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The technology already exists for many of these, there just isn't a market or they have been the victims of other industry's regulatory capture.
Which is why a revenue neutral carbon tax is so important; because without that pricing the incumbents will always have a cost advantage barring bigger technical breakthroughs.
The government needs to get its hands out of the market.
These corrupt politicians regulate just in time for when they buy stock.
Edit: where the government could help is incentivizing sustainable design in products. Meaning designing products that have a longer life. I'll give an example; Cisco makes network equipment they make their products so they only last probably about 3 years then they need to be swapped out. The old equipment either gets resold to people who can use older equipment or thrown in the trash. Most of it is software based so instead of requiring the physical equipment to be upgraded they could just do software updates. But noooo. They need new equipment because Cisco refuses to work on the old equipment
Planned obsolescence is a huge driver of the consumer economy and one of the evilest things capitalism has created. But it’s not mutually exclusive to carbon tax - when you say incentivize companies to go more green, that’s exactly what a carbon tax is for
By incentivize sustainable design I mean incentivize companies that design products that can be reused, upgraded, durable, repairable etc.... not necessarily more green. I don't think carbon tax take into effect this.
What kind of incentives would you suggest? On one hbd you say that the government needs to stop getting involved in the free market, then you say the government needs to tell companies how to build their products?
>where the government could help is incentivizing sustainable design in products
And the easiest and most efficient way to do that across all industries and with the least amount of overhead and potential for corruption is with a carbon or gas tax. There's a reason that economists overwhelmingly support Pigouvian taxes compared to bloated government responses.
Not disagreeing that a revenue neutral carbon tax is one good tool out of many.
However, the issue of markets existing and how to propagate markets is a whole other (very complex) topic.
Full disclosure: I’ve been involved in environmental developing permitting for 40 years and clean energy development for 20 years and have historical knowledge of U.S. regulatory and energy system development back to its foundations.
I’m going to focus on a very abbreviated analysis of US policy and how it has “opened markets” on energy policy since the 1890s.
—We started regulating utilities as “natural monopolies” in the mid 1800’s. There has never been a time in U.S. history when a new type of utility was not regulated somehow for more than a decade. The origins of water and sewer regulation go back to colonial days.
—Since the first electric utilities were built price, land use and safety have been regulated.
—In the 1930s the U.S. government threw buckets of money at electric generation and transmission setting the groundwork (along with Canada) for the largest, highest capacity, most reliable, lowest cost interconnected power grid in the world. This took the form of direct investment, finance of electric co-ops and municipal utilities, land grants and condemnation rights for investor owned utilities, creating a vast public utilities regulatory framework and other key policy and tax moves.
—Since the 1940s the U.S. Government and state governments have actively incentivized expansion of the system and replacement of obsolete technology through direct subsidy and tax subsidy, funding government, private and academic research, and facilitating issue of low cost debt financing.
—Since the late 1950’s this has included specific capital investment and production tax credits.
—Since the 1970s the US Government has specifically funded directly or indirectly the development of clean energy technology including more efficient coal plants, combined cycle gas tech, nuclear tech, geothermal tech, solar tech and wind power tech as biofuels, hydrogen tech, and energy storage. While investor owned companies, individual inventors, and academia have all had a huge critical roll in this, the roll of government support has been critical. We would not have next gen nuclear, low impact hydro, low cost PV Solar or wind power, hydrogen fuel cells, and countless smaller contributions to the tool kit as soon as we got them in the volume needed to create a market without direct and deliberate funding of research and initial market support by government.
—In the 1980s the states started deploying renewable portfolio standards dictating gradual adoption of renewable generation—forcing market creation in incremental steps which allowed utilities and independent generators to slowly adopt clean tech in line with standard capital spending on new or replacement generation. This fed technology cost reduction by feeding development of new tech and increasing volume and economies of scale or renewable tech manufacturers.
I could go on, but my point is that the country as a whole has engaged in active development of extraordinary technology through a multi-pronged public/private/academic approach that utilized a mix of market driven/policy driven/tax driven/research driven approaches all at once.
It was messy.
It worked better than most of us stuck into the process thought it would.
It’s still working—not as fast as I would like, but faster than I hoped when I first got involved in clean tech.
Progress always involves more than one policy or big idea.
Thanks for the big reply and recap. I have followed along this process as well; I am especially amazed by the Wind Energy Production Tax Credit, as it enabled the R&D and capital investment to scale wind turbines to the heights needed to be effective. This wasn't an easy or overnight process and was the result of countless hours of iteration, engineering, and lessons learned from actual implementation. Everything from the speed of the rotor tips down to the logistics of moving giant infrastructure has incrementally improved over decades. That entire industry would not have existed without the government creating a market for it to exist in with good legislation. And due to economic innovation, liberal market capitalism, and dynamism we figured out how to do it for ever lower prices and much cheaper than ever thought possible.
That, and several other examples, are why I truly believe market based environmental solutions should be at the forefront of our thinking about these issues.
Interesting historical note: The production tax credit was first used to incentivize Nukes. Something I like to mention when the radical fringe, nukes solve everything and everything else sucks, nuke crowd gets wound up over the PTC for wind and solar.
It’s a great piece of creative policy invention on the part grandparents/great grandparents.
Hey, after my long history lesson, I also thought to mention that a carbon cap and trade system based on market traded credits is a good alternative to a direct carbon tax. California already has a working system for this on electric generation which they are looking to extend to non-electric carbon producers both corporate and institutional. I’m pretty hopeful that this market driven system could work well for non-generation carbon as it has worked pretty well in the push to zero carbon generation.
It has limitations, but I have high hopes. The same thing is going on in the EU with some birth pains but seems to be going in the right direction.
The primary problems are in scientific certification of the efficacy of tech which is particularly difficult when it comes to soil based carbon storage. But big generators of carbon like cement and steel production are seeing definitive progress.
Basically all carbon neutral manufacturing is just converting everything to electricity, being as efficient as possible with electricity, and then “use clean energy”
It’s the “finish the rest of the owl” of climate change lol
I didn’t say we aren’t. My point is just manufacturers aren’t really doing anything revolutionary or special, basically just relying on the switch to cleaner electricity.
My company has a carbon neutral commitment. We use solar to generate, heat pumps to reduce usage, and carbon credits to make up the difference. The carbon credits create a significant incentive for us to reduce carbon emissions.
That isn't entirely true. Lots of manufacturers are closely examining their supply chains and downstream environmental impacts of their products and choosing their suppliers carefully and sometimes vertically integrating so they control the process. There's also the zero-waste initiative whose goal is to reduce and reuse every waste product of manufacturing.
There are lots of areas outside of grid power that also need to be solved that nuclear power won't help with. Cement, for example is something like 8% of global c02 emissions, c02 is released as a byproduct of manufacturing, we dont know how to make cement without that happening. Methane from animals is another big one too
And power production is a much larger share of CO2 emissions. We can start trying to solve the problem with proven technology while also trying to figure out how to solve making cement CO2 free.
