Editor’s Note: The
following essay MORE ENERGY by Bill Gates appeared in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2016 annual report.
GUEST BLOG--by Bill
Gates--At some point today, you’ll probably do one or all of these things:
Flip a switch for light. Take fresh food from a refrigerator. Turn a dial to
make your home warmer or cooler. Press a button on your laptop to go online.
You probably won’t think twice about any of these actions,
but you will actually be doing something extraordinary. You will be using a
superpower—your access to energy.
Does that sound ridiculous?
Just imagine, for a minute, life without energy.
You don’t have a way to run a laptop, mobile phone, TV, or
video games. You don’t have lights, heat, air conditioning, or even the
Internet to read this letter.
About 1.3 billion people—18 percent of the world’s
population—don’t need to imagine. That’s what life is like for them every day.
You can see this fact for yourself in this photograph of
Africa at night taken from space.
Africa has made extraordinary progress in recent decades. It
is one of the fastest-growing regions of the world with modern cities, hundreds
of millions of mobile phone users, growing Internet access, and a vibrant
middle class.
But as you can see from the areas without lights, that
prosperity has not reached everyone. In fact, of the nearly one billion people
in sub-Saharan Africa, 7 out of every 10 of them live in the dark, without
electricity. The majority of them live in rural areas. You would see the same
problem in Asia. In India alone, more than 300 million people don’t have
electricity.
If you could zoom into one of those dark areas in that photograph,
you might see a scene like this one. This is a student doing her homework by
candlelight.
 |
| A young girl studies by candlelight in Tanzania, 2015 |
I’m always a little stunned when I see photographs like
this. It’s been well over a century since Thomas Edison demonstrated how an
incandescent light bulb could turn night into day. (I’m lucky enough to own one
of his sketches of how he planned to improve his light bulb. It’s dated 1885.)
And yet, there are parts of the world where people are still waiting to enjoy
the benefits of his invention.
If I could have just one wish to help the poorest people, it
would be to find a cheap, clean source of energy to power our world.
You might be wondering, “Aren’t people just trying to stay
healthy and find enough to eat? Isn’t that important too?” Yes, of course it
is, and our foundation is working hard to help them. But energy makes all those
things easier. It means you can run hospitals, light up schools, and use
tractors to grow more food.
Think about the history classes you’re taking. If I had to
sum up history in one sentence it would be: “Life gets better—not for everyone
all the time, but for most people most of the time.” And the reason is energy.
For thousands of years, people burned wood for fuel. Their lives were, by and large,
short and hard. But when we started using coal in the 1800s, life started
getting better a lot faster. Pretty soon we had lights, refrigerators,
skyscrapers, elevators, air conditioning, cars, planes, and all the other
things that make up modern life, from lifesaving medicines and moon landings to
fertilizer and Matt Damon movies. (The Martian was my favorite movie last
year.)
Without access to energy, the poor are stuck in the dark,
denied all of these benefits and opportunities that come with power.
So if we really want to help the world’s poorest families,
we need to find a way to get them cheap, clean energy. Cheap because everyone
must be able to afford it. Clean because it must not emit any carbon
dioxide—which is driving climate change.
I’m sure you have read about climate change and maybe
studied it in school. You might be worried about how it will affect you. The
truth is, the people who will be hit the hardest are the world’s poorest.
Millions of the poorest families work as farmers. Changes in weather often mean
that their crops won’t grow because of too little rain or too much rain. That
sinks them deeper into poverty. That’s particularly unfair because they’re the
least responsible for emitting CO2, which is causing the problem in the first
place.
 |
| A farmer's dried up cropland, Assam, India, 2014 |
Scientists say that to avoid these dramatic long-term
changes to the climate, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80
percent by 2050, and eliminate them entirely by the end of the century.
When I first heard this I was surprised. Can’t we just aim
to cut carbon emissions in half? I asked many scientists. But they all agreed
that wouldn’t be enough. The problem is that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for
decades. Even if we halted carbon emissions tomorrow, the temperature would
still rise because of the carbon that’s already been released. No, we need to
get all the way down to zero.
That’s a huge challenge. In 2015, the world emitted 36
billion tons of carbon dioxide to produce energy. This is a mind-boggling
number. (It’s worth remembering, because it will come in handy. For example,
someone may tell you they know how to remove 100 million tons of carbon per
year. That sounds like a lot, but if you do the math—100 million divided by 36 billion—you’ll
see that they’re talking about 0.3 percent of the problem. Every reduction in
emissions helps, but we still have to work on the other 99.7 percent.)
How can we ever reduce 36 billion tons to
zero?
Whenever I’m confronted with a big problem I turn to my
favorite subject: math. It’s one subject that always came naturally to me, even
in middle school when my grades weren’t that great. Math cuts out the noise and
helps me distill a problem down to its basic elements.
Climate change is an issue that has plenty of noise
surrounding it. There are those who deny it is a problem at all. Others
exaggerate the immediate risks.
What I needed was an equation that would help me understand
how we might get our CO2 down to zero.
Here’s what I came up with:
That might look complicated. It’s not.
On the right side of the equation you have the total amount of carbon
dioxide (CO2) we put in the atmosphere. This is what we need to get to zero.
It’s based on the four factors on the left side of the equation: the world’s
population (P) multiplied by the services (S) used by each person; the energy
(E) needed to provide each of those services; and finally, the carbon dioxide
(C) produced by that energy.
As you learned in math class, any number multiplied by zero
will equal zero. So if we want to get to zero CO2, then we need to get at least
one of the four factors on the left to zero.
