2) Bill Gates Just Released The Math Formula That Will Solve Climate Change

Randall Lane : Forbes Staff

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Bill Gates is betting personal billions on investing in clean energy. And now the world's richest man is putting his mouth where his money is.
He devoted his half of the annual letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- a yearly barometer of his philanthropic focus, either in terms of how or where he’s deploying money and attention -- to climate change. More specifically, the need for a clean, renewable energy source.
“I’m amazed how little we spend there compared with defense research, medical research,” Gates tells Forbes.

Especially when the stakes are so big. Gates directed this year’s letter toward high school students, complete with personal details including his early affinity for Superman comic books, his bad grades in middle school and his love of Cocoa Puffs cereal. (Melinda Gates, who focused the second half of the letter on gender equality, prefers Wheat Chex). He punctuates his letter with a simple mathematical equation he concocted that underscores the need for what he calls an “energy miracle”.

P x S x E x C = CO2 (carbon dioxide output).
It’s a neat little formula because it drives home the point: that for all the Paris climate talks and more affordable Teslas, environmental incrementalism is somewhat pointless. In the equation, P = population; S = services used by people; E= the energy needed to power those services; and C equals the carbon dioxide created by that energy. Population is of course trending ever-higher, as are the services people demand, especially in the developing world which has barely scratched the surface in terms of cars and air conditioning and other modern basics. Those two factors swamp progress in energy efficiency. Gates points out that scientists are calling for an 80 percent drop in carbon emissions by 2050 (and a total end by 2100) to stave off the most dramatic effects of climate change, yet even with more efficiency, the growth in population and services means that emissions will instead jump by 50%.
Math 101: the only way to get to zero carbon dioxide output is to drop one of those inputs to zero. Since eliminating any carbon byproduct of energy is preferable to a complete human die-off or a stone age suite of services, that’s the only path. Shaving at the margins simply won’t get the job done; only a moonshot solution that provides unlimited clean energy will stave off environmental (and thus, economic) catastrophe.
“Unless emissions get to zero, you’re just not going to get there,” says Gates.

But Gates offers optimism: a prediction that we’ll solve the riddle within 15 years, “reasoning backwards from how long it takes to implement new scale technology.”
Thus, he’s less focused on tactics like emphasizing natural gas over coal or moderating demand than encouraging any and all “crazy sounding” ideas until one sticks. “The supply side in innovation hasn’t really gone up,” says Gates.
“We likely need something quite dramatic,” Gates continues. “You need a source that’s always available, or you need a huge breakthrough in storage.”
The moment, Gates says, is right now. Federal R+D spending in this area is budgeted to go up 15% in 2016. If that rate can be sustained, that’s a doubling over five years, a figure that’s “great for American leadership.”

As Gates sees it, once government and university researchers can find a potential solution, the private sector will flood the zone to get it to market, and do so quickly (Gates has already recruited the likes Richard Branson, Jack Ma and Mark Zuckerberg for a Breakthrough Energy Coalition to back that up.) ”We built the odds in favor of the right innovations,” says Gates.
In addressing the foundation’s letter to high school students and by only tackling two themes, Gates says that he and Melinda are shooting for a more focused message and a broader audience. And he remains hopeful that an energy moonshot will become a 2016 election topic. “Maybe at some point when there are less presidential candidates.”