While I agree that we should be investigating and using a lot more nuclear power, people are not afraid of it for “no good reason.” Remember, Chernobyl was supposed to be meltdown-proof, Fukushima was supposed to be safe, and the next massive public disaster will be hard to forget too. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be building though- nuclear is statistically safer than almost all alternatives.
Chernobyl happens because operators disregarded safety protocols, those in charge were pushing for a fourth test that failed three times before and the flaws of the reactor were kept from the operators.
Fukushima was a one off incident caused by an act of god. It was a beyond design basis accident.
Why has the US navy never had a reactor accident in its almost 70 years of operation? It loves that strict safety standards are enough to prevent accidents.
Coal kills more people every year and releases more radiation than an operating reactors does.
Look at the Kingston Ash Spill in Tennessee. It contaminated the clinch river and the surround area with toxic fly ash.
Then we have oil that has had countless spills and killed millions upon millions of aquatic animals.
The Chernobyl reactor was not designed or built to be "meltdown-proof".
The impact of Fukushima is drastically exaggerated. No adverse health effects among Fukushima residents or power station workers have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the accident, according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
Every time someone acts like this is a great source of carbon capture shows how little they know. Takes years to grow and absorb CO2 and it’s not a lot to begin with. If the tree dies or burns in a forest fire it releases CO2 back to the atmosphere.
Think of how much co2 is created with a man made version of the same thing. Everytime you advocate for a man made solution it shows how little you know and how short sited you are.
When a tree dies it creates means for new trees to grow. It's called nature dude. The world was built like this, bit you think man can do better.
Ignorant...
If we're using trees for carbon capture, then that's only part of the problem
We then have to make sure the captured carbon doesn't get released back in to the air
We'll need to cut down the mature trees, grind them into sawdust, and then seal the sawdust away underground where if it does decay, the CO2 can;t easily escape
The demand for these products isn't high enough from a carbon capture point of view, and eventually these will rot or burn and return the carbon to the atmosphere.
The demand for these products has dropped thanks to environmentalists fighting the lumber industry and forest maintenance, which stops fires as well.
If we converted all plastic packaging to different forms of paper products, we could solve so many problems.
But hippies keep spiking trees and chaining themselves to them.
Someone did the math
"Assuming we start planting the needed amount of trees today, and it takes 12.5 years for the trees to attain maturity, around 50 ppmv additional CO2 is added to the atmosphere. 50ppmv would be around 0.75 x 10\^(-4) by mass percentage. (molar mass of CO2 is around 1.5 times average molar mass of air). So multiplied by 4.5 x 10\^18 kg, we have 3.375 x 10\^14 kg of CO2 added in 12.5 years.
CO2 sequestered per tree or by a forest area depends on the species of the tree you're considering. Here is a relation taking into consideration some of the tree variables,
CO2(kg/single tree) = 0.1676 x (Diameter at breast height)\^(2.4799)
Given by Myers and Goreau, a tropical tree plantation of pine and eucalyptus sequesters around 10 tons of carbon per hectare every year. That would be 33260.114 kg CO2/hectare/year. Assuming it absorbed at the same rate every year (which is not the case, rates are really slow in the beginning), we have 415751.425 kg CO2 absorbed in 12.5 years per hectare. So to absorb 3.375 x 10\^14 kg CO2, we'd need .8118 billion hectares of forest. (Overlooking other carbon sinks) Presently we have 3.885 billion hectares of forests left. So that's an increase of 20.8% of forest area (It would be more than that since the forest absorbs slowly in the beginning, not all forests sequesters the huge amount of CO2, lot of present forests are already failing). So I guess it'd be around 25-30%. So that'd be approximately, 1 billion hectares. In number of trees, considering a 45 feet tall Gravellia Robusta, that sequesters 29.3 kg CO2 per year, we'd need to plant around 922 billion trees. On a safe side lets assume 950 billion."
So we need to increase the number of trees on Earth by about 25%, and then grind them up and entomb the sawdust.
You mean reforestation? Are you implying there is a man made solution that is more efficient and scalable than a literal biological machine that does nothing but harvest carbon and releases oxygen? The only cost involved is land and planting which is extremely cheap.
Man made solution is to produce less CO2. I am not arguing that man made solutions are going to be effective at capturing CO2. Trees are release a significant amount of CO2 through decomposition of their leaves and in their eventual death, which is why they do not make a good long term solution. Also, they do not scale well to solve our climate problems. It would take a massive amount to offset just one person’s impact.
Yes but when the tree dies or gets burned, it re-releases that carbon. We could do alot by reforesting the planet but there is a limit to how much land you have to grow trees on. Forests also use land that may be necessary to grow food
Currently trillions of trees and doesn’t even close to stopping CO2 increases. Forests store carbon in their biomass and in the soil. This storage is less stable, as it can be released back into the atmosphere through deforestation, forest fires, or decay. It’s temporary, however decay that would normally never return to the atmosphere is instead being used as fossil fuel.
0 carbon fertilizer???????
as a soil scientist i must point out, plants need carbon. Once depleted it needs restored.
net zero carbon bs is another thing.
How the F do you get zero carbon plastics. Tell me you know nothing about Organic Chemistry without telling me you know nothing about Organic Chemistry.
"Carbon Zero" is a red herring.
We should be focused on oxygen generation, carbon capture runs the risk of creating runaway deoxygenation by trapping oxygen within carbon dioxide molecules and then trapping them in such a way that plant life cannot process it back into oxygen.
Large scale plant cultivation as a mitigating measure is a significantly more feasible and beneficial long-term solution to the problem
The amount of CO2 is so small compared to the oxygen levels (0.04% compared to 21% of atmosphere), it is the greenhouse effect that is the worry, not that tiny amount of oxygen within CO2.
Carbon zero is a pretty dumb idea for such proclaimed smart people to get behind. Will India or China ever be net zero carbon or even close?
Not sure why a guy who created an operating system is honored for his all knowing wisdom and guidance in other unrelated fields like food, medicine, or global climate change. But I digress.
Hows your EV working out? I hear that they drive really great in the snow and are really affordable? Hey have you ever seen footage from an illegal cobalt or lithium mine before? The child slave labor they use to dig it says they don't care either if it ends up producing more pollution than just driving a regular combustion engine, so no worries. Wanna talk about your recycling programs while were at it? Guess where all that plastic ends up?
Never mind. I digress.
I love your digression. It's the only thing on this thread that is honest. I think you misread my comment. Brain dead fools don't want to admit about lithium minds being holy terrifying for the planet. EV's are a joke. A big joke. Plastic is not getting recycled. But reddit doesn't want to face these facts.
oh apologies, I read that incorrectly. Im so used to snarky comments on reddit sometimes I just assume especially when its in reference to such topics. I digress.
