Part 5: Energy Innovation

Bill Gates continues… “Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game. If tomorrow some other country invented cheap energy with no CO2 output, would that be a bad day or a good day? For anybody who’s reasonable, that would be, like the best day ever. If all you care about is America’s relative position, every day since the end of WWII has really been bad for you. So when somebody says to me, ‘Oh, the Chinese are helping to lower the cost of it, or creating something that emits less CO2′, I say, great! The Chinese are also working on new drugs. When your children get sick, they might be able to take those drugs.”

Jeff Goodell asks,”Let’s say President Obama comes to you and says,’We need to make this energy transition quicker. Bill, you are going to be my energy guy.’ What are the two or three things you would tell him we should do right now, politics aside?” BG’s reply,” The first is a pretty dramatic increase in research and development – about $10 billion a year extra. The US government has an annual budget of 3.5 trillion so that’s not a lot of money percentage wise. To pay for it you could tax energy usage at a very modest level, between one and two percent. That would make it budget neutral.

Then you need a real energy plan. One example: If you’re going to get sun and wind power out of the center of the country, you have to do some amazing transmission stuff out to the coasts. But if off shore wind is going to be gigantic, then the need for transmission is less imperative. Building transmission takes decades,  so you’ve got to really have a plan that considers each option based on the likelihood of success.  You have to write down the probabilities so you can shift resources as the probabilities shift.”