Let’s go through them, one by one, and see what we get.
The world’s population (P) is currently 7 billion and
expected to increase to 9 billion by 2050. No chance it’ll be zero.
Next, services. This is everything: food, clothing, heat,
houses, cars, TV, toothbrushes, Elmo dolls, Taylor Swift albums, etc. This is
the number that I was saying earlier needs to go up in poor countries, so
people can have lights, refrigerators, and so on. So (S) can’t be zero, either.
Let’s take a look at (E). That’s the energy needed per
service. There’s some good news here. Fuel-efficient cars, LED light bulbs, and
other inventions are making it possible to use energy more efficiently.
Many people, and you may be one of them, are also changing
their lifestyles to conserve energy. They’re biking and carpooling to save gas,
turning down the heat a couple degrees, adding insulation to their homes. All
of these efforts help cut down on energy use.
Unfortunately, they don’t get us to zero. In fact, most
scientists agree that by 2050 we’ll be using 50 percent more energy than we do
today.
So none of the first three—population, services, and
energy—are getting close to zero. That leaves the final factor (C), the amount
of carbon emitted per each unit of energy.
The majority of the world’s energy, other than hydro and
nuclear, is produced by fossil fuels like coal that emit an overwhelming amount
of CO2. But there’s some good news here, too. New green technologies are
allowing the world to produce more carbon-free energy from solar and wind
power. Maybe you live near a wind farm or have seen solar panels near your
school.
It’s great that these are getting cheaper and more people
are using them. We should use more of them where it makes sense, like in places
where it’s especially sunny or windy. And by installing special new power lines
we could make even more use of solar and wind power.
But to stop climate change and make energy affordable for
everyone, we’re also going to need some new inventions.
Why? Solar and wind power are reliable energy sources so
long as the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. But people still need
dependable energy on cloudy days, at nighttime, and when the air is still. That
means power companies often back up these renewable sources with fossil fuels
like coal or natural gas, which emit greenhouse gases.
It would help, of course, if we had a great system for
storing solar and wind power. But right now, the best storage option is
rechargeable batteries, and they are expensive. Lithium-ion batteries like the
one inside your laptop are still the gold standard. If you wanted to use one to
store enough electricity to run everything in your house for a week, you would
need a huge battery—and it would triple your electric bill.
So we need more powerful, more economical solutions.
In short, we need an energy miracle.
When I say “miracle,” I don’t mean something that’s
impossible. I’ve seen miracles happen before. The personal computer. The
Internet. The polio vaccine. None of them happened by chance. They are the
result of research and development and the human capacity to innovate.
In this case, however, time is not on our side. Every day we
are releasing more and more CO2 into our atmosphere and making our climate
change problem even worse. We need a massive amount of research into thousands
of new ideas—even ones that might sound a little crazy—if we want to get to
zero emissions by the end of this century.
New ways to make solar and wind power available to everyone
around the clock could be one solution. Some of the crazier inventions I’m
excited about are a possible way to use solar energy to produce fuel, much like
plants use sunlight to make food for themselves, and batteries the size of
swimming pools with huge storage capacity.
Many of these ideas won’t work, but that’s okay. Each dead
end will teach us something useful and keep us moving forward. As Thomas Edison
famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve successfully found 10,000
ways that will not work.”
But to find thousands of ways that won’t work, you first
need to try thousands of different ideas. That’s not happening nearly enough.
Governments have a big role to play in sparking new advances, as they have for other scientific research. U.S. government funding was behind breakthrough cancer treatments and the moon landing. If you’re reading this online, you have the government to thank for that too. Research paid for by the U.S. government helped create the Internet.
But energy research and the transition to new energy sources
takes a long time. It took four decades for oil to go from 5 percent of the
world’s energy supply to 25 percent. Today, renewable energy sources like wind
and solar account for less than 5 percent of the world’s energy.
So we need to get started now. I recently helped launch an
effort by more than two dozen private citizens that will complement government
research being done by several countries. It’s all aimed at delivering energy
miracles.
You may be wondering what you can do to help?
First, it’s important for everyone to get educated about
this energy challenge. Many young people are already actively involved in
climate and energy issues and I’m sure they could use more help. Your
generation is one of the most globally minded in history, adept at looking at
our world’s problems beyond national borders. This will be a valuable asset as
we work on global solutions in the decades ahead.
Second, if you’re someone with some crazy-sounding ideas to
solve our energy challenge, the world needs you. Study extra hard in your math
and sciences. You might just have the answer.
The challenge we face is big, perhaps bigger than many
people imagine. But so is the opportunity. If the world can find a source of
cheap, clean energy, it will do more than halt climate change. It will
transform the lives of millions of the poorest families.
I'm so optimistic about the world’s ability to make a
miracle happen that I’m willing to make a prediction. Within the next 15
years—and especially if young people get involved—I expect the world will
discover a clean energy breakthrough that will save our planet and power our
world.
I like to think about what an energy miracle like that would
mean in a slum I once visited in Nigeria. It was home to tens of thousands of
people but there was no electricity. As night fell, no lights flickered on. The
only glow came from open fires lit in metal barrels, where people gathered for
the evening. There was no other light for kids to study by, no easy way to run
a business or power local clinics and hospitals. It was sad to think about all
of the potential in this community that was going untapped.
A cheap, clean source of energy would change everything.
Imagine that.
 |
| Bill and Melinda Gates search for miracles |
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment