bill gates helped usher in the digital revolution at microsoft and has spent the
decade since exploring and investing in innovative solutions to some of the world's toughest problems
global poverty disease and the coronavirus pandemic which he spent nearly two billion dollars
on now he's focusing on climate change agreeing with the overwhelming majority of scientists
who warn of a looming climate disaster the good news is gates believes it's possible to prevent
a catastrophic rise in temperatures the bad news he says in the next 30 years we need scientific
breakthroughs technological innovations and global cooperation on a scale the world has never seen
the story will continue in a moment
you believe this is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced absolutely the amount of
change uh new ideas it's way greater than the pandemic and it needs a level of cooperation
that would be unprecedented that doesn't sound no it's not easy uh but hey 30 years
we have more educated people than ever we have a generation that's speaking out on this topic
uh and you know i got to participate in the miracle of the personal computer and the
internet and so yes i have a bias to believe innovation can do these things he's talking
about innovations in every aspect of modern life manufacturing agriculture transportation
because nearly everything we now do releases earth-warming greenhouse gases mainly carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere he took us to his favorite burger joint in seattle to explain
you're talking about changing everything in the economy i mean every aspect yeah the physical of
what we can see right now of us sitting around here what specifically would be impacted well
this cement uh would be made in a different way the steel in the building would be different
you know the meat and the burger is a big deal these you know all this plastic and paper
potatoes with potatoes you're talking about fertilizer the irrigation system that's used
all the tractors the transport trucks that bring them to this restaurant
all that has to change hey when you're going to zero it you don't get to skip anything gates says
going to zero means eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions or else if they wait a hundred years to
do this it's way too late uh then the natural ecosystems will have failed the instability uh
you know the migration you know those things will will get really really bad well before the end of
the century when you talk about migration you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people
trying to move from north africa to europe every year exactly the syrian war was a 20th of what
climate migration will look like so the deaths per year are way 10 times greater than than what we've
experienced in the pandemic in a new book how to avoid a climate disaster gates outlines all the
solutions he believes we need he says the u.s has to lead the world getting to zero greenhouse gas
emissions by 2050. he supports president biden's decision to rejoin the paris climate agreement but
is asking the administration to massively increase the budget for climate and clean energy research
to 35 billion dollars a year you've said that governments need to do the hard stuff
but not just go after the low-hanging fruit what's low-hanging fruit
passenger cars part of the electric generation with renewables the things everybody knows about
that's getting almost all the money not the hard parts which is the industrial piece including the
steel and cement those pieces we've hardly started to work on no one thinks much about cement and
steel but making it accounts for 16 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions and the demand is only
growing the world will add an estimated two and a half trillion square feet of buildings by 2060
that's the equivalent to putting up another new york city every month for the next 40 years so one
innovative company gates has been pouring money into is carbon cure they inject captured carbon
dioxide into concrete what they do is they stick co2 in here and the cement and they mix them up
and so you're able to actually get rid of some co2 by sticking it in the cement
right now they get rid of about five percent but they have a next generation they can get to 30
percent the carbon has been just injected into this so it's captured it so it's not going to be
released into the atmosphere that's right gates has already invested two billion dollars of his
own money on new green technologies and plans to spend several billion more in 2016 he also
recruited jeff bezos mike bloomberg and nearly two dozen other wealthy investors to back a billion
dollar fund called breakthrough energy ventures making long-term often risky investments in
promising technologies it kind of blows my mind you know what's the cost of making that stuff
gates regularly consults with the fund's team of top scientists and entrepreneurs who've so
far invested in 50 companies with cutting-edge ideas to reduce carbon emissions what's like
the most far-flung idea you've backed there's one that's so crazy it's even hard to describe
it's so crazy it's hard to describe even yeah how do you pitch that to investors they find
geological formations and they just pump water down into them the energy they've used uh to
pump it in then they can draw that energy back out so it's it's a water pressure storage thing
which you know when i first thought i thought that can't work but but you gave money to it
yeah lots of money because cows account for around four percent of all greenhouse gases gates
has invested in two companies making plant-based meat substitutes impossible foods and beyond meat
but farming the vegetables used to make many meat alternatives emits gases as well
so gates is also backing a company that's created an entirely new food source
this company nature's find is using fungi and then they turn them into sausage and
