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TED Talks, Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

I'm going to talk today about energy and climate.

And that might seem a bit surprising because my full-time work at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. But energy and climate are extremely important to these people, in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. The climate getting worse, means that many years their crops won't grow. There will be too much rain, not enough rain. Things will change in ways that their fragile environment simply can't support. And that leads to starvation. It leads to uncertainty. It leads to unrest. So, the climate changes will be terrible for them. Also, the price of energy is very important to them.

In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of, to reduce poverty, by far, you would pick energy. Now, the price of energy has come down over time. Really, advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. The coal revolution fueled the industrial revolution, and, even in the 1900’s we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning, we can make modern materials and do so many things. And so, we're in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. But, as we make it cheaper -- and let's go for making it twice as cheap -- we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2. CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one.

If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects. The effects on the weather and, perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be and where the positive feedbacks are, there's some uncertainty there, but not very much.

And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. I asked the top scientists on this several times, do we really have to get down to near zero? Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? And the answer is that, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. And so that's a big challenge. It's very different than saying we're a 12 ft high truck trying to get under a 10 ft bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under. This is something that has to get to zero. Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons.

For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. It's been constantly going up. It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero. This equation has four factors.

A little bit of multiplication. So, you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person's using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. So, let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero. Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. Now that's back from high school algebra, but let's take a look. First we've got population.

Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3. The second factor is the services we use.

This encompasses everything, the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. These are very good things, and getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. And it's a great thing for this number to go up. In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, over all, that will more than double the services delivered per person. Here we have a very basic service. Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework, and, in fact, these kids don't, so they're going out and reading their school work under the street lamps. Now, efficiency, E, the energy for each service, here, finally we have some good news.

We have something that's not going up. Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings. there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially, some individual services even, bring it down by 90 percent. There are other services like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. And so, overall here, if we're optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. So let's look at this fourth factor -- this is going to be a key one -- and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy.

And so the question is, can you actually get that to zero? If you burn coal, no. If you burn natural gas, no. Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles. Now, when I use the term miracle, I don't mean something that's impossible.

The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. The internet and its services are a miracle. So, the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. Usually, we don't have a deadline, where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. This is a case where we actually have to drive full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight time line. Now, I thought, how could I really capture this?

Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here? I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitos, and somehow people enjoyed that. (Laughter) It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitos. So, with energy, all I could come up with is this. I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. So here we have some natural fireflies. I'm told they don't bite, in fact, they might not even leave that jar. (Laughter) Now, there's all sorts gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don't really add up to much.

We need solutions, either one or several, that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability, and, although there's many directions people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. I've left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better, but my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges. Let's look first at the burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas.

What you need to do there, seems like it might be simple, but it's not, and that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. Now we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level, but getting up to that full percentage, that will be very tricky, and agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long term issue. Who's going to be sure? Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? This is a lot of volume. So that's a tough one. Next, would be nuclear.

It also has three big problems. Cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high. The issue of the safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, that the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. And then what do you do with the waste? And, although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. People need to feel good about it. So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. The last three of the five, I've grouped together.

These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. And they actually -- although it's great they don't require fuel -- they have some disadvantages. One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. This is energy farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of time more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. Also, these are intermittent sources. The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and, likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. So, we've got big cost challenges here. We have transmission challenges. For example, say this energy source is outside your country, you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. And, finally, this storage problem.

And, to dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries that get made, for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything, and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses, and what I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of a hundred better than the approaches we have now. It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. Now, how we're going to go forward on this: what's the right approach?

Is it a Manhattan project? What's the thing that can get us there? Well, we need lots of companies working on this, hundreds. In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. And a lot of them, you'll look at and say they're crazy. That's good. And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. Vinod Khosla's investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help back that. Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. And innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. The idea of Terrapower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium, the one percent, which is the U235, we decided, let's burn the 99 percent, the U238.

It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material's approach, this looks like it would work. And, because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile.

You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. It's a great thing. It breathes this uranium as it goes along. So it's kind of like a candle. You can see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the left over, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. That would power the U.S. for hundreds of years. And, simply by filtering sea water in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward.

So let's think, how should we measure ourselves? What should our report card look like? Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. For 2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. That really is very important, that we get there. And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries, still some agriculture. Hopefully, we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. So, the other grade is, are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and we're in the process of getting it elsewhere. That's super important. That's a key element of making that report card. So, backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like?

