Gates called climate change the world's most vexing problem, and added that finding a cheap and clean energy source is more important than creating new vaccines and improving farming techniques, causes into which he has invested billion of dollars.
Perhaps the climate change deniers will pay attention to somebody like Bill Gates. After all he is either completely or partially responsible for the computer that people are using to read these very words.
He is also a smart entrepreneur who has made billions creating innovative products and then creating a demand for them. Who better to talk about climate change and help brainstorm ideas about how to address it?
The world must eliminate all of its carbon emissions and cut energy costs in half in order to prevent a climate catastrophe, which will hit the world's poor hardest, he said.
"We have to drive full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline," he said.
Gates spent a significant portion of his speech highlighting nuclear technology that would turn spent uranium -- the 99 percent of uranium rods that aren't burned in current nuclear power plants -- into electricity.
That technology could power the world indefinitely; spent uranium supplies in the U.S. alone could power the country for 100 years, he said.
A "traveling wave reactor" would burn uranium waste slowly, meaning a 60-year supply could be added to a reactor at once and then not touched for decades, he said.
Gates also called for innovation in battery technology.
Now see those are some VERY interesting and innovative ideas, that could have a real positive impact on reducing our need to burn fossil fuels and add their emissions to the greenhouse gases that imperil our planet.
I often think of climate change deniers the way I think about Creationists. The science is too hard for them to understand so instead they feel more comfortable saying it does not exist and replying on faith instead.However like creationists (who have ministers who may very well know that what they say is false but rely on the ignorance of their congregants) the climate change deniers have the Republicans and Fox News to take advantage of their lack of education and to foster their distrust of climate science. (It never ceases to amaze me that the people who say that the biologists and climate scientist are dead wrong, have no compunction about trusting science to heal their sicknesses, keep their planes airborne, and continue to improve their 50 inch flat panel television sets.)
I have always felt that part of the problem is that climate change is not obvious to the casual observer (Like a flat panel television or airplane for instance), so it is easy to confuse those who do not spend the time to research it.
If we ran out of fossil fuel tomorrow, I have little doubt we would see workable alternatives introduced in less than a month. However as long as the gas and oil corporations can still make a profit, and they can afford to throw money at our politicians (Everybody give big shout out to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski), and essentially purchase their own media outlets (Let's all say "hey" to Fox News), then many of our politicians do not have the will to do what is right.
And that is criminal neglect that will have a serious negative impact on our children and our children's children.
It will take more important and influential people like Bill Gates to bravely stand up and speak the truth to the world, before we will see the politicians suckling at the teat of big oil finally release their liplock and work toward a solution to this desperate problem.
