In my new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, I talk about the inventions we need to get to zero, like new ways of storing electricity and making steel. We founded Breakthrough Energy to help accelerate that innovation.
But innovation means more than inventing new things. It’s also a matter of developing new policies so we can demonstrate and deploy those inventions in the market as fast as possible.
Below is an excerpt from my new book about the role of policy in avoiding a climate disaster. Excerpt from How to Avoid a Climate Disaster In 1943, at the height of World War II, a thick cloud of smoke descended on Los Angeles. It was so noxious that it made residents’ eyes sting and their noses run. Drivers couldn’t see more than three blocks down the road. Some locals feared that the Japanese army had attacked the city with chemical weapons. L.A. hadn’t been attacked, though— at least, not by a foreign army. The real culprit was smog, created by an unfortunate combination of air pollution and weather conditions. Almost a decade later, for five days in December 1952, London too was crippled by smog. Buses and ambulances stopped running. Visibility was so low, even within enclosed buildings, that movie theaters were shut down. Looting was rampant because the police couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. (If you’re a fan of the Netflix series The Crown, as I am, you’ll remember a gripping episode in season 1 that takes place during this awful incident.) What’s now known as the Great Smog of London killed at least 4,000 people. Thanks to incidents like these, the 1950s and 1960s marked the arrival of air pollution as a major cause of public concern in the United States and Europe, and policy makers responded quickly. Congress began to provide funding for research into the problem and possible remedies in 1955. The next year, the British government enacted the Clean Air Act, which created smoke-control zones throughout the country where only cleaner-burning fuels could be used. Seven years later, America’s Clean Air Act established the modern regulatory system for controlling air pollution in the United States; it remains the most comprehensive law—and one of the most influential— to regulate air pollution that can endanger public health. In 1970, President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency to help implement it. Although air pollution is still a major cause of illness and death— it likely kills more than 7 million people every year—the policies we’ve put in place have undoubtedly kept the number from being even higher.* (They’ve also helped reduce greenhouse gases a bit, even though that wasn’t their original purpose.) Today they illustrate as well as anything the leading role that government policies have to play in avoiding a climate disaster. I admit that “policy” is a vague, dull-sounding word. A big breakthrough like a new type of battery would be sexier than the policies that led a chemist to invent it. But the breakthrough wouldn’t exist without a government spending tax dollars on research, policies designed to drive that research out of the lab and into the market, and regulations that created markets and made it easy to deploy at scale. In this book, I’ve been emphasizing the inventions we need to get to zero—new ways of storing electricity, making steel, and so on—but innovation is not just a matter of developing new devices. It’s also a matter of developing new policies so we can demonstrate and deploy those inventions in the market as fast as possible. National leaders around the world will need to articulate a vision for how the global economy will make the transition to zero carbon. That vision can, in turn, guide the actions of people and businesses around the world. Government officials can write rules regarding how much carbon power plants, cars, and factories are allowed to emit. They can adopt regulations that shape financial markets and clarify the risks of climate change to the private and public sectors. They can be the main investors in scientific research, as they are now, and write the rules that determine how quickly new products can get to market. And they can help fix some problems that the market isn’t set up to deal with—including the hidden costs that carbon-emitting products impose on the environment and on humans. It might seem ironic that I’m calling for more government intervention. When I was building Microsoft, I kept my distance from policy makers in Washington, D.C., and around the world, thinking they would only keep us from doing our best work. In part, the U.S. government’s antitrust suit against Microsoft in the late 1990s made me realize that we should’ve been engaging with policy makers all along. I also know that when it comes to massive undertakings—whether it’s building a national highway system, vaccinating the world’s children, or decarbonizing the global economy— we need the government to play a huge role in creating the right incentives and making sure the overall system will work for everyone. *** Learn more about How to Avoid a Climate Disaster on Gates Notes including: A selection from the book’s introduction, in which I explain how I came to work on climate change. Tips on what you can do to help solve the problem. The one idea in the book that I hope everyone remembers.SOURCES: CO Chair, Bill and Melinda Gate
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