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by simpaticoder
241 days ago
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Gates is making a speculative case that climate change can be (should be) fought with the needs of the global poor at top-of-mind. He acknowledges the apparent zero-sum nature of it: impoverished people face much greater and more immediate threats than climate change, and fossil fuel tech (for example) really does address those urgent threats effectively. He solves this conundrum by speculating that we can have our cake (help the global poor) and eat it too (slow climate change) by inventing new tools and methods. I hope he's right. I'm glad he's doing this advocacy. By doing so he's fighting two popular opinions, first that climate change is a hoax, and second, that climate change must be addressed even if it means sacrificing the well-being of the global poor. That said, I have grave concerns that Gates is simply wrong, that we cannot invent our way out of both climate change and the suffering of the global poor. His many remarkable mentions of AI do not, in my opinion, lend strength to his argument, nor does his mention of "almost commercialized" fusion. The former being a gimmick, the latter being forever 30 years away. If our hopes rest on tech like that, then we must prepare to be devastated and pick one side of the zero-sum. |
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I feel positive around whether or not we can- renewable and battery technology in incredible at the moment and we could shift quickly to a much less devastating track if the political will was there.
That said, without the political story, technology itself can't change things. We've seen this by the fact thay renewable technology advances have also come alongside technology advances in the fossil fuel industry, like fracking.
Around a 1/3 of CO2 emision is down to agriculture, which is mostly meat (and of that mostly beef). There's no tech fix required here, since humans can survive easily without beef, but something would need to change economically or otherwise so that the CO2 impact of food factors into our collective diets.