Bill Gates Advocates for More Serious Green Technology
Bill Gates has the tendency to think big, really big. He doesn't care for "cute" green technologies.
Individual solar panels, energy efficient light bulbs and appliances, hybrid cars, and other small measures of energy efficiency appear to be mere distractions to the founder of Microsoft who's trying to spread the gospel of massive production of renewable energies, more along the lines of deserts filled with solar panels or nuclear power.
To Gates, most green technologies created for the home simply won't help meet the global demand for energy as emerging and rapidly expanding economies demand ever more energy, negating, what to him, is negligible energy efficiency.
What does Gates suggests as a solution to the energy crisis and climate problems?
Being a proponent of what he calls "basic research", he suggests that richer countries analyze long-term problems and fund the solutions before deploying them in developing nations.
If we are indeed in a hurry to find a solution to, say, climate change, then wouldn't analyzing long-term problems take up decades of time because analysts need long-term data? Do we really have decades to collect the needed data in order to analyze it and find a solution?
Then, there's the question of how to get richer countries to fund the solutions. Under what incentive would the richer countries be motivated to fork out billions, if not trillions, to fund the process of finding a solution from research of data to application of a new green technology? Are we even certain that developing countries will be receptive to the research or solution of richer countries?
Then, there's the third complication to his suggestion. If developing nations currently use old technology to build their rapidly expanding economies, when and how would they make the switch to cleaner, newer, greener technology later, when the richer countries have funded research to produce the better technologies? Doesn't it make better sense to have the developing countries begin funding the research they would need to use in the future?
Towards his goal of total decarbonization in industrialized nations, Gates seems to put all his faith in massive solar projects and nuclear technologies. To the latter, he has invested millions in Seattle-based nuclear firm TerraPower. This firm has designed a reactor fueled by depleted, rather than enriched, uranium. In theory, this reactor should produce a thousandth of the waste that a typical nuclear plant would, and should be able to run for 50 years without refueling.
To see and hear Bill Gates, check out his lecture at TED Talks titled Bill Gates on Energy: Innovating to Zero.
Follow Technorati