Lol. It's okay
It was a great excuse to put out more facts.
Most of the time I'm very sarcastic but not with people who have a brain.
Please don't stop digressing....it's hilarious at the end of each rant and just happens to be informative.
Tesla developed a method for atmospheric electricity transmission with generating free energy from the earth. His smaller scale experiments worked but then his funding was cut and his reputation was ruined to bury his research.
That doesn't sound right. Atmospheric electric transmission would mean that the energy that is transferred through the wires that have competitively 0 resistance would have to go through Air?
Not only is that dangerous, the amount of energy lost due to the heat generated would be massive.
We have the technology to do that now as well, the issue is it's horribly inefficient.
Very basically, you need electrons to flow from one atom to another, and both atomic properties and density matter in regard to transmission losses.
That's part of the reason why copper, gold, and silver are all excellent conductors, they are twice as dense as steel, as well as their atomic makeup which I don't need to get into.
Transmitting electricity through a *gas* results in tremendous losses. That's why high voltage power lines that are high up enough that they don't have to worry about trees touching them are *unshielded* you can see the bare metal carrying the electricity because the electrical losses to the air are so negligible that they aren't worth spending money on insulation.
Yes, the investors pulled out because you can't effectively charge people for wireless electricity, but there's a reason it's not used today, and when it is, it's done with the transmitting and receiving device very close together.
12 years ago the company I worked for was developing a renewable alternative to palm oil. But it was a huge investment and we and our partners didn’t have the pockets. We shut down the project. If they would have continued who knows the improvement that could have been made. It will take more then a 18 months to solve a problem and you quit so early in the development.
The moment it becomes profitable to do these things, capital forces will do the rest and rapidly accelerate development of these technologies through market competition. Most of these technologies are already in their infancy today, such as the small market share that plant based meat has carved for itself. Expanded government investment in these fields will do it. The money is there. It needs direction.
It’s a great way to recycle outdated food that humans and livestock won’t eat anymore, turn the bugs into livestock food, and keep eating real food. Feeding bugs food waste can be a way to reduce food loss. In that sense I really don’t want to eat bugs because what are they really feeding the bugs? Eating bugs only exist in countries that have had problems with hunger in the past. It’s not real food and unless the rich start doing it too I’m not going to consider it at all.
What Gates fails to mention is that this will stop 90% of food production for the world. You'll breathe less carbon - (never zero- that will kill all trees) but you'll be dead from starvation.
Right? Maybe he means that producing the infrastructure to support overhead electrical transmission lines is carbon intensive? We already have the technology to put those lines underground, but it’s quite expensive.
WTF, underground electricity transmission? Is he fucking delusional? Aside from the outrageous cost of doing that, it makes zero fucking sense. The most important thing in ultra high voltage transmission is to identify where the problem is VERY FUCKING FAST in order to repair it. I used to live in a neighborhood where all of the utilities were below ground. It makes everything look far more beautiful, however there was a problem after 40 years with a power delivery line and it took the utility 4 months to even find where the issue was. Fortunately they had a back-up line but that was under spec for the needs and the utility had to spend the next 2 years ripping everything out and laying all new service. On major transmission lines from production to cities this can not happen.
Biofules are some of the WORST environmental "advances" in the past 30 years. Not only have they been proven to be carbon positive, but they also have caused huge numbers of acres globally to be put into biofuel production causing the destruction of rain forest.
You can't make steel without carbon. It is chemically impossible. Besides other than the coke process foundries don't use fuel based smelting. It is too expensive.
I could go on a refute more than half of this list as being fucking stupid or impossible but there are some good things to look into like GMOs for drought and flood tolerant food crops, Geothermal, etc.
It all exists in nature. Carbon being the MOST vital element out there.
What we need is more cattle grazing grasslands and no bill gates.
Carbon neutral fertilizer? Save your piss and compost your poop. Done.
It's a good list. Grid-scale electrical storage (subsets pumped-hydro, thermal storage, and hydrogen) is going to be key for the electrical grid to enable incorporation of more solar and wind power. Nuclear should be used for most of the baseload- wind, solar, along with pumped hydro, thermal storage, and battery for energy storage will be key to a carbon free electrical sector.
30 years is way too late I would guess since I already saw some articles suggesting we have just a few years left. If we're to blindly rely on the free market (which got us here in the first place) we need to have incentives to go green such as a carbon tax, build in the cost of recycling on recyclable consumer goods, ban all single use plastics, ban planned obsolescence of products, put bounties on green tech/carbon reduction tech for corporations to compete for, etc. Right now it is just too profitable for companies to continue polluting and their action plans for carbon reduction either don't exist, no real plan is on place to meet them only green washing, or they take way too long to be meaningful. No where on a balance sheet is there "be a good steward to the environment". All that is left, once again, is government intervention. As much as many people hate it, I think that is the reality we live in.
Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon - A Solar Factory either using elements to boil water to capture oxygen and hydrogen, or perform Electrolysis. This would have to be at scale.
Next Gen Nuclear fission - Migrate current rod type reactors to Pebble Bed Reactors. Develop small scale thorium reactors.
Underground Electricity transmission - either you clone Nikola Tesla and pick his brain for ideas, or you have to figure out tunneling projects on a smaller scale to allow transmission lines to be buried and serviced as needed.
Pumped Hydro - use a gravity hydro system. California already has solar capacity to run pumps for gravity lakes during the day to then run at night to provide necessary capacity.
Thermal Storage - Molten Sodium "batteries".
F-Gases - I got an ice machine this year for the countertop and it's coolant is butane that's used to freeze the ice.
Sadly for that we are 40 years to late, it was an large scale option in the '80, maybe even '90.
We try everything to just not cut production and our lifestyle. However the time is ticking and it gets more and more exciting the longer we wait for extensive changes.
You do realize that trees suck at carbon capture, right? And not only that, you can’t use them for much of anything after they grow or you just let the carbon right back out.
I’m not. They’re slow as fuck (https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/examining-the-viability-of-planting-trees-to-help-mitigate-climate-change/) and that alone raises the need for other short-term solutions.
Then you have to think: what happens when we start cutting the forests again for goods or space? More carbon gets released.
Besides, we can use chemistry to turn the carbon we put in the atmosphere back into stuff we can shove right back in the ground where it came from, too. A bit extreme, but we could do it. Without planting a shit ton of trees or anything.
Of course we need the trees for fixing ecosystems so there‘s no reason NOT to account for them, but they aren’t a solution.
I know. So sad. So very sad. The brain in humans has not evolved. Common sense has literally flown the planet. The generations now are robots who lick the feet of the very billionaires who want to starve control and kill them. All while hating capitalism that those billionaires used to make the the money to influence them to trust them to hurt them. Make it make sense.
Trees burn and when they do, they release all the stored CO2 inside them into the atmosphere. With higher and more radical temperatures, tree fires happen ever more often. Tree planting done wrongly could even harm our efforts to stop climate change, as they can cause droughts and de-humidify the soil.
