Bill Gates, thank you for speaking with us. You've always been a problem solver. Personal computers, fighting tropical diseases. Now you're working to solve climate change. What's the biggest challenge facing you in that fight?
Well, climate change is very unjust because most of the suffering will be the poor, particularly who have to farm to get enough food, and when their crop fails, they suffer disease and malnutrition. So the speed with which this needs to be done is very daunting. How fast do we need to move?
Well, we've set ambitious goals, trying to get to zero by 2050. Um... Some countries are on board and making progress with that, but when you have global problems, it's tough to get everyone, not just every country, but every sector of emissions to move quickly. We're here in Dubai, which is obviously an oil country.
The president of COP28 is the CEO of one of the largest oil companies in the world. I know that you have actually said in the past... that you'd welcome anybody to the table, whether they're an activist or even an oil company.
What do you make, then, of this comp being set here in Dubai? Well, I think they're doing a very strong job of hosting this, which is a complex thing to do. Over time, we, through carbon taxes and by innovating on the clean side, we want to out-compete all oil use.
Yes. You know, if there was a country that didn't buy oil and had zero emissions, great, let's have the conference there. And that country, you know, doesn't exist.
So, you know, I think this meeting is an important event. I think there'll be lots of collaborations that come out of this. For an activist...
Is it an opportunity or is it something that's holding back negotiations, having oil companies more at the center of the process? I mean... I mean, when we're doing meetings about clean steel, clean cement, the location we're in or the wealth that created the economic success here, that's not influencing this. I mean, we're here to get carbon emissions to zero as fast as we can. I want to ask you about why you're here at COP28 in Dubai.
I think a lot of us associate you with these whiz-bang innovations, but that's not the case. That's not exactly the case here, right? Well, I consider seeds that can deal with high temperature or seeds that are more productive. It's pretty whiz-bang stuff. So the Gates Foundation is very involved in adaptation, and that's how I saw that climate was a big thing, is that the farmers in these poor countries were having their crops fail, and that was leading to malnutrition and even more...
childhood death. So it's through that lens that I feel the urgency. And what exactly will you be working on when it comes to agriculture? What's the biggest problem that needs solving?
Well, if we can make these crops still thrive, despite the higher temperatures and the droughts that will take place, then we can continue the upward path of human development that we've been on. You know, it's important that we lift people out of poverty because that's when you live in a house that can have air conditioning and you have a savings account. so that if you have a bad harvest, you're not starving because of that. And we owe it to these developing countries to minimize the impacts and to help them adapt.
How do you innovate when it comes to agriculture? You said that seeds are whiz-bang to you. What does that mean?
How can we change something that seems so fundamental to adapt to these rising temperatures that we're seeing? Well, in the 1960s and 70s... as the Asian populations grew, people worried about widespread starvation. And fortunately, because this CG system that does the seed work came up with far more productive varieties, what was called the Green Revolution.
In fact, calories per person in Asia went up during that time frame. And so it was not without some challenges, but that was kind of a miracle. Now we need to take a broader set of crops, including the ones that are used in Africa, and we need to deal with the challenge. That the weather is tougher for farming. It's an outdoor activity.
Most of it doesn't have irrigation. And so that's where the most suffering from climate will be unless we improve the inputs, including the seeds. What sort of human face on that problem? I know you've actually visited some small farmers in rural areas. What have they told you?
How are they being affected by climate change? Yeah, so I was out in rural Kenya, and they were using these drought tolerance systems. crops, a drought tolerant maze that the foundation was involved in. But that woman actually was getting most of her income from the chicken she was raising.
And so by taking the genetics of the chicken, the very very high productivity ones that are in the temperate zone and cross breeding with the chickens that can deal with the heat, she was getting a variety where she was selling the eggs, selling the meat and thriving. And so that was a case where it was empowering women, it was improving nutrition and made her climate resilient. How do you now take the problem of agriculture being affected by climate change? We're seeing droughts.
We're seeing famines. How do you ramp up the solutions to that? Where will you be looking to put your resources? Well, the... CG System is this great organization, not well known, that does the seed work.
And the Gates Foundation is the biggest funder of that work, and we're encouraging others, you know, if you care about seed work, about climate, if you care about nutrition, the impact of a dollar that goes in is pretty amazing because you get millions of farmers each benefiting from the work you did. And it's not just the seeds. You also want to get them weather information, you know, so that they have know when to plant. You want advice, you know, when they run into problems.
So all the different things that raise agricultural productivity, even in the face of climate. And I know here in Dubai. There are some big numbers involved with what you're announcing, a $200 million pledge to reach 500 million farmers by the end of the decade. Talk about the scale that we're talking about.
Well, crops like maize, wheat, rice, every improvement you make for disease resistance there has a global impact. There are crops like some of the beans. sorghum, cassava, that are more important for Africa. And so they've been kind of ignored to date.
So the extra resources for the CG system allows them to go after a much broader set of crops than were ever advanced during the first green revolution. We're at COP28. That means there have been 27 previous climate conferences.