Well, again, it should have the two elements. We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions. The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and, therefore, the less the temperature. But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed.

There's a lot of great books that have been written about this. The Al Gore book, "Our Choice" and the David McKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. There's a lot that has to come together. So this is a wish.

It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years, I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented, this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact. If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the U.S. and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all the lives of those two billion will be far worse. So, what do we have to do?

What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? We need to go for more research funding. When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the CO2. They should discuss this innovation agenda, and you'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. We do need the market incentives, CO2 tax, cap and trade, something that gets that price signal out there. We need to get the message out. We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve. Thank you.

(Applause) Thank you. Chris Anderson: Thank you.

Thank you.

(Applause) Thank you. Just so I understand more about Terrapower, right -- I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is? Bil Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've done, that's only tens of millions, and even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions.

The tough thing is building the pilot reactor, finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it. CA: And so, to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground almost like a vertical kind of column of nuclear fuel, of this sort of spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down?

BG: That's right.

Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong, that thing where you're opening it up and moving things in and out. That's not good. So, if you have very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in -- just think of it as a log -- put it down and not have those same complexities. And it just sits there and burns for the sixty years, and then it's done. CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution.

BG: Yeah.

Well, what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there -- there's a lot less waste under this approach -- then you can actually take that, and put it into another one and burn that. And we start off actually by taking the waste that exists today, that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry casking by reactor. That's our fuel to begin with. So, the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process. CA: But in your talking to different people around the world about the possibilities here, where is there most interest in actually doing something with this?

BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called nuclear, so we've got a lot of interest, that people from the company have been in Russia, India, China.

I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. So I'm optimistic. You know the French and Japanese have done some work. This is a variant on something that has been done. It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor, is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live?

BG: Well, we need, for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy.

That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. And, you know, Terrapower, if things go well, which is wishing for a lot, could easily meet that. And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies, we need it to be hundreds, who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. We certainly need one to succeed. CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changes, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there?

BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing.

It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that's a different approach. There's a liquid type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal, and so, if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation, the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own. CA: If this doesn't work, then what?

Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been over-eating, and you're about to have a heart-attack.

Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. Now, that's just an insurance policy. You hope you don't need to do that. Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about, should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect. CA: Climate skeptics: if you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they're wrong?

BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps.

The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. Are they saying there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? There are very, very few things that they can even say there's a chance in a million of those things. The main problem we have here is kind of like AIDS. You make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later. And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later -- and a somewhat uncertain pain thing.

In fact, the IPCC report, that's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, okay, that isn't that big of a deal. The fact is it's that uncertain part that should move us towards this. But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, okay, I don't care that it doesn't put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2, but I guess I'll accept it because it's cheaper than what's come before. (Applause) CA: And so, that would be your response to the Bjorn Lomborg argument, that basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, [that] it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do.

BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece -- say the U.S. should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now -- it's not that dramatic. It shouldn't take away from other things. The thing you get into big money on, and this, reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that. That, to me, mostly is a waste. Unless you're very close and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap. I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. If the trade-off you get into is, let's make energy super expensive, then the rich can afford that. I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. The disaster is for that two billion. And even Lomborg has changed.

His shtick now is, why isn't the R&D getting discussed more. He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R&D point. And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. The R&D piece, it's crazy how little it's funded. CA: Well Bill, I suspect I speak on the behalf of most people here to say, I really hope your wish comes true.

Thank you so much. BG: Thank you.

(Applause)

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero! Bill Gates über Energie: Innovation bis zum Nullpunkt! Ο Μπιλ Γκέιτς για την ενέργεια: Καινοτομώντας προς το μηδέν! Bill Gates sobre la energía: ¡Innovar hasta cero! ビル・ゲイツのエネルギー論:ゼロへの革新! Bill Gates o energii: Innowacje do zera! Bill Gates sobre energia: Inovar até zero! Билл Гейтс об энергетике: инновации до нуля! Білл Гейтс про енергетику: Інновації до нуля! 比尔-盖茨谈能源:创新到零!