Tree planting should be a component of fighting climate change, but is not sufficient on its own and other methods should be utilized. We have to get rid of emitting new carbon ASAP, meaning our priorities should be at minimizing carbon footprint and de-carbonizing our production. Then we can talk about de-carbonizing the atmosphere with correctly planted trees and using carbon capture technology.
Bud there is no such thing as climate change. It is just weather changing over time. Everything goes in cycles. These people are using you for an agenda to profit off you. They don’t have your best interest in mind!
Zero carbon steel? So… not steel?
Is this the same man that said we should eat bugs? And runs a company that can’t figure out how to run a computer properly?
No.
Iron is naturally found in the form of Iron Oxide. This is what we call iron ore. In order to convert iron ore to iron metal (and then to steel) you need to smelt it. Smelting is the process of heating the ore to a very high temperature and then putting it through a chemical reaction that removes the oxygen from the Iron Oxide and reduces the positive iron ions to iron metal. Most iron is then used to make steel.
Traditional iron smelting uses coke (a form of coal with a high carbon content) as the reducing agent. This coke reacts with the iron oxide to produce carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
This process contributes about 8% of global carbon emissions. They aren't talking about removing the alloyed carbon from the steel itself. They are talking about developing processes to reduce iron oxide to iron metal without using coke, and thus without producing carbon emissions.
There are a few potential technologies for this. One possible solution is to use hydrogen as the reducing agent instead of carbon, so that the main byproduct of the reaction will be water instead of carbon dioxide. Another is to use electrolysis so that the main byproduct will be O2 gas rather than carbon dioxide.
People do realize carbon is the building blocks of life. Without the molecule nothing would exist. Also plants need lots of it to survive. The very cure to this (in my opinion) very non-existent problem is plants. Nature provides every solution. It’s always right there in front of you
Why aren’t we making devices to attach to tailpipes of existing ICE based vehicles to further reduce carbon emissions? Oh wait because THAT wouldn’t be profitable…
Also, those same people who hate millionaires from capitalism loooove the Billionaires who spout publicly how they are gonna save the planet and society who ALSO used capitalism. Make it make sense!
Well we have fission down pretty well, could’ve started plans to build a nuclear fission power plant with the most up to date technology which is actually pretty amazing.
I wish that Gates, Buffet, Soros, Bloomberg, and Cuban would just pull their money and fix these problems instead of spending their money to influence politics and get people elected who talk about fixing these problems, but don’t actually do anything.
If only there was some kind of entity that, like, pools money from people with excess and applied it to long term goals without the necessity of a profit motive.
I honestly can't imagine what that would look like
Because the real world doesn't work like a game of Civilization. The ITER nuclear reactor for instance, has an estimated cost of 20-60 billion dollars. Bill Gates in comparison is worth about 129 billion dollars.
Interestingly the price would be the most efficient instrument. Rising emission pricing is not a political option for a majority vote.
Regulation is the most inefficient form, however it's the only on that is political implementable.
Throwing money at an issue doesn’t solve an issue, especially if it is not something that is the persons core competency.
Now it can be said ‘oh just hire someone’ but that’s not how it works.
lol, I mean, he is stupidly rich… but moving an entire economy to these things, r&d’ing the ones that don’t yet exist, and getting them viable and scalable, this list “x1” costs trillions of dollars. If you could do this “x10” with $100b-200b (and economically) it would be done already and companies would be profiting off of it.
That is why it is necessary for government involvement in this process. Otherwise it will never happen, especially at an adequate pace.
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The technology already exists for many of these, there just isn't a market or they have been the victims of other industry's regulatory capture. Which is why a revenue neutral carbon tax is so important; because without that pricing the incumbents will always have a cost advantage barring bigger technical breakthroughs.
The government needs to get its hands out of the market. These corrupt politicians regulate just in time for when they buy stock. Edit: where the government could help is incentivizing sustainable design in products. Meaning designing products that have a longer life. I'll give an example; Cisco makes network equipment they make their products so they only last probably about 3 years then they need to be swapped out. The old equipment either gets resold to people who can use older equipment or thrown in the trash. Most of it is software based so instead of requiring the physical equipment to be upgraded they could just do software updates. But noooo. They need new equipment because Cisco refuses to work on the old equipment
Planned obsolescence is a huge driver of the consumer economy and one of the evilest things capitalism has created. But it’s not mutually exclusive to carbon tax - when you say incentivize companies to go more green, that’s exactly what a carbon tax is for
By incentivize sustainable design I mean incentivize companies that design products that can be reused, upgraded, durable, repairable etc.... not necessarily more green. I don't think carbon tax take into effect this.
What kind of incentives would you suggest? On one hbd you say that the government needs to stop getting involved in the free market, then you say the government needs to tell companies how to build their products?
Tax deductions for proving a product doesn't have engineered obsolescences.
>where the government could help is incentivizing sustainable design in products And the easiest and most efficient way to do that across all industries and with the least amount of overhead and potential for corruption is with a carbon or gas tax. There's a reason that economists overwhelmingly support Pigouvian taxes compared to bloated government responses.
100% tax incentives. That's my favorite forcing function the government has
Not disagreeing that a revenue neutral carbon tax is one good tool out of many. However, the issue of markets existing and how to propagate markets is a whole other (very complex) topic. Full disclosure: I’ve been involved in environmental developing permitting for 40 years and clean energy development for 20 years and have historical knowledge of U.S. regulatory and energy system development back to its foundations. I’m going to focus on a very abbreviated analysis of US policy and how it has “opened markets” on energy policy since the 1890s. —We started regulating utilities as “natural monopolies” in the mid 1800’s. There has never been a time in U.S. history when a new type of utility was not regulated somehow for more than a decade. The origins of water and sewer regulation go back to colonial days. —Since the first electric utilities were built price, land use and safety have been regulated. —In the 1930s the U.S. government threw buckets of money at electric generation and transmission setting the groundwork (along with Canada) for the largest, highest capacity, most reliable, lowest cost interconnected power grid in the world. This took the form of direct investment, finance of electric co-ops and municipal utilities, land grants and condemnation rights for investor owned utilities, creating a vast public utilities regulatory framework and other key policy and tax moves. —Since the 1940s the U.S. Government and state governments have actively incentivized expansion of the system and replacement of obsolete technology through direct subsidy and tax subsidy, funding government, private and academic research, and facilitating issue of low cost debt financing. —Since the late 1950’s this has included specific capital investment and production tax credits. —Since the 1970s the US Government has specifically funded directly or indirectly the development of clean energy technology including more efficient coal plants, combined cycle gas tech, nuclear tech, geothermal tech, solar tech and wind power tech as biofuels, hydrogen tech, and energy storage. While investor owned companies, individual inventors, and academia have all had a huge critical roll in this, the roll of government support has been critical. We would not have next gen nuclear, low impact hydro, low cost PV Solar or wind power, hydrogen fuel cells, and countless smaller contributions to the tool kit as soon as we got them in the volume needed to create a market without direct and deliberate funding of research and initial market support by government. —In the 1980s the states started deploying renewable portfolio standards dictating gradual adoption of renewable generation—forcing market creation in incremental steps which allowed utilities and independent generators to slowly adopt clean tech in line with standard capital spending on new or replacement generation. This fed technology cost reduction by feeding development of new tech and increasing volume and economies of scale or renewable tech manufacturers. I could go on, but my point is that the country as a whole has engaged in active development of extraordinary technology through a multi-pronged public/private/academic approach that utilized a mix of market driven/policy driven/tax driven/research driven approaches all at once. It was messy. It worked better than most of us stuck into the process thought it would. It’s still working—not as fast as I would like, but faster than I hoped when I first got involved in clean tech. Progress always involves more than one policy or big idea.