And this is really the first time that world leaders are coming together to focus on food, to focus on agriculture. adaptation to focus on the issues facing small farmers. Why do you think it's taken so long? Well, I think a lot of people hoped that the mitigation could go fast enough that we wouldn't have to think about adaptation.
And adaptation is more complex. In a mitigation, you see the tons emitted and you see, okay, what's the cost to get rid of those tons? And, you know, we know the errors of emissions and we need innovations in every one of those.
For adaptation, it's forest fires, it's flooding, but overwhelmingly the outdoor activity that's most affected is farming because most people don't realize the poorest in the world are subsistence farmers. And you talk about adaptation, there's this interesting argument to be made, isn't there, that, oh, well, if you're adapting to climate change, you're throwing in the towel. You're saying that, well, hey, this is going to happen. There's not much we can do about it.
Let's prepare for the climate. of the future. Where do you come down on that argument?
Well, I'm putting billions into accelerating the mitigation efforts. So we need more innovation. We need to go faster on that.
But even the best case will still involve enough warming. We're already seeing the old seeds failing. And that's tragic because the people we're talking about had no role. in the carbon submissions. Africa's like 3% of overall emissions, and yet that's where the negative impacts will be the greatest.
I want to ask you just in general about innovation. So much of what you do. When it comes to climate change, is there a danger of relying too much on innovation?
Looking and hoping for technologies to come online in five years, a decade, two decades? Does that mean we lose sight of what we need to get done right now? now? Well, certain technologies like wind and solar, we should be deploying those even faster.
You know, we've got to improve the grids. We have to figure out the reliability. And so we need to go full speed ahead on that. Just because the next generation or something else will come along shouldn't relieve us of full speed deployment, including things like electric cars that, at least at the high end of the range, aren't hugely more expensive.
For the person who parks on the street, okay, we're still not there, but time is definitely on our side in that one. So implementation of what we've done is really important. we have today, full speed. In many areas like steel and cement, we don't have an economic solution.
And just raising the price of everything at a time when people are experiencing inflation, you know, if we're not smart about that, we're going to get a lot of pushback. You know, we're seeing that a little bit in political debates. So how do you square the need to go fast and the limit on what people are willing to spend.
And that's where innovation comes in. I know you're not a politician, at least not yet. Do you think, though, about politics? And you mentioned it. We're often, it seems, one election away from the climate agenda of a country doing a 180. Does that worry you?
Certainly, I wish that parties would compete on how to solve climate, not on whether it's... say, a priority or not. But climate change is political in a lot of countries. It's becoming political. And because many of these investments are like 20-and 30-year investments, if you really get the idea that, okay, 50% of the time we don't care, that really would hurt the climate movement.
And so communicating about the challenge, communicating about the people who are suffering, Just like we do with malaria and TB and vaccines, bringing it home to people that generosity in this area, whether it's the R&D or mitigation or adaptation, that's incumbent upon us. We care about other humans, and we need to hear about the impacts that we're having on them. You've contributed billions of dollars to climate innovations, but a new study shows the world's richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than the...
poorest 66%. What responsibility do you think the super rich have to act in a sustainable way as we see so many of these climate impacts falling on the backs of the world's whole? Yeah, so, you know, I spend about $9 million a year selling, I'm buying sustainable aviation fuel to cancel out my footprint. I wouldn't claim in any way... you know, that means I can leave the problem alone because I should use my skills and money to drive innovation, you know, so that this problem doesn't just get solved for my emissions, it gets solved for everyone's emissions.
You know, I hope more people of wealth get involved in this, just like, you know, I hope they get involved in philanthropy in general and global health. You know, I do think those who are the luckiest and I'm I'm certainly in that group. We owe a lot to the society that created that framework.
We should have a long-term view of how we make a contribution. The situation right now, we're hearing headlines. We're hearing from the UN Secretary General that it's getting dire, that we're running out of time, we're running out of carbon that we can put into the atmosphere. You recently said, though, there's more reason to be optimistic than people...
realize? Well, the human condition, you know, continues to improve. You know, the headlines, of course, accurately talk about things that are going wrong.
But, you know, we now have half as many children dying every year. It was over 10 million at the turn of the century. Now it's down below 5 million.
And so we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that as we meet these challenges, you know, we did create God be to to buy vaccines. We did create global funds to buy bed nets to reduce malaria deaths. And so we should be doing more.
The idea of helping the poor countries, reducing inequity, you know, I'm always impatient that we're not doing enough there. But people shouldn't lose sight of the fact that in the climate area and in the health area, the human condition can continue to improve. What's the biggest thing that gives you hope right now that we can... do this, that we can keep global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius?
Well 1.5 is not likely to be achieved. I don't think so. No. The reduction you need for that is quite dramatic.
But the extreme scenarios like 4 degrees, fortunately because of the changes, that's off the table. So wherever we end up, the less warming the better. and scaling these things up, it's replacing most of our physical economy.
So I've often said this is one of the hardest things we'll ever do. The rich countries have to lead by example and get their emissions down quickly. And with innovation, that becomes possible. Bill Gates, thank you for giving us some hope.
Thank you very much. Thank you.