Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is and has always been a huge advocate for environmental change. His umbrella organization Breakthrough Energy Ventures gathers several innovative options for green energy and living that hope to drastically reduce our carbon footprint on this planet.
Recently Gates had a keynote conversation with Warner Baxter at 2023’s Edison Electrical Institute conference. Baxter is the outgoing EEI Chair, and both of them had some dire words of warning about the future of climate change.
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“It was around 2010 that the idea that we weren’t putting money into innovation in the energy space started to concern me in the face of this planetary challenge," Gates told Baxter at the event. "Energy [research & development] budgets weren’t going up."
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"Whenever I see a problem, I focus on how to bring innovation to bear," Gates explains. "How do you build teams, get them the right resources, and is there a solution that can deal with these constraints? Clearly with climate, the brute force solution, which is doing things expensively, is never going to work.”
The points of the joint interview were heavily in line with Gate's book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” which highlights all the challenges we face on the road to addressing climate change by the year 2050. Warner even quoted Gates' book, reading, “This will be the hardest thing that humans have ever done.”
"We’re no longer able to say, ‘Okay, in the near term, it’s business as usual, and then that climate thing will happen later,’” Gates pointed out to the audience.
The bulk of the conversation revolved around America’s energy grid and using solar and wind resources to drastically reduce environmental damage. Both Gates and Baxter believe that the most effective way to ensure the future is to support all kinds of environmental innovation. Baxter also reminded attendees how important it is that giants in the electricity sector be on board.