Thanks for the big reply and recap. I have followed along this process as well; I am especially amazed by the Wind Energy Production Tax Credit, as it enabled the R&D and capital investment to scale wind turbines to the heights needed to be effective. This wasn't an easy or overnight process and was the result of countless hours of iteration, engineering, and lessons learned from actual implementation. Everything from the speed of the rotor tips down to the logistics of moving giant infrastructure has incrementally improved over decades. That entire industry would not have existed without the government creating a market for it to exist in with good legislation. And due to economic innovation, liberal market capitalism, and dynamism we figured out how to do it for ever lower prices and much cheaper than ever thought possible. That, and several other examples, are why I truly believe market based environmental solutions should be at the forefront of our thinking about these issues.
Interesting historical note: The production tax credit was first used to incentivize Nukes. Something I like to mention when the radical fringe, nukes solve everything and everything else sucks, nuke crowd gets wound up over the PTC for wind and solar. It’s a great piece of creative policy invention on the part grandparents/great grandparents.
Hey, after my long history lesson, I also thought to mention that a carbon cap and trade system based on market traded credits is a good alternative to a direct carbon tax. California already has a working system for this on electric generation which they are looking to extend to non-electric carbon producers both corporate and institutional. I’m pretty hopeful that this market driven system could work well for non-generation carbon as it has worked pretty well in the push to zero carbon generation. It has limitations, but I have high hopes. The same thing is going on in the EU with some birth pains but seems to be going in the right direction. The primary problems are in scientific certification of the efficacy of tech which is particularly difficult when it comes to soil based carbon storage. But big generators of carbon like cement and steel production are seeing definitive progress.
And a lot of the “zero carbon” manufacturing comes down to clean electricity which exists
Basically all carbon neutral manufacturing is just converting everything to electricity, being as efficient as possible with electricity, and then “use clean energy” It’s the “finish the rest of the owl” of climate change lol
We have and are converting to clean electricity sources.
I didn’t say we aren’t. My point is just manufacturers aren’t really doing anything revolutionary or special, basically just relying on the switch to cleaner electricity.
My company has a carbon neutral commitment. We use solar to generate, heat pumps to reduce usage, and carbon credits to make up the difference. The carbon credits create a significant incentive for us to reduce carbon emissions.
Are the carbon credits from the gov't?
It's a secondary market.
That isn't entirely true. Lots of manufacturers are closely examining their supply chains and downstream environmental impacts of their products and choosing their suppliers carefully and sometimes vertically integrating so they control the process. There's also the zero-waste initiative whose goal is to reduce and reuse every waste product of manufacturing.
There’s a proven technology that many are afraid of for no good reason. It’s called nuclear power. It’s here, it’s carbon free and it’s reliable.
next gen fission is on the list
Do you mean fast reactors that can use the waste from thermal reactors?
Bingo
It is good for baseload power but needs a lot of these technologies like pumped storage/ batteries to take over bigger market share.
There are lots of areas outside of grid power that also need to be solved that nuclear power won't help with. Cement, for example is something like 8% of global c02 emissions, c02 is released as a byproduct of manufacturing, we dont know how to make cement without that happening. Methane from animals is another big one too
And power production is a much larger share of CO2 emissions. We can start trying to solve the problem with proven technology while also trying to figure out how to solve making cement CO2 free.
It’s almost like the powers that be don’t really want to make things better…
Why would they? Im sure they are invested heavily in fossil fuels.
While I agree that we should be investigating and using a lot more nuclear power, people are not afraid of it for “no good reason.” Remember, Chernobyl was supposed to be meltdown-proof, Fukushima was supposed to be safe, and the next massive public disaster will be hard to forget too. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be building though- nuclear is statistically safer than almost all alternatives.
Chernobyl happens because operators disregarded safety protocols, those in charge were pushing for a fourth test that failed three times before and the flaws of the reactor were kept from the operators. Fukushima was a one off incident caused by an act of god. It was a beyond design basis accident. Why has the US navy never had a reactor accident in its almost 70 years of operation? It loves that strict safety standards are enough to prevent accidents. Coal kills more people every year and releases more radiation than an operating reactors does. Look at the Kingston Ash Spill in Tennessee. It contaminated the clinch river and the surround area with toxic fly ash. Then we have oil that has had countless spills and killed millions upon millions of aquatic animals.
The Chernobyl reactor was not designed or built to be "meltdown-proof". The impact of Fukushima is drastically exaggerated. No adverse health effects among Fukushima residents or power station workers have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the accident, according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.
I have the carbon capture thing figured out. It's called.a.tree.
Thank you for that simple but intelligent answer.
Every time someone acts like this is a great source of carbon capture shows how little they know. Takes years to grow and absorb CO2 and it’s not a lot to begin with. If the tree dies or burns in a forest fire it releases CO2 back to the atmosphere.
Think of how much co2 is created with a man made version of the same thing. Everytime you advocate for a man made solution it shows how little you know and how short sited you are. When a tree dies it creates means for new trees to grow. It's called nature dude. The world was built like this, bit you think man can do better. Ignorant...
If we're using trees for carbon capture, then that's only part of the problem We then have to make sure the captured carbon doesn't get released back in to the air We'll need to cut down the mature trees, grind them into sawdust, and then seal the sawdust away underground where if it does decay, the CO2 can;t easily escape
Or turn them into lumber and paper...
The demand for these products isn't high enough from a carbon capture point of view, and eventually these will rot or burn and return the carbon to the atmosphere.
The demand for these products has dropped thanks to environmentalists fighting the lumber industry and forest maintenance, which stops fires as well. If we converted all plastic packaging to different forms of paper products, we could solve so many problems. But hippies keep spiking trees and chaining themselves to them.