I’m going to talk today about energy and climate. 今日はエネルギーと気候についてお話しします。

And that might seem a bit surprising because my full-time work at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. というのも、私が財団でフルタイムで行っている仕事のほとんどはワクチンと種子に関するもので、20億人の最貧困層がより良い生活を送れるようにするために私たちが発明し、提供しなければならないものだからだ。 But energy and climate are extremely important to these people, in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. しかし、エネルギーと気候はこれらの人々にとって極めて重要であり、実際、地球上の誰よりも重要である。 The climate getting worse, means that many years their crops won’t grow. 気候が悪化しているということは、作物が育たない年も多いということだ。 İklimin kötüleşmesi, uzun yıllar ekinlerinin büyümeyeceği anlamına geliyor. There will be too much rain, not enough rain. 雨は多すぎるだろうし、十分ではないだろう。 Things will change in ways that their fragile environment simply can’t support. 物事は、彼らの脆弱な環境が単にサポートできない方法で変化します。 And that leads to starvation. そしてそれが飢餓につながる。 It leads to uncertainty. それは不確実性につながる。 It leads to unrest. それは不安へとつながる。 So, the climate changes will be terrible for them. Quindi, i cambiamenti climatici saranno terribili per loro. だから、気候の変化は彼らにとって恐ろしいものになるだろう。 Also, the price of energy is very important to them. また、エネルギー価格も彼らにとって非常に重要である。

In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of, to reduce poverty, by far, you would pick energy. 実際、貧困削減のために価格を下げるべきものをひとつだけ選ぶとしたら、断然エネルギーを選ぶだろう。 На самом деле, если бы вы могли выбрать только одну вещь, на которую нужно снизить цену, чтобы сократить бедность, вы бы выбрали энергию. Now, the price of energy has come down over time. Ora, il prezzo dell'energia è diminuito nel tempo. 今、エネルギー価格は時間の経過とともに下がっている。 Really, advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. In realtà, la civiltà avanzata si basa sui progressi energetici. 本当に、高度な文明はエネルギーの進歩の上に成り立っている。 The coal revolution fueled the industrial revolution, and, even in the 1900’s we’ve seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that’s why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning, we can make modern materials and do so many things. 石炭革命は産業革命の原動力となったし、1900年代に入ってからも電力価格は急速に下落している。 And so, we’re in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. だから、豊かな世界では電気は素晴らしい状況にある。 But, as we make it cheaper -- and let’s go for making it twice as cheap -- we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2. しかし、より安くするためには--2倍安くするためには--新たな制約をクリアする必要がある。 CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. CO2は地球を温暖化しており、CO2に関する方程式は実は非常に単純なものだ。

If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects. 排出されたCO2を合計すると、気温の上昇につながり、気温の上昇は非常に悪い影響をもたらす。 The effects on the weather and, perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can’t adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. 天候への影響や、もっと悪いことに、自然の生態系がこうした急激な変化に適応できず、生態系が崩壊するという間接的な影響もある。 Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be and where the positive feedbacks are, there’s some uncertainty there, but not very much. さて、あるCO2の増加から気温がどのように変化するのか、また正のフィードバックはどこにあるのか、その正確な量には多少の不確実性があるが、それほど多くはない。

And there’s certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. その影響がどの程度になるかは確かに不透明だが、極めて悪いものになるだろう。 I asked the top scientists on this several times, do we really have to get down to near zero? この件に関して、私はトップ科学者たちに何度も尋ねた。 Can’t we just cut it in half or a quarter? 半分か4分の1にできないのか? And the answer is that, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. そしてその答えは、ゼロに近づくまで気温は上昇し続けるというものだ。 And so that’s a big challenge. それは大きな挑戦だ。 It’s very different than saying we’re a 12 ft high truck trying to get under a 10 ft bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under. 高さ12フィートのトラックが10フィートの橋の下をくぐろうとするのとはまったく違う。 This is something that has to get to zero. これはゼロにしなければならないことだ。 Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. 私たちは毎年、260億トン以上の二酸化炭素を排出している。

For each American, it’s about 20 tons. アメリカ人一人当たり、約20トンだ。 For people in poor countries, it’s less than one ton. 貧しい国の人々にとっては1トンにも満たない。 It’s an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. 地球上のすべての人の平均は約5トンだ。 And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. そしてどうにかして、それをゼロにするような変化を起こさなければならない。 It’s been constantly going up. 常に上がり続けている。 It’s only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero. 様々な経済的な変化によって、この数値はまったく平らになっていない。 This equation has four factors. この方程式には4つの要素がある。

