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Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

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Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#11

Post by disabled »

DLA wrote: post #8

Hey Bill and other elites - does this mean no more 20,000 square foot homes and private jets?

Gates’ main house is actually 66,000 square feet.

He apparently has 6 total houses.

See: https://www.velvetropes.com/backstage/bill-gates-house

Anyways, Gates is always preaching about “policy” (The Gates Foundation is about power and getting governments to fund their objectives, ultimately) but never actually sets a good individual example of how to live, like normal citizens.

I mean, it is not coincidental that he is preaching about global warming right after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown, which released an unprecedented amount of methane in to the atmosphere.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#14

Post by disabled »

notriddle wrote: post #13
DLA wrote: post #8

Hey Bill and other elites - does this mean no more 20,000 square foot homes and private jets?

> You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less The headline says 'no.'

The above poster is just suggesting that Bill Gates not be a hypocrite with respect to consuming less.

He consumes way way way more than the average citizen.

I don’t even know why people listen to him.

Shouldn’t we be listening to actual climate scientists in the US government? And not some software CEO who has conflicts of interest? Why are we even platforming this dude and giving him any legitimacy?

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#15

Post by chiefalchemist »

Asking? Of course not. There's no incentive to just stop, and 100x more signals to consume.

Instead, apply of concept of capital gains being taxed less than income to consumption and carbon footprint. It works for the behavior of the rich. I'm sure Bill would agree. It can work for the rest of us in the context of climate change.

p.s. Funny how Bill (and then wife) built a massively excessive home. I guess he asked himself and that didn't work. So now he speaks from experience?

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#16

Post by Gibbon1 »

ryeights wrote: post #3

Implement a carbon tax, and it will happen. The insistence from some that we can just innovate our way out of the climate crisis, when the Industrial Revolution and pursuit of technological expansion for the sake of profit at all costs is what got us into this situation in the first place, is what I find truly “quixotic.” There is no incentive for corporations to improve the climate situation in a meaningful way.

My thinking about carbon taxes is they will just result in political blowback and a lot of the push comes from entities with an interest in the status quo..

Bill gates is right, trying to impoverish people in the developed world would both result in blowback and be a disaster if implemented. I think there is an 80/20 rule with consumption in developed countries. 20% consume 80% of the resources. Getting the 20% to reduce consumption is a won't fix politically. Yet degrowth people think somehow the 80% can reduce their consumption and not go under. Look at the amount of reduction in consumption that triggers a recession, it's 10X less than the shock degrowth people are demanding.

The complicating factor is the upper classes are completely resistant to any sort collective action that benefits lower class people. And they are hellbent to make sure no one ever gets to see a successful example.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#17

Post by sattoshi »

disabled wrote: post #14
notriddle wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less The headline says 'no.'

The above poster is just suggesting that Bill Gates not be a hypocrite with respect to consuming less. He consumes way way way more than the average citizen. I don’t even know why people listen to him. Shouldn’t we be listening to actual climate scientists in the US government? And not some software CEO who has conflicts of interest? Why are we even platforming this dude and giving him any legitimacy?

He spends a lot of money to be heard. Nobody was listening to him until he started throwing millions around to organizations to platform him.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#19

Post by yongjik »

DLA wrote: post #8

Hey Bill and other elites - does this mean no more 20,000 square foot homes and private jets?

I always feel the talks of private jets are missing the point. (Besides, it's always the private jets of Al Gore and Bill Gates that are in question. People never ask about the private jets of BP execs.)

To simplify, let's assume that Bill Gates has a Boeing 747, which burns about 38 pounds of fuel per mile [1]. Distance between New York (JFK) and London (LHR) is 3,440 mile. For a round trip, double that, so we have about 261k pounds, or 118 ton of fuel. Applying jet fuel to CO2 conversion ratio of 3.16 [2], we get about 374 ton of CO2.

If Bill Gates takes this trip every day for a year, we get about 137,000 tons of CO2. Okay, that's a lot! However,

Mankind emitted about 35 billion ton of CO2 in 2020. That's about 66,000 tons per minute. So Bill Gates would have contributed about two minute's worth of global warming in a year.

That's still an extremely large amount for a single person, but the question we should ask is, did Bill Gates's action (such as advocating nuclear power) result in delaying global warming by two minutes? Not one year, not even a day, but just two minutes?

Alternatively, did he speed up mankind's preparation, again, by two minutes?

If the answer to either question is Yes, then I'd argue that it's worth the CO2 spent on it.

Now let's invert the question. What's the justification for people who say "Fuck global warming!" and hop on a trip to Hawaii? Collectively they sustain many more flights per year, and it's not like most of them are doing anything substantial to mitigate AGW.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft

[2] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...

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