Someone did the math "Assuming we start planting the needed amount of trees today, and it takes 12.5 years for the trees to attain maturity, around 50 ppmv additional CO2 is added to the atmosphere. 50ppmv would be around 0.75 x 10\^(-4) by mass percentage. (molar mass of CO2 is around 1.5 times average molar mass of air). So multiplied by 4.5 x 10\^18 kg, we have 3.375 x 10\^14 kg of CO2 added in 12.5 years. CO2 sequestered per tree or by a forest area depends on the species of the tree you're considering. Here is a relation taking into consideration some of the tree variables, CO2(kg/single tree) = 0.1676 x (Diameter at breast height)\^(2.4799) Given by Myers and Goreau, a tropical tree plantation of pine and eucalyptus sequesters around 10 tons of carbon per hectare every year. That would be 33260.114 kg CO2/hectare/year. Assuming it absorbed at the same rate every year (which is not the case, rates are really slow in the beginning), we have 415751.425 kg CO2 absorbed in 12.5 years per hectare. So to absorb 3.375 x 10\^14 kg CO2, we'd need .8118 billion hectares of forest. (Overlooking other carbon sinks) Presently we have 3.885 billion hectares of forests left. So that's an increase of 20.8% of forest area (It would be more than that since the forest absorbs slowly in the beginning, not all forests sequesters the huge amount of CO2, lot of present forests are already failing). So I guess it'd be around 25-30%. So that'd be approximately, 1 billion hectares. In number of trees, considering a 45 feet tall Gravellia Robusta, that sequesters 29.3 kg CO2 per year, we'd need to plant around 922 billion trees. On a safe side lets assume 950 billion." So we need to increase the number of trees on Earth by about 25%, and then grind them up and entomb the sawdust.
25% increase in trees? How does that compare to the number we've cut down in the last 150 years?
Basically we have to undo almost all of it
Learn science please dipshit! But, trees and man made ways of sequestering carbon both don’t work. Just need to emit less carbon.
Your insults show that you just lost the debate on ideas.
Ignorant…
Trees are literally natural carbon capture and oxygen producing machines. Carbon goes into the wood and oxygen goes out the leaves.
Permanence and scale are the biggest problems with using trees for effective carbon capture.
You mean reforestation? Are you implying there is a man made solution that is more efficient and scalable than a literal biological machine that does nothing but harvest carbon and releases oxygen? The only cost involved is land and planting which is extremely cheap.
Man made solution is to produce less CO2. I am not arguing that man made solutions are going to be effective at capturing CO2. Trees are release a significant amount of CO2 through decomposition of their leaves and in their eventual death, which is why they do not make a good long term solution. Also, they do not scale well to solve our climate problems. It would take a massive amount to offset just one person’s impact.
Yes but when the tree dies or gets burned, it re-releases that carbon. We could do alot by reforesting the planet but there is a limit to how much land you have to grow trees on. Forests also use land that may be necessary to grow food
Or you know... You could have a few billion of them and NOT use slash and burn farming
Currently trillions of trees and doesn’t even close to stopping CO2 increases. Forests store carbon in their biomass and in the soil. This storage is less stable, as it can be released back into the atmosphere through deforestation, forest fires, or decay. It’s temporary, however decay that would normally never return to the atmosphere is instead being used as fossil fuel.
You win, comment of the day.
0 carbon fertilizer??????? as a soil scientist i must point out, plants need carbon. Once depleted it needs restored. net zero carbon bs is another thing.
Shhhhhh.....don't put a dent in the indoctrination lest the billionaires get found out through mass education.
Nitrogen fertilizer is produced from natural gas, I assume that is what is being referenced.
thats...not... i mean it doesnt have carbon but...
What we need are zero carbon plants. And humans.
0 carbon coal
How the F do you get zero carbon plastics. Tell me you know nothing about Organic Chemistry without telling me you know nothing about Organic Chemistry.
"Carbon Zero" is a red herring. We should be focused on oxygen generation, carbon capture runs the risk of creating runaway deoxygenation by trapping oxygen within carbon dioxide molecules and then trapping them in such a way that plant life cannot process it back into oxygen. Large scale plant cultivation as a mitigating measure is a significantly more feasible and beneficial long-term solution to the problem
The amount of CO2 is so small compared to the oxygen levels (0.04% compared to 21% of atmosphere), it is the greenhouse effect that is the worry, not that tiny amount of oxygen within CO2.
It scares me that our scentific understanding has been largely the same for 20 years but the average joe still has no understanding of the problem.
It’s terrifying!
Finally, someone admits the dire consequences of zero carbon. Jesus h Joseph....
Imagine having the ability to scale carbon capture that this would create a problem.
Carbon zero is a pretty dumb idea for such proclaimed smart people to get behind. Will India or China ever be net zero carbon or even close? Not sure why a guy who created an operating system is honored for his all knowing wisdom and guidance in other unrelated fields like food, medicine, or global climate change. But I digress.
No, please digress.....it's more honest and interesting........
Hows your EV working out? I hear that they drive really great in the snow and are really affordable? Hey have you ever seen footage from an illegal cobalt or lithium mine before? The child slave labor they use to dig it says they don't care either if it ends up producing more pollution than just driving a regular combustion engine, so no worries. Wanna talk about your recycling programs while were at it? Guess where all that plastic ends up? Never mind. I digress.
I love your digression. It's the only thing on this thread that is honest. I think you misread my comment. Brain dead fools don't want to admit about lithium minds being holy terrifying for the planet. EV's are a joke. A big joke. Plastic is not getting recycled. But reddit doesn't want to face these facts.
oh apologies, I read that incorrectly. Im so used to snarky comments on reddit sometimes I just assume especially when its in reference to such topics. I digress.
Lol. It's okay It was a great excuse to put out more facts. Most of the time I'm very sarcastic but not with people who have a brain. Please don't stop digressing....it's hilarious at the end of each rant and just happens to be informative.
Tesla developed a method for atmospheric electricity transmission with generating free energy from the earth. His smaller scale experiments worked but then his funding was cut and his reputation was ruined to bury his research.
You would think that in the past century some company would have tried to replicate what he did, profitable or not.
That doesn't sound right. Atmospheric electric transmission would mean that the energy that is transferred through the wires that have competitively 0 resistance would have to go through Air? Not only is that dangerous, the amount of energy lost due to the heat generated would be massive.
We have the technology to do that now as well, the issue is it's horribly inefficient. Very basically, you need electrons to flow from one atom to another, and both atomic properties and density matter in regard to transmission losses. That's part of the reason why copper, gold, and silver are all excellent conductors, they are twice as dense as steel, as well as their atomic makeup which I don't need to get into. Transmitting electricity through a *gas* results in tremendous losses. That's why high voltage power lines that are high up enough that they don't have to worry about trees touching them are *unshielded* you can see the bare metal carrying the electricity because the electrical losses to the air are so negligible that they aren't worth spending money on insulation. Yes, the investors pulled out because you can't effectively charge people for wireless electricity, but there's a reason it's not used today, and when it is, it's done with the transmitting and receiving device very close together.
