Bill Gates is a huge donor to climate change causes on both a social and personal level. Every year, he writes a $10 million cheque to a corporation to purchase sustainable energy for others to offset his carbon footprint. His money, however, solely goes to climate solutions that have been validated by technology, rather than experimental approaches such as tree planting.
Gates stated today (September 21) at the New York Times Climate Forward Summit in New York City that he is the largest individual client of Climeworks, a firm that develops methods for extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air. In addition to carbon capture, the company handles “a variety of things” for Gates, such as purchasing electric heat pumps and solar panels.
“However, I avoid some of the less proven approaches.” “I don’t plant trees,” Gates remarked onstage with New York Times climate writer David Gelles. Gelles stated that many people assume that if we only plant enough trees, we would be able to solve the climate problem entirely.
“And that’s complete nonsense,” Gates said. “I mean, are we the science people, or are we the idiots? Which one do we want to be?”
After a lengthy awkward period, Gelles joked that he would phone his friend, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and ask him what he thought. As part of his response to the climate catastrophe, Benioff and his wife, Lynne, launched a project in 2020 to plant a trillion trees on Earth by 2030.
Bill Gates advocates technology-driven climate solutions over tree planting
Climate scientists have discovered that just planting a large number of trees will not prevent global warming because trees take a long time to mature and absorb enough carbon to make a difference. An earlier this year study by MIT and the organization Climate Interactive discovered that planting a trillion trees will only avert 0.15 degrees Celsius (0.27 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100.
According to the company’s website, Climeworks’ carbon capture facility can capture up to 4,000 tons of CO2 from the air annually on a 0.42-acre plot of land, which is about 1,000 times more effective than trees on the same plot. Individual consumers can purchase monthly carbon offset plans from Climeworks between $28 to $112. The more you pay, the more CO2 from the air the company will remove in your name.
Bill Gates advocated for a technology-driven strategy to combat climate change. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, his family’s foundation, is a prominent supporter of climate change initiatives. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, his climate-focused investment firm, has backed more than a dozen startups creating clean energy solutions.
“I’m the person who is doing the most on climate in terms of the innovation and how we can square multiple goals,” Gates said.
He emphasized the importance of innovation in government-led climate projects because measures like subsidies and carbon taxes are frequently unviable or insufficient.
“I believe we should spend a lot of money on climate change. I believe we should have very high carbon taxes. But the political realities are such that, without innovation, it’s unlikely, particularly in middle-income countries, that the brute-force approach will be successful,” Bill Gates said.