Not content with having founded Microsoft, which made him for nearly twenty years the richest man in the world, Bill Gates became above all, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created with his wife, a philanthropist who flies to the aid of poverty in the world and promotes access to healthcare for the most disadvantaged.
While he has been in the sights of conspirators since the Covid-19 health crisis, the entrepreneur with the look of an eternal teenager, by publishing his book
Climate: How to avoid a disaster *
, expresses himself with a new cap , that of climate defender.
A legitimacy - relative - acquired by launching five years ago Breakthrough Energy, an investment fund dedicated to financing green energies, which counts among its many investors… Jeff Bedos, founder of Amazon.
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The billionaire's approach, who
"pleads guilty"
to his private jet flights, is very pragmatic.
Its most original proposal lies in the use of its concept of “green premium”, the price differential between a polluting practice and its “clean” alternative.
According to him, it would be necessary to implement as a priority the existing solutions for which this differential is the weakest and to concentrate the research and development in the countries where it is the highest.
Even if the countries excelling in innovation export their technologies to those in the South.
"This would avoid debating whether each nation is doing its part to prevent climate disaster."
Because notwithstanding the obstacles, undeniable, far from him the idea of restraining emerging countries in their development.
An approach at odds with the UN
An approach at odds with the UN, which reasons above all in terms of commitments by country.
To achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement by 2050, global greenhouse gas emissions should drop by half by 2030 according to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ).
Nothing unrealistic for Bill Gates, who however raises the question of the cost of the transition, whether to innovate in transport (starting with biofuels), production (such as research on the manufacture of carbon-free plastic ) or electricity (in particular its storage).
To eliminate the 51 billion tons of CO2 equivalents emitted each year in the world, the author estimates this cost at 5,100 billion per year, based on a price per ton of CO2 that he ultimately estimates at 100 dollars.
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Because “innovating also means developing new visions, business models, logistics chains, markets and policies”
, believes, however liberal he may be, the billionaire, who expects strong incentives from the public authorities.
It is not insignificant that half of his chapter devoted to cultivation and breeding evokes emissions linked to the consumption of meat, he who has invested in the artificial meat start-ups Beyond Meat and Impossible Food.
We doubt that “the activists” - to whom this book is particularly dedicated - appreciate this discourse as a whole, which presents nuclear power and carbon sequestration as clean energies.
As for the "yellow vests", Bill Gates does not fail to remind them that a liter of gasoline costs less in the United States than a liter of orange juice or Charles Shaw wine ...
* Climate: how to avoid a disaster
, Bill Gates, Flammarion Editions, 384 pages, 22.90 euros.
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