Bill Gates shows he’s serious with climate change and renewable energy, hoping to inspire governments of the world.

One thing is for sure: the world needs more people like Bill Gates.

Microsoft’s founder and currently the richest man on Earth, Gates is known for supporting and spearheading various philanthropic projects regarding education, community, human rights, children, health, poverty, sanitation, and environment:

Bill Gates shows he’s serious with climate change to the tune of $2 Billion. (Image courtesy of Inhabitat.com)

Now, he’s focusing on renewable energy for a simple reason: he thinks it’s about time our energy system got fixed once and for all.  Because, hey, our long-standing dependence on fossil fuels is irrevocably plunging our planet to very warm temperatures.

In an interview by James Bennet for The Atlantic this week, Gates casted doubt on the current target set by the United Nations climate change conference happening in Paris this December.  The target limit he’s talking about is the 2 degrees Celsius rise in global temperature, which can be held back by pledging reduced carbon emissions.

Says Gates:

“It’s good to have people making commitments… But if you really look at those commitments—which are not binding, but even if you say they will all be achieved—they fall dramatically short of the reductions required to reduce CO2 emissions enough to prevent a scenario where global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius. I mean, these commitments won’t even be a third of what you need.

 

“And one of the interesting things about this problem is, if you have a country that says, “Okay, we’re going to get on a pathway for an 80 percent reduction in CO2 by 2050,” it might make a commitment that “Hey, by 2030, we’ll be at 30 percent reduction.” But that first 30 percent is dramatically, dramatically easier than getting to 80 percent. So everything that’s hard has been saved for post-2030—and even these 2030 commitments aren’t enough. And many of them won’t be achieved.” (italics ours)

But rather than simply lament and wait for the outcome of the Paris Talks, Bill Gates is taking matters in his own hands.  Specifically he’s donating $2 Billion to fund research and development for renewable energy because so far government approach to tackling climate change has been lackluster and prone to politicking.  With this fund, Gates hopes to provide much needed impetus for startups and other companies taking a stab at renewable energy technologies.  R&D must be sped up because, at its current snail pace, the 2 degrees Celsius target isn’t likely to happen by 2050.

Germany is already showing the world it can be done, what with its energetic transition to renewable energy.  This year the country is gearing up to get as much as 33{e3829ec1db02d54faaf9fa2de0d48db26af01d7a7944a63c3b26976124791cab} of its electricity from renewable energy.  So what’s stopping everyone else?

Wind farms in Germany, contributing to clean energy the whole year round (Image from thecorereport.com)

In the interview, Gates also noted the discrepancy of government funding for energy research vis-à-vis health research.  The latter currently gets a $30 Billion funding ($5 Billion of which goes to cancer research).  Meanwhile it’s only a mere $6 Billion a year funding that goes to energy research.  Both cancer and climate change pose a clear threat to our lives, the latter maybe even more so as it impacts the entire human race, and yet government priority is not set on it.

What Bill Gates is proposing here is an abrupt stoppage of use of all coal and fossil fuel energy.  It will be a big dramatic leap to renewable energy, the innovation of which might initially inconvenient world economies, but it’s all for the price of a cleaner world.