A little bit of multiplication. ちょっとした掛け算だ。 So, you’ve got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that’s going to be based on the number of people, the services each person’s using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. 左側にCO2というゼロにしたいものがありますが、これは人の数、各人が平均的に利用しているサービス、各サービスの平均的なエネルギー、そして単位エネルギー当たりのCO2排出量に基づいています。 So, let’s look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero. どうすればゼロにできるのか、ひとつひとつ見ていこう。 Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. おそらく、どちらかの数字がゼロに近づかなければならないだろう。 Now that’s back from high school algebra, but let’s take a look. さて、これは高校の代数の話に戻るが、見てみよう。 First we’ve got population. まずは人口だ。

Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. 現在、世界には68億人の人口がいる。 That’s headed up to about nine billion. それは約90億に上る。 Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3. 新しいワクチンやヘルスケア、リプロダクティブ・ヘルス(生殖補助医療)サービスに関して本当に素晴らしい仕事をすれば、おそらく10%か15%下げることができるだろう。 The second factor is the services we use. 2つ目の要因は、私たちが利用しているサービスだ。

This encompasses everything, the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. これは食べるもの、衣服、テレビ、暖房など、あらゆるものを包括している。 These are very good things, and getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. これらは非常に良いことであり、貧困をなくすということは、地球上のほとんどすべての人にこれらのサービスを提供するということだ。 And it’s a great thing for this number to go up. そして、この数字が上がることは素晴らしいことだ。 In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, over all, that will more than double the services delivered per person. 豊かな世界では、おそらく上位10億人くらいは、削減し、使用量を減らすことができるだろうが、毎年、平均してこの数字は上がっていくだろう。 Here we have a very basic service. ここでは非常に基本的なサービスを提供している。 Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework, and, in fact, these kids don’t, so they’re going out and reading their school work under the street lamps. 実際、この子たちはそうではないので、外に出て街灯の下で学校の宿題を読んでいる。 Now, efficiency, E, the energy for each service, here, finally we have some good news. さて、各サービスのエネルギー効率Eだが、ここでようやく朗報が飛び込んできた。

We have something that’s not going up. 上がらないものがある。 Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings. さまざまな発明や照明の新しい方法、さまざまなタイプの車、さまざまな建物の建て方などを通して。 there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially, some individual services even, bring it down by 90 percent. 多くのサービスでは、そのサービスのエネルギーを大幅に下げることができる。 There are other services like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. 肥料の製造方法や航空輸送の方法など、改善の余地がはるかに少ないサービスもある。 And so, overall here, if we’re optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. 全体として、楽観的に考えれば、3倍から6倍の削減が可能かもしれない。 But for these first three factors now, we’ve gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won’t cut it. しかし、この最初の3つの要因では、260億トンからせいぜい130億トン程度になる。 So let’s look at this fourth factor -- this is going to be a key one -- and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. では、この4つ目の要素--これは重要な要素になるだろう--を見てみよう。

And so the question is, can you actually get that to zero? 問題は、それをゼロにできるかどうかだ。 If you burn coal, no. 石炭を燃やしている人はダメだ。 Kömür yakarsan, hayır. If you burn natural gas, no. 天然ガスを燃やしている場合は、そうではない。 Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. 新興の自然エネルギーと原子力を除けば、現在電気を作るほぼすべての方法はCO2を排出する。 And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. だから、私たちが世界規模でやらなければならないのは、新しいシステムを作ることだ。 And so, we need energy miracles. だから、エネルギーの奇跡が必要なんだ。 Now, when I use the term miracle, I don’t mean something that’s impossible. さて、私が奇跡という言葉を使うとき、不可能なことを意味するのではない。

The microprocessor is a miracle. マイクロプロセッサーは奇跡だ。 The personal computer is a miracle. パーソナルコンピューターは奇跡だ。 The internet and its services are a miracle. インターネットとそのサービスは奇跡だ。 So, the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. だから、ここの人々は多くの奇跡の創造に参加してきた。 Usually, we don’t have a deadline, where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. 通常、私たちは期限を設けず、ある期日までに奇跡を起こさなければならない。 Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don’t. 普通は、ただ傍観しているだけで、何人かはやってくるし、何人かはやってこない。 Genellikle, sadece bir şekilde beklersiniz ve bazıları gelir, bazıları gelmez. This is a case where we actually have to drive full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight time line. これは、実際に全速力で走り、かなり厳しい時間制限の中で奇跡を起こさなければならないケースだ。 Now, I thought, how could I really capture this? さて、どうすればこれを写真に収めることができるだろうか?

Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people’s imagination here? 何か人々の想像力をかき立てるような、自然な説明やデモンストレーションはないものだろうか? I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitos, and somehow people enjoyed that. 1年前、蚊を持参したとき、なぜかみんなそれを楽しんでいたことを思い出した。 (Laughter) It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitos. (笑)蚊と一緒に暮らしている人たちがいるんだ、という考えに彼らを引き込んだんだ。 So, with energy, all I could come up with is this. だから、エネルギーを使って、私が思いつくのはこれだけだ。 I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. 私は今年、ホタルを放つことが環境への貢献になると決めた。 So here we have some natural fireflies. というわけで、天然のホタルを紹介しよう。 I’m told they don’t bite, in fact, they might not even leave that jar. 彼らは噛んだりしないと聞いている。実際、彼らはその瓶から離れないかもしれない。 (Laughter) Now, there’s all sorts gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don’t really add up to much. そのようなギミック的な解決策はいろいろあるが、あまり意味がない。

We need solutions, either one or several, that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability, and, although there’s many directions people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. そして、人々が求めている方向性はたくさんあるが、大きな数字を達成できるのは本当に5つしかない。 I’ve left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. 潮汐、地熱、核融合、バイオ燃料は省いた。 Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better, but my key point here is that we’re going to have to work on each of these five, and we can’t give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges. しかし、私がここで重要視しているのは、この5つそれぞれに取り組まなければならないということだ。 Let’s look first at the burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. まず化石燃料の燃焼について見てみよう。石炭を燃やすか、天然ガスを燃やすかだ。

What you need to do there, seems like it might be simple, but it’s not, and that’s to take all the CO2, after you’ve burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. CO2を燃やした後、煙道から排出し、加圧して液体を作り、それをどこかに置き、そこに留まることを願うのだ。 Now we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level, but getting up to that full percentage, that will be very tricky, and agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long term issue. 現在、60%から80%のレベルでこれを行う試験的なものがいくつかあるが、完全なパーセンテージまで引き上げるのは非常に難しい。 Who’s going to be sure? 誰が確かめるんだ? Who’s going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? 核廃棄物やその他の廃棄物の何十億倍もあるものを誰が保証するのか? This is a lot of volume. これはかなりのボリュームだ。 So that’s a tough one. だから、それは難しいよ。 Next, would be nuclear. 次は核だろう。

It also has three big problems. また、3つの大きな問題を抱えている。 Cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high. 特に規制の厳しい国ではコストが高い。 The issue of the safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, that the fuel doesn’t get used for weapons. 安全性の問題、何も問題が起きないという安心感、人間のオペレーターがいるにもかかわらず、燃料が兵器に使われないという安心感。 And then what do you do with the waste? そして、その廃棄物をどうするのか? And, although it’s not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. そして、規模はそれほど大きくないが、それについては多くの懸念がある。 People need to feel good about it. 人々は良い気分になる必要がある。 So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. だから、解決可能かもしれない、だから取り組むべき3つの非常に難しい問題がある。 The last three of the five, I’ve grouped together. 5つのうちの最後の3つは、私がグループ分けしたものだ。

