It was a combo you don’t see every day: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and Intellectual Ventures boss Nathan Myhrvold — live on stage, one time only.
Their topic: The fate of the world, basically.
Specifically, they were talking about climate change. Their panel discussion at the BOAO Forum For Asia in Seattle focused on the double-whammy of carbon emissions and governmental dysfunction, and the potential economic and technological fixes needed to keep our planet from going haywire.
The underlying message: The U.S. and China need to get it together, or we’re screwed. (They were generally more polite about it.)
Here are some of the highlights.
Bill Gates: “I think everybody here would agree that a significant price on carbon, in all the developed markets, would send a strong signal to the innovators. For somebody who’s buying a power plant, it’s ideal to have them have some certainty of what that carbon price will look like over a pretty long period, over the life of that plant. Politicians typically can’t lock something in for a 50-year period. Uncertainty leads to underinvestment in R&D, underinvestment in the new capital equipment. We’ve had some setbacks. Australia had a price on carbon that’s essentially gone.
“I know people think, ‘Oh, if the U.S. does it, it’s not that large of a problem that you’re solving.’ That’s fair. But you do have a real problem in terms of who should go first in trying to send out the right price signals, and fixing the R&D underinvestment that exists in this space. …
“(Carbon pricing) needs to be coupled in a very strong way with getting the masses to care about the environment, and get them to say, ‘OK, I won’t understand the the specifics of my country’s R&D budget, but I know my country got a bad break, and I’m here to speak up that I want us to make these long-term investments.’
“The timeframe problem is really a tough one. We used to think of government as having a longer time frame than the private sector, but in some democracies, including this one, right now it’s like the private sector has got a longer-time horizon than the government does. That doesn’t work — not just for energy.”
Hank Paulson: “I spent a lot of my career managing risk and thinking about insurance. What I’m concerned about are what I call the small but deep holes. The risks that may be 1 in 10, 1 in 20. There’s so much uncertainty, as Bill pointed out, about all these questions.
“I’m not sure we’re going to have the time. I want to avoid the worst outcomes. That’s how I think about this whole problem. How do we avoid the kinds of outcomes that just dramatically and in very adverse ways change the way our children and grandchildren live. Looking at it like that, I’m still hoping for the silver bullet, wanting to see government research dollars, new technologies, but … I don’t think we can afford, any of us, to say we’re going to have another 1 billion, 2 billion people who are going to try to live the way we live in the United States.
Nathan Myhrvold: “If you wanted to find a problem that was almost the worst-case problem for the way we govern the world, it would be climate change. We all share one atmosphere, there’s one global climate. So we’re all in it together. But it’s a long-term problem, whereas most governments are focused on things that are not global but local. And not focused on long term, they’re focused on short term.
“So it’s very challenging to get our forms of governance to be consistent with what the problem is. The worst part of this is that we all tend to put things off if they’re uncomfortable or cause short-term pain.
“But if we put it off until the pain is obvious in climate change, put it off for 50 years or 100 years, we could be in one of those deep holes where it’s very, very bad and there’s no good way out. It’s a challenge for this century for us to come up with means of governance and cooperation that can meet that challenge. Because our current approach isn’t working.
“If we can’t work together on this, it would just be stupid.”
Gates has been outspoken on climate change, and Paulson used the forum in Seattle to launch a new initiative to fund climate change research.
You might ask, what the heck was Myhrvold doing up there? Yes, he’s known for his patent holdings, but the former Microsoft tech chief is also the guy who once proposed pumping liquid sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays enough to cool the Earth — spraying sunscreen into the sky, essentially.
Yeah, so here’s hoping the U.S. and China can figure this thing out.