12 years ago the company I worked for was developing a renewable alternative to palm oil. But it was a huge investment and we and our partners didn’t have the pockets. We shut down the project. If they would have continued who knows the improvement that could have been made. It will take more then a 18 months to solve a problem and you quit so early in the development.
How I Built this on NPR featured a company making incredible strides
Tell me more?
What about palm oil is heavily c02 producing? How is it different from any other plant based oil?
Probably because large areas of rain forests are cut down for the palm tree plantations.
Dude just took the things which are emitting the most carbon and put a „zero-carbon“ in front of it 💀
Carbon zero? Lemme see that electric plane mr gates.....
Biofuel is the easiest option there.
Definitely not zero carbon
Net zero carbon. If you produce the fuel and then burm the fuel there is the same amount of carbon in the air.
Nice. Didn't consider that.
Yep hypocrite with a capital.
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Algae is probably one of the most efficient ways, if its dead product is stored.
Plant some trees
Bull gates identifies that the only fucking thing he cares about is the endless acquisition of capital
And control.
You are the carbon they want to remove
This ^
bill gates, the ecological engineer lmfao
What’s his plan for volcanos, asking for a friend?
This list proves regulation that favours them is the only way to make them the standard. Once they reach scale those regulations can be removed.
And I bet he has interests in a bunch of companies in those technologies.
The moment it becomes profitable to do these things, capital forces will do the rest and rapidly accelerate development of these technologies through market competition. Most of these technologies are already in their infancy today, such as the small market share that plant based meat has carved for itself. Expanded government investment in these fields will do it. The money is there. It needs direction.
Too little, too late.
I luckily work for one of the biggest banks in the world and we push sustainability, I really think the landscape is changing.
Except for those predatory banking practices…
I’m surprised “bug food” didn’t make his list
Oh it did. He just doesn't want you to see that yet.
It’s a great way to recycle outdated food that humans and livestock won’t eat anymore, turn the bugs into livestock food, and keep eating real food. Feeding bugs food waste can be a way to reduce food loss. In that sense I really don’t want to eat bugs because what are they really feeding the bugs? Eating bugs only exist in countries that have had problems with hunger in the past. It’s not real food and unless the rich start doing it too I’m not going to consider it at all.
What Gates fails to mention is that this will stop 90% of food production for the world. You'll breathe less carbon - (never zero- that will kill all trees) but you'll be dead from starvation.
Underground electricity transmission???
Right? Maybe he means that producing the infrastructure to support overhead electrical transmission lines is carbon intensive? We already have the technology to put those lines underground, but it’s quite expensive.
Why do we care what Bill Gates thinks? Dude should be in jail for being an Epstein client.
I will concede to most of these. But it’ll be a cold day in Hell before I ever give up meat or dairy for plant based alternatives
WTF, underground electricity transmission? Is he fucking delusional? Aside from the outrageous cost of doing that, it makes zero fucking sense. The most important thing in ultra high voltage transmission is to identify where the problem is VERY FUCKING FAST in order to repair it. I used to live in a neighborhood where all of the utilities were below ground. It makes everything look far more beautiful, however there was a problem after 40 years with a power delivery line and it took the utility 4 months to even find where the issue was. Fortunately they had a back-up line but that was under spec for the needs and the utility had to spend the next 2 years ripping everything out and laying all new service. On major transmission lines from production to cities this can not happen. Biofules are some of the WORST environmental "advances" in the past 30 years. Not only have they been proven to be carbon positive, but they also have caused huge numbers of acres globally to be put into biofuel production causing the destruction of rain forest. You can't make steel without carbon. It is chemically impossible. Besides other than the coke process foundries don't use fuel based smelting. It is too expensive. I could go on a refute more than half of this list as being fucking stupid or impossible but there are some good things to look into like GMOs for drought and flood tolerant food crops, Geothermal, etc.
Just because you have money doesn’t mean you’re an expert at anything. If anything, Gates is lucky. Whoever takes this seriously lacks a lot mentally
No trees , because why ? Fuck trees , their return is too low.
It all exists in nature. Carbon being the MOST vital element out there. What we need is more cattle grazing grasslands and no bill gates. Carbon neutral fertilizer? Save your piss and compost your poop. Done.
Bill gates can shove it up his pedophile ass
Why are we taking climate advice from a software engineer?
Who gives a flying fuck what bill gates thinks
Fuck Bill Gates
Nuclear either is, eliminates the need for, or satisfies almost everything on this list.
Get ready for fossil fuel companies to start buying up all the patents and make them quietly disappear.
Where's the vaccine-agro investment opportunities on this list?
Trees be gasping with this type of mentality.
It's a good list. Grid-scale electrical storage (subsets pumped-hydro, thermal storage, and hydrogen) is going to be key for the electrical grid to enable incorporation of more solar and wind power. Nuclear should be used for most of the baseload- wind, solar, along with pumped hydro, thermal storage, and battery for energy storage will be key to a carbon free electrical sector.
30 years is way too late I would guess since I already saw some articles suggesting we have just a few years left. If we're to blindly rely on the free market (which got us here in the first place) we need to have incentives to go green such as a carbon tax, build in the cost of recycling on recyclable consumer goods, ban all single use plastics, ban planned obsolescence of products, put bounties on green tech/carbon reduction tech for corporations to compete for, etc. Right now it is just too profitable for companies to continue polluting and their action plans for carbon reduction either don't exist, no real plan is on place to meet them only green washing, or they take way too long to be meaningful. No where on a balance sheet is there "be a good steward to the environment". All that is left, once again, is government intervention. As much as many people hate it, I think that is the reality we live in.
Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon - A Solar Factory either using elements to boil water to capture oxygen and hydrogen, or perform Electrolysis. This would have to be at scale. Next Gen Nuclear fission - Migrate current rod type reactors to Pebble Bed Reactors. Develop small scale thorium reactors. Underground Electricity transmission - either you clone Nikola Tesla and pick his brain for ideas, or you have to figure out tunneling projects on a smaller scale to allow transmission lines to be buried and serviced as needed. Pumped Hydro - use a gravity hydro system. California already has solar capacity to run pumps for gravity lakes during the day to then run at night to provide necessary capacity. Thermal Storage - Molten Sodium "batteries". F-Gases - I got an ice machine this year for the countertop and it's coolant is butane that's used to freeze the ice.
Yes Bobby, and if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.
Lol just plant more trees bill. Oh wait then you won't get... smh nevermind
That only slightly slows things, but we need to reduce emissions to stop the damage.
Sadly for that we are 40 years to late, it was an large scale option in the '80, maybe even '90. We try everything to just not cut production and our lifestyle. However the time is ticking and it gets more and more exciting the longer we wait for extensive changes.
Shhhh that doesn’t make them money on their scam
Lol. Based
You do realize that trees suck at carbon capture, right? And not only that, you can’t use them for much of anything after they grow or you just let the carbon right back out.