These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. これらはよく再生可能エネルギーと呼ばれるものだ。 And they actually -- although it’s great they don’t require fuel -- they have some disadvantages. 燃料を必要としないのは素晴らしいが、デメリットもある。 One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. ひとつは、これらの技術で収集されるエネルギーの密度が、発電所よりも劇的に低いことだ。 This is energy farming, so you’re talking about many square miles, thousands of time more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. これはエネルギー農業だから、何平方キロメートルも、通常のエネルギー発電所の何千倍もの面積になる。 Also, these are intermittent sources. また、これらは断続的なソースである。 The sun doesn’t shine all day, it doesn’t shine every day, and, likewise, the wind doesn’t blow all the time. 太陽は一日中輝いているわけではないし、毎日輝いているわけでもない。同様に、風もいつも吹いているわけではない。 And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it’s not available. そのため、これらのエネルギー源に依存するのであれば、エネルギーが供給されない時間帯にエネルギーを得るための何らかの方法を持たなければならない。 So, we’ve got big cost challenges here. つまり、ここには大きなコスト面での課題がある。 We have transmission challenges. トランスミッションの課題もある。 For example, say this energy source is outside your country, you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. 例えば、このエネルギー源が自国外にあるとすると、技術が必要なだけでなく、エネルギーが他国からもたらされるリスクに対処しなければならない。 And, finally, this storage problem. そして最後に、このストレージの問題だ。

And, to dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries that get made, for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything, and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses, and what I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. これを次元化するために、自動車用、コンピューター用、電話用、懐中電灯用など、あらゆる種類のバッテリーを調べて、世界中で使用されている電気エネルギーの量と比較してみた。 And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that’s going to be a factor of a hundred better than the approaches we have now. そして実際、私たちはここで大きなブレークスルーを必要としている。今あるアプローチよりも100倍優れたものをね。 It’s not impossible, but it’s not a very easy thing. 不可能ではないが、とても簡単なことではない。 Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you’re using. この現象は、断続的なソースを、例えば使用量の20~30%以上にしようとすると現れる。 If you’re counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. もし100パーセントを期待するのであれば、驚異的なミラクル・バッテリーが必要だ。 Now, how we’re going to go forward on this: what’s the right approach? さて、これからどうやってこの問題を進めていくのか?

Is it a Manhattan project? マンハッタン計画ですか? What’s the thing that can get us there? 私たちをそこに導いてくれるものは何だろう? Well, we need lots of companies working on this, hundreds. まあ、たくさんの企業がこの問題に取り組む必要がある。 In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. この5つの道それぞれで、少なくとも100人は必要だ。 And a lot of them, you’ll look at and say they’re crazy. そして、その多くを見て、クレイジーだと言うだろう。 That’s good. それはいいことだ。 And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. そして、ここTEDグループには、すでにこれを追求している人たちがたくさんいると思う。 Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. ビル・グロスはいくつかの会社を持っており、そのひとつがeSolarという会社で、素晴らしい太陽熱技術を持っている。 Vinod Khosla’s investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I’m trying to help back that. ヴィノッド・コスラは、素晴らしいことをやっていて面白い可能性を秘めた数十の企業に投資している。 Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. ネイサン・マーボルドと私は、意外かもしれないが、実際に核のアプローチを取っている会社を支援している。 There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. 原子力には、モジュール式、液体式といった革新的な技術がある。 And innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there’s some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. この業界ではかなり前から技術革新が止まっている。 The idea of Terrapower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium, the one percent, which is the U235, we decided, let’s burn the 99 percent, the U238. テラパワーのアイデアは、ウランの一部、つまり1パーセントのU235を燃やす代わりに、99パーセントのU238を燃やそうというものだ。

It is kind of a crazy idea. ちょっとクレイジーなアイデアだ。 In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it’s through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material’s approach, this looks like it would work. 現代のスーパーコンピューターの登場によって、シミュレーションが可能になり、適切な材料でアプローチすれば、うまくいきそうだということがわかるようになった。 And, because you’re burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. そして、その99%を燃やすことで、コストプロファイルが大幅に改善される。

You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today’s reactors. 実際に廃棄物を燃やし尽くせば、現在の原子炉から出る残飯をすべて燃料として使うことができる。 So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. だから、その心配をする代わりに、それを受け取るんだ。 It’s a great thing. 素晴らしいことだ。 It breathes this uranium as it goes along. このウランを吸いながら進む。 So it’s kind of like a candle. ロウソクのようなものだ。 You can see it’s a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. よく進行波リアクターと呼ばれるものだ。 In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. 燃料の面では、これで本当に問題が解決した。 I’ve got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. ここにケンタッキー州のある場所の写真がある。 This is the left over, the 99 percent, where they’ve taken out the part they burn now, so it’s called depleted uranium. これは99パーセントの残りで、今燃やしている部分を取り除いたもので、劣化ウランと呼ばれている。 That would power the U.S. そうなれば、米国の電力は賄えるだろう。 for hundreds of years. 何百年もの間。 And, simply by filtering sea water in an inexpensive process, you’d have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. そして、安価なプロセスで海水を濾過するだけで、地球の残りの全生涯に十分な燃料が得られるのだ。 So, you know, it’s got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. だから、前途は多難だが、前進するために必要な何百ものアイデアの一例だ。

