Gates and progress on climate change

I am a massive fan of Bill Gates' book on Climate Change. In my opinion he is rational, he is balanced, and he hasn't lost his fucking mind like so many folks have. The high points are that innovation will be vital and we are making quite a bit of progress when you step back and look at things.

So I'm going to crib out three paragraphs from something he wrote on his blog that is related. If you only have time to read 3 paragraphs go for it. If you have more time read the whole blog post, it's basically a summary of his book. If you REALLY want to get educated on climate change and human response to it then buy his book. It's a good book.

Some people are skeptical when a technology person like me says innovation is the answer. And it’s true that new tools aren’t the only thing we need. But we won’t solve the climate problem without them.

There are two reasons for this. First, we need to eliminate emissions from every sector of the economy. Although some behavior change will help, the world can't achieve its zero-emissions goals without inventing new ways of doing things. For example, the production of concrete and steel alone accounts for around 10 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gases, but right now, we don’t have practical ways to make either one without releasing carbon dioxide.

The second reason is that, in a world with limited resources, innovations allow us to magnify the impact of our efforts. Consider what has happened in public health over the past two decades: We’ve cut in half the number of children who die before the age of five. Although it’s true that global health funding went up, that’s not the only reason for the dramatic change. It’s also because advances in science and policy drove down the cost of vaccines and made it possible to immunize far more children—and because the world spent its limited resources on the most effective ways to save lives.