as quantum scape, a solid-state battery company, while others have long gone bankrupt. In November last year, quantumscape went public in the form of SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition company) through the acquisition of Kensington capital. The company is developing lithium-ion battery technology and has received $300 million from Volkswagen. According to gates, carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUs) is the key to negative carbon technology. If we can not eliminate carbon emissions from the source, then we must reduce carbon in an indirect way. He said that the direct air capture system developed by climeworks in Switzerland can store carbon dioxide underground, but the problem is that it is expensive and the cost of carbon removal per ton is as high as $600. in his view, in the future, the cost of carbon capture needs to be reduced to at least $100 in order to be widely used, which is possible in ten years. Carbon engineering, a Canadian energy company invested by gates, has proved this possibility in theory. It is cooperating with oil giants such as western oil companies. gates calculated such an account: there are 51 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in the world every year, assuming that the cost of carbon capture can be reduced to $100, then the cost of carbon capture in a year is $5 trillion. With the development of green technology, if the green premium can be reduced by 95%, it means that the world only needs to subsidize 250 billion US dollars for emission reduction every year, "it becomes feasible.". optimistic about the prospect of nuclear power industry Gates also founded Tyra energy, focusing on the research of the fourth generation nuclear reactor. The company established a joint venture with CNNC, but was later stopped by the trump administration. Recently, however, Tera energy received US $4 billion from the US Department of energy to build a new reactor demonstration project in the next five years. Gates has always been a supporter of nuclear fission technology, believing that nuclear energy is guaranteed in terms of cost and safety, although the public has doubts about it. "Even the current third generation of nuclear power plants are safer than natural gas or coal." He stressed that the fourth generation nuclear reactor being researched by Tera energy will be safer. In his opinion, the real reason why the United States has made little progress in the nuclear power industry in recent years is that the construction cost is too high and the regulations are very complex. Therefore, the United States needs a new reactor design to supplement wind and solar power generation. He said that solar energy and wind energy can not be used as the energy source of UPS, and this function can only be undertaken by nuclear power. but he also admitted that it would be very difficult for people to accept nuclear power plants even if engineering problems were solved because of people's prejudice against them. Gates' personal carbon offset plan_ blank" href=" https://news.163.com/news/search?keyword=%E7%A2%B3%E8%B6%B3%E8%BF%B9 "Style =" box sizing: inherit; color: rgb (0, 140, 210); text decoration: none; "> carbon footprint < / a >, and introduced their own efforts to offset carbon emissions, including: using clean biofuels, purchasing electric heat pumps, paying carbon removal costs to climeworks, etc. Gates told CERAWEEK that he spends $7 million a year to offset his personal carbon footprint, part of which is for his < a target = "_ blank" href=" https://news.163.com/news/search?keyword=%E7%A7%81%E4%BA%BA%E9%A3%9E%E6%9C%BA "Style =" box sizing: inherit; color: rgb (0, 140, 210); text decoration: none; "> private aircraft < / a > buy biofuels. As the largest customer of aviation biofuels in the United States, he said the cost of these low-carbon fuels is three times that of traditional aviation fuels. "I'd like to see how biofuels can scale up and bring the green premium down from the current 300%." He believes that for the aviation industry, if biofuels are used, ticket prices must be set higher. for personal carbon footprint other than aviation fuel, gates paid $600 per ton of carbon removal cost to climeworks. (author: Zheng Qingting, editor: Chen Qingmei)

2023-03-22 10:04:30

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