So let’s think, how should we measure ourselves? では、自分自身をどのように測るべきか、考えてみよう。 What should our report card look like? 成績表はどうあるべきか? Well, let’s go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. じゃあ、本当に必要なところまで行って、それから中間を見よう。 For 2050, you’ve heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. 2050年については、80%削減という話をよく耳にする。 That really is very important, that we get there. それは本当に重要なことだ。 And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries, still some agriculture. そしてその20%は、貧しい国々で行われていること、まだ一部の農業で使われることになる。 Hopefully, we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. うまくいけば、林業もセメントもきれいになる。 So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. つまり、その80%を達成するためには、中国のような国々を含む先進国は、発電を完全に切り替えなければならないのだ。 So, the other grade is, are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and we’re in the process of getting it elsewhere. つまり、もう1つのグレードは、このゼロ・エミッション技術を配備しているか、すべての先進国で配備しているか、そして他の国でも配備を進めているかということだ。 That’s super important. それは超重要なことだ。 That’s a key element of making that report card. それが成績表を作る重要な要素だ。 So, backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? では、2020年の成績表はどうあるべきか?

Well, again, it should have the two elements. まあ、繰り返しになるが、2つの要素があるはずだ。 We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions. 削減を開始するために、このような効率化を進めるべきだ。 The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and, therefore, the less the temperature. 排出量が減れば減るほど、CO2の総量は減り、したがって気温も下がる。 But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don’t get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. しかし、ある意味では、そこに到達するまでのグレード、つまり、大きな削減には至らないようなことをすることは、これらのブレークスルーの革新の一部であるもう一方のグレードと同等か、あるいはそれよりもわずかに重要度が低い程度でしかない。 These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. このようなブレークスルーは、フルスピードで進める必要があり、企業やパイロット・プロジェクト、変更された規制の内容で測ることができる。

There’s a lot of great books that have been written about this. このことについて書かれた素晴らしい本がたくさんある。 The Al Gore book, "Our Choice" and the David McKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." アル・ゴア著『Our Choice(私たちの選択)』とデビッド・マッケイ著『Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air(熱風のない持続可能なエネルギー)』である。 They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. 私たちには幅広い支援が必要だからだ。 There’s a lot that has to come together. まとまらなければならないことがたくさんある。 So this is a wish. だから、これは願いなんだ。

It’s a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. この技術を発明することは、とても具体的な願いだ。 If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years, I could pick who’s president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that’s half the cost with no CO2 gets invented, this is the wish I would pick. もし今後50年間の願いが1つだけあるとしたら、誰が大統領になるかを選んでもいいし、私が大好きなワクチンを選んでもいいし、CO2ゼロでコストが半分になるものが発明されることを選んでもいい。 This is the one with the greatest impact. これが最もインパクトのあるものだ。 If we don’t get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the U.S. この願いが叶わなければ、短期的な考えを持つ人々と長期的な考えを持つ人々との間の分裂はひどいものになるだろう。 and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all the lives of those two billion will be far worse. と中国、貧しい国と豊かな国、そして何よりも20億人の生活がはるかに悪化するだろう。 So, what do we have to do? では、どうすればいいのか?

What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? 私はあなたに何を訴えているのか? We need to go for more research funding. もっと研究費を獲得する必要がある。 When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn’t just discuss the CO2. コペンハーゲンのような場所で各国が集まるとき、CO2についてだけ議論すべきではない。 They should discuss this innovation agenda, and you’d be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. 彼らはこの革新的なアジェンダについて話し合うべきだ。そして、こうした革新的なアプローチに対する支出がとんでもなく低いレベルにあることに唖然とするだろう。 We do need the market incentives, CO2 tax, cap and trade, something that gets that price signal out there. 市場インセンティブ、CO2税、キャップ・アンド・トレード、価格シグナルを発信する何かが必要だ。 We need to get the message out. 私たちはメッセージを発信する必要がある。 We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. 私たちはこの対話を、政府がとる措置も含めて、より合理的で、より理解しやすい対話にする必要がある。 This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve. これは重要な願いだが、私たちなら実現できると思う。 Thank you.

