| Bill's focus on new tech still seems odd to me. Maybe he's thought about it, and as a famous geek thinks that the number one thing he can do is champion tech innovation. But he specifically talks about increasing energy efficiency. An obvious opening to talk about carbon taxes that bake efficiency decisions into everything we buy (and provides a ready made market for new, low-carbon tech). Or he talks about coal, again a great opening to talk about removing subsidies from that industry and getting the workers retrained in something else. And he seems dismissive of solar, like those will only help African farmers when the sun is shining and so are barely worth even thinking about. In general he seems too focussed on getting carbon to 0, and not enough focussed on the low hanging fruit which, if solved with todays existing tech and policy instruments, would extend the runway we have to find breakthrough tech before our world descends into anarchy and global warfare. Just swapping natural gas for coal gives us much ability to burn fossil fuels, since it halves the carbon per energy output. Might not be as cool as a fusion reactor, but every carbon molecule counts. |
Significantly, he's trying to do practical things to improve the lives of poor people in the third world, as opposed to founding libraries or building more William Gates computer buildings at elite universities.
It's fair to judge what he does against what he could do, but it's unreasonable to judge him for what he can't do.