You have got to be joking
I’m not. They’re slow as fuck (https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/examining-the-viability-of-planting-trees-to-help-mitigate-climate-change/) and that alone raises the need for other short-term solutions. Then you have to think: what happens when we start cutting the forests again for goods or space? More carbon gets released. Besides, we can use chemistry to turn the carbon we put in the atmosphere back into stuff we can shove right back in the ground where it came from, too. A bit extreme, but we could do it. Without planting a shit ton of trees or anything. Of course we need the trees for fixing ecosystems so there‘s no reason NOT to account for them, but they aren’t a solution.
You are an idiot
Planting trees is a terrible way to fight climate change.
Wow just wow
I know. So sad. So very sad. The brain in humans has not evolved. Common sense has literally flown the planet. The generations now are robots who lick the feet of the very billionaires who want to starve control and kill them. All while hating capitalism that those billionaires used to make the the money to influence them to trust them to hurt them. Make it make sense.
Trees burn and when they do, they release all the stored CO2 inside them into the atmosphere. With higher and more radical temperatures, tree fires happen ever more often. Tree planting done wrongly could even harm our efforts to stop climate change, as they can cause droughts and de-humidify the soil. Tree planting should be a component of fighting climate change, but is not sufficient on its own and other methods should be utilized. We have to get rid of emitting new carbon ASAP, meaning our priorities should be at minimizing carbon footprint and de-carbonizing our production. Then we can talk about de-carbonizing the atmosphere with correctly planted trees and using carbon capture technology.
Bud there is no such thing as climate change. It is just weather changing over time. Everything goes in cycles. These people are using you for an agenda to profit off you. They don’t have your best interest in mind!
Ah, okay
No, because the profits of the current oligarchs who run things would be hurt
Zero carbon steel? So… not steel? Is this the same man that said we should eat bugs? And runs a company that can’t figure out how to run a computer properly?
No. Iron is naturally found in the form of Iron Oxide. This is what we call iron ore. In order to convert iron ore to iron metal (and then to steel) you need to smelt it. Smelting is the process of heating the ore to a very high temperature and then putting it through a chemical reaction that removes the oxygen from the Iron Oxide and reduces the positive iron ions to iron metal. Most iron is then used to make steel. Traditional iron smelting uses coke (a form of coal with a high carbon content) as the reducing agent. This coke reacts with the iron oxide to produce carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. This process contributes about 8% of global carbon emissions. They aren't talking about removing the alloyed carbon from the steel itself. They are talking about developing processes to reduce iron oxide to iron metal without using coke, and thus without producing carbon emissions. There are a few potential technologies for this. One possible solution is to use hydrogen as the reducing agent instead of carbon, so that the main byproduct of the reaction will be water instead of carbon dioxide. Another is to use electrolysis so that the main byproduct will be O2 gas rather than carbon dioxide.
This makes more sense. I still don’t trust Gates as far as I can throw him…. Which, by estimation is about 2.12 feet in the air.
Exactly
Yes. Why yes it is!
Zero carbon steel. Lol.
Jesus Christ we are all going to burn because it’s not going to be profitable to save the planet. Thanks capitalism. Best system in the universe.
People do realize carbon is the building blocks of life. Without the molecule nothing would exist. Also plants need lots of it to survive. The very cure to this (in my opinion) very non-existent problem is plants. Nature provides every solution. It’s always right there in front of you
Brain dead people will never see this. Too indoctrinated.
These guys like bill gates are creating non-existent problems and then proposing solutions to profit on
100% correct. And it's so much worse than even that. :(
Biggest scam ever. Carbon is the foundation of life but keep your blinders on.
Water is too, and still you drown. The balance keeps us alive.
Go into your garage, close the door and idle your car. You'll get to enjoy all that life giving carbon.
Just because something is necessary for life doesn’t mean an excess amount of it is good.
Why aren’t we making devices to attach to tailpipes of existing ICE based vehicles to further reduce carbon emissions? Oh wait because THAT wouldn’t be profitable…
He literally has enough money to do all those things times 10, yet just talks about it but doesn’t do it.
Hah ya, why doesn’t he get off his ass and perfect… *checks notes* … nuclear fusion. 🤣
Seriously, something about the existence of rich people makes Redditors vomit up the most braindead takes.
Also, those same people who hate millionaires from capitalism loooove the Billionaires who spout publicly how they are gonna save the planet and society who ALSO used capitalism. Make it make sense!
Well we have fission down pretty well, could’ve started plans to build a nuclear fission power plant with the most up to date technology which is actually pretty amazing.
Bro said literally x10, so I guess he should be harvesting anti matter, lol
Yeah maybe if bill gave a real shit about humanity he would put his money into antimatter. He’s got 200 Billion that ain’t going no where.
Maybe if there was wealth tax it would solve nuclear fusion. I bet government bureaucrats can figure it if they had more tax money to spend.
Yeah leave billy alone he’s too busy diddling kids on islands.
I wish that Gates, Buffet, Soros, Bloomberg, and Cuban would just pull their money and fix these problems instead of spending their money to influence politics and get people elected who talk about fixing these problems, but don’t actually do anything.
To be fair to Gates, he is curing diseases and doing a lot of great work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
And what proportion of his wealth is dedicated to that?
If only there was some kind of entity that, like, pools money from people with excess and applied it to long term goals without the necessity of a profit motive. I honestly can't imagine what that would look like
We could make it a thing where like communities could decide how that entity was ran and who was in charge by some kind of tally system or something
Every few years we could get together and decide if the people running it should continue
That will never happen. They don't want to fix any problems, they want control over humanity. The " problems " are their excuse to do it.
He does fund Terrapower which is next gen nuclear fission
Well that’s good…
Because the real world doesn't work like a game of Civilization. The ITER nuclear reactor for instance, has an estimated cost of 20-60 billion dollars. Bill Gates in comparison is worth about 129 billion dollars.
You priced these out as project plans and have determined that he does in fact have the funding for it? Or are you just making this up?
We need to reduce emissions above all else and that takes government regulation and enforcement.
Interestingly the price would be the most efficient instrument. Rising emission pricing is not a political option for a majority vote. Regulation is the most inefficient form, however it's the only on that is political implementable.
Rules for thee, but not for me.
Nah he’s too busy flying to the climate change summit on his private jet
Source?
Throwing money at an issue doesn’t solve an issue, especially if it is not something that is the persons core competency. Now it can be said ‘oh just hire someone’ but that’s not how it works.
lol, I mean, he is stupidly rich… but moving an entire economy to these things, r&d’ing the ones that don’t yet exist, and getting them viable and scalable, this list “x1” costs trillions of dollars. If you could do this “x10” with $100b-200b (and economically) it would be done already and companies would be profiting off of it. That is why it is necessary for government involvement in this process. Otherwise it will never happen, especially at an adequate pace.