(Applause) Thank you. Chris Anderson: Thank you. クリス・アンダーソン:ありがとう。

Thank you.

(Applause) Thank you. Just so I understand more about Terrapower, right -- I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is? テラパワーについてもう少し理解したいのですが、まず、どの程度の規模の投資なのでしょうか? Bil Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we’ve done, that’s only tens of millions, and even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure our materials work properly, then you’ll only be up in the hundreds of millions.

The tough thing is building the pilot reactor, finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it’s just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it. CA: And so, to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground almost like a vertical kind of column of nuclear fuel, of this sort of spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down?

BG: That’s right.

Today, you’re always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong, that thing where you’re opening it up and moving things in and out. That’s not good. So, if you have very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in -- just think of it as a log -- put it down and not have those same complexities. And it just sits there and burns for the sixty years, and then it’s done. CA: It’s a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution.

BG: Yeah.

Well, what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there -- there’s a lot less waste under this approach -- then you can actually take that, and put it into another one and burn that. And we start off actually by taking the waste that exists today, that’s sitting in these cooling pools or dry casking by reactor. That’s our fuel to begin with. So, the thing that’s been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you’re reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you’re going through this process. CA: But in your talking to different people around the world about the possibilities here, where is there most interest in actually doing something with this?

BG: Well, we haven’t picked a particular place, and there’s all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that’s called nuclear, so we’ve got a lot of interest, that people from the company have been in Russia, India, China.

I’ve been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. So I’m optimistic. You know the French and Japanese have done some work. This is a variant on something that has been done. It’s an important advance, but it’s like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who’s done a fast reactor, is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live?

BG: Well, we need, for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that’s very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy.

That’s sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. And, you know, Terrapower, if things go well, which is wishing for a lot, could easily meet that. And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies, we need it to be hundreds, who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. And it’s best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. We certainly need one to succeed. CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changes, is this the biggest that you’re aware of out there?

BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing.

It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. You know, we don’t know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that’s a different approach. There’s a liquid type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal, and so, if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation, the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own. CA: If this doesn’t work, then what?

Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? BG: If you get into that situation, it’s like if you’ve been over-eating, and you’re about to have a heart-attack.

Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. There is a line of research on what’s called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. Now, that’s just an insurance policy. You hope you don’t need to do that. Some people say you shouldn’t even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you’ll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. I’m not sure that’s wise, given the importance of the problem, but there’s now the geoengineering discussion about, should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect. CA: Climate skeptics: if you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they’re wrong?

BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps.

The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. Are they saying there’s negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? There are very, very few things that they can even say there’s a chance in a million of those things. The main problem we have here is kind of like AIDS. You make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later. And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later -- and a somewhat uncertain pain thing.

In fact, the IPCC report, that’s not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, okay, that isn’t that big of a deal. The fact is it’s that uncertain part that should move us towards this. But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, okay, I don’t care that it doesn’t put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2, but I guess I’ll accept it because it’s cheaper than what’s come before. (Applause) CA: And so, that would be your response to the Bjorn Lomborg argument, that basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it’s going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, [that] it’s a stupid waste of the Earth’s resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do.

BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece -- say the U.S. should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now -- it’s not that dramatic. It shouldn’t take away from other things. The thing you get into big money on, and this, reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that’s non-economic and you’re trying to fund that. That, to me, mostly is a waste. Unless you’re very close and you’re just funding the learning curve and it’s going to get very cheap. I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. If the trade-off you get into is, let’s make energy super expensive, then the rich can afford that. I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. The disaster is for that two billion. And even Lomborg has changed.

His shtick now is, why isn’t the R&D getting discussed more. He’s still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he’s realized that’s a pretty lonely camp, and so, he’s making the R&D point. And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. The R&D piece, it’s crazy how little it’s funded. CA: Well Bill, I suspect I speak on the behalf of most people here to say, I really hope your wish comes true.

Thank you so much. BG: Thank you.

(Applause)