yogurt pretty amazing when you say fungi do you mean like a mushroom or a microbe it's a microbe
the microbe was discovered in the ground in a geyser in yellowstone national park without
soil or fertilizer it can be grown to produce this nutritional protein that can then be turned
into a variety of foods with a small carbon footprint this is the yogurt oh this is good
wow i've had like cashew yogurt or oat yogurt it's sort of along those lines yeah with the burgers
they're you know like beyond impossible they're getting close to real thing but you can still tell
these i'm not sure i could tell no i'm more of a burger expert than i am a yogurt gates
never planned to focus on climate change but while working in africa with the foundation he started
with his wife melinda in 2000 he came to see just how vulnerable those in developing countries are
to the effects of rising temperatures so 15 years ago gates started educating himself on climate
change bringing scientists and engineers to his office in seattle for what he calls learning
sessions he also reads voraciously books and binders full of scientific research yeah so
this is the most recent one which is about clean hydrogen so you're reading thousands of pages
every few days on topics yeah my reading is is key and then asking questions when it it doesn't
make sense gates isn't just looking to cut future carbon emissions he's also investing in direct air
capture an experimental process to remove existing co2 from the atmosphere some companies are now
using these giant fans to capture co2 directly out of the air gates has become one of the world's
largest funders of this kind of technology but of all his green investments gates has spent the most
time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear energy arguing it's key to a zero-carbon future
he says he's a big believer in wind and solar and thinks it can one day provide up to 80 percent of
the country's electricity but gates insists unless we discover an effective way to store
and ship wind and solar energy nuclear power will likely have to do the rest energy from nuclear
plants can be stored so it's available when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing
were you always a big proponent of nuclear in 2008 he founded terrapower a company that
has redesigned a nuclear reactor this is your prototype exactly terrapower's naturing reactor
uh this is a rendering we haven't built it yet but here's the nuclear island right here
this is the reactor exactly gate says terrapower's reactor is less expensive to build
produces less waste and is fully automated reducing the potential for human error gates
and director of engineering lindsey boles showed us what they say is another key to its safety
what is it that we're looking at here so these individual fuel pins are actually where the
uranium fuel is and that's what generates all the heat in our natrium reactor this is what everybody
is worried about yes exactly in a normal reactor it's water that's flowing past and heating up
and it'll boil and generate a lot of high pressure that high heat and pressure can cause an explosion
like in chernobyl in 1986 when radioactive material was spread for thousands of miles but
gates says the pteropower reactor won't use water to cool down the fuel rods they plan to use liquid
sodium the liquid sodium can absorb a lot more heat and so we we don't have any high pressure
inside the reactor in october the department of energy awarded terror power 80 million dollars to
build one of the first advanced nuclear reactors in the u.s nuclear power can be done in a way that
none of those uh failures of the past would recur because just the physics of how it's built
i admit convincing people of that will be almost as hard as actually building it but
since it may be necessary to avoid climate change we shouldn't give up you've been criticized for
being a technocrat saying technology is the only solution for for tackling climate change there
are other people say look the solution's already there it's just government policy is what really
needs to be focused on i wish that was true i wish all this funding of these companies wasn't
necessary at all without innovation we will not solve climate change we won't even come close
gates credits young activists for keeping climate change in the headlines but he knows some
consider him an imperfect ally are you the right messenger on this because you fly private planes
a lot and you're creating a lot of greenhouse gases yourself yeah i'd probably have one of
the highest greenhouse gas footprints of anyone on the planet you know my my
personal flying uh alone is gigantic now i'm spending quite a bit uh to buy aviation fuel
uh that was made with plants you know i switched to an electric car i've used solar panels
i'm paying a company that actually at a very high price can pull a bit of carbon out of the air
and stick it underground and so i'm offsetting my personal emissions those are called carbon
offsets right so you know it's costing like 400 a ton it's like 7 million dollars so you're paying 7
million a year to offset your carbon footprint yep he's encouraging others who can afford it to buy
carbon offsets and green products so that what he calls the green premium the added production costs
for reducing carbon emissions will go down and quality of products up driving the innovations
that may get us to zero it just seems overwhelming if every aspect of our daily life has to change it
can seem overwhelming but you are optimistic yeah there are days when it looks very hard if people
think it's easy they're wrong if people think it's impossible they're wrong it's possible it's
possible but it'll be the most amazing thing mankind has ever done that's what it has to
be yeah it's an all-out effort you know like a world war but it's us against greenhouse gases
bill gates advice on how to combat mistrust in science
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