Bill Gates: How the world can avoid a climate disaster

Anderson Cooper reports for 60 Minutes, February 14, 2021

“Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won’t even come close,” Gates says.

Bill Gates helped usher in the digital revolution at Microsoft, and has spent the decades since exploring – and investing in – innovative solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems – global poverty, disease, and the coronavirus pandemic, which he’s spent nearly $2 billion on.

Bill Gates says he is determined as ever to drive innovation!

Now he is 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.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/bill-gates-climate-change-60-minutes-2021-02-14/

From Peter Dykstra, Environmental Health News, January 31, 2021

I’ve been thinking about how the precarious state of American politics will guide climate policy. It looks like the key to it all is understanding West Virginia politics. And I’m not sure anyone, anywhere, understands West Virginia politics. Or maybe it’s just me, because West Virginia politics surely beats the heck out of me.

Because somehow, pro-coal moderate Democrat Joe Manchin just became President Joe Biden’s Senate point man on climate change.

Taking his shot — A reliably Democratic state for decades, Bill Clinton carried West Virginia by 13 points in 1992. But like so many largely rural states out west, the Mountaineer State’s socially-conservative base began to erode that advantage. And its blue politics turned red in a few decades, notably helping George W. Bush win the contested 2000 Presidential election.

Elected Governor in 2005, Manchin set his targets on a U.S. Senate seat in 2010. And by “set his targets,” I mean a campaign ad had Manchin literally take a .303 and shoot a hole in a “Cap and Trade” bill, all at once boosting coal, praising guns, and threatening the Environmental Protection Agency. Nice shot, Joe.

The lone Democrat — Proceed to the Senate, a partial term to replace Robert Byrd, a political titan who had served 51 years in the Senate.

Manchin comfortably won re-election in 2012 and 2018, even while West Virginians rejected the top of the Democratic ticket in 2016. Hilary Clinton not only got crushed in West Virginia, she helped crush herself. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she told a March 2016 town hall, shortly before her first crushing at the non-mittened hands of Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary.

Also on Election Day 2016, West Virginians defied their own trend by choosing another Democrat for Governor. At six feet seven, 368 pounds, and with the too-Hollywood name of Jim Justice, he was the state’s wealthiest resident — and a Democratic coal baron. Seven months after his inauguration, Justice announced a switch to the GOP. Once again, Manchin was the only Democrat standing in a once all-blue state leadership.

Wild card — Should Manchin follow Justice and decamp for the Republicans, the brittle Democratic hold on the Senate would be lost, and Joe Biden’s vision for sweeping change would be lost. Manchin has never voiced such a threat, but such a move could be as politically consequential as the ones that gave Biden a 50-50 Senate “majority.”

That’s how the Senate Democrat with the most atypical track record on climate and coal came to hold so many of the party’s cards. Unlike Jim Justice, Manchin accepts the overwhelming scientific view that climate change is real, human-induced, and a deadly threat.

But he supported President Trump’s 2017 withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, and he’s been an avid backer of plans to turn the Ohio River Valley into a plastics-manufacturing hub, accessing the region’s fossil fuel wealth. Manchin also backs making West Virginia a focus of carbon capture. Efforts to date to draw carbon out of fossil fuel combustion have been a multi-billion-dollar failure.

Biden’s climate team, studded with international czar John Kerry; domestic boss and former EPA Chief Gina McCarthy, and Energy Secretary designate and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, all come from a different place— philosophically and geographically—than Joe Manchin. It will be one of the first of many dramas for Team Biden’s environment dreams.

https://www.ehn.org/joe-manchin-climate-change-2650177301.html

We need to face the implications of the fact that while the proposed changes listed will not actually be enough, ANY change that reduces fossil fuel use will be vigorously opposed by Republicans and Joe Manchin.

What kind of absurdity is it to say that if getting to NET zero is compared to a trip across the country, we’re already crossing into Indiana?!

Emissions have steadily risen, despite some improvements in efficiency. I suppose this is a game of Let’s pretend: let’s pretend that shifting production to China eliminates those emissions; let’s pretend that shifting from coal to gas and thus reducing CO2 emissions is good because methane emissions don’t count; let’s pretend there is no rebound (Jevon’s) Effect in improving efficiency; let’s pretend that switching from internal combustion engine behemoths to electric behemoths will eliminate transportation emissions rather than reducing them maybe 15%; let’s pretend that various accounting tricks (offsets) and various magical new technologies just over the horizon (geoengineering) can make the emissions go away without changing our lifestyle or the capitalist system that has locked us onto this suicidal trajectory.

When this piece makes the astonishing statement that we have to cut emissions 43% from 2005 baseline to get to net zero, how does that math make any sense? Why isn’t it a 100% reduction? I’ll tell you why, it’s what’s disguised by that little word, “net”. It’s the geoengineering they are already not naming, as everyone who learns what is behind it is horrified, and they won’t be allowed to proceed with astonishingly reckless experiments with our only planet if the global public is armed with the knowledge soon enough. And they’re counting on those experiments because the bottom line is–the termination of our species is not too high a price to pay to perpetuate the economic system that has made the people in power rich, and to feed the hubris and worship of technology that forms the religion of these men, and yes, they’re nearly all men.

I believe much of this is the normal thing that happens at the end of an empire: the ruling class has so successfully insulated itself from the consequences of their decisions that when the cost comes starkly due, most of them are too busy partying to even notice or take it seriously while the decision makers among them are willing to sacrifice everything to maintain their privilege. And most of the society never gets a voice.

What this means is that collapse is inevitable. Billions will die prematurely, almost certainly. Since it’s unlikely Biden will be allowed to even do the pathetically inadequate stuff here proposed — which would get us from our current location with our ankles in the Atlantic, not crossing into Indiana — to the Appalachians.

Mary Wildfire, Roane County, WV