Innovation can be extremely unequal.
Mike Cohen/Getty Images
Bill Gates speaks at New York Times Dealbook in 2019.
“No” is probably not a word the world’s second-richest man is all that accustomed to hearing. Bill Gates, one might imagine, exists in a world of near-limitless possibility. When he throws money at things, they often happen: from an elaborate meal prepared by personal chefs to a revolution in personal computing. Why should the climate crisis be any different?
In the press tour for his new book,
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Gates has presented himself as having put his big engineer brain to work devising the path to solving climate change, shrugging off the fact that the politics haven’t caught up. It’s an audacious title for a book with a relatively limited scope. The core argument is that the world urgently needs to lower what he calls “Green Premiums”: the extra costs associated with no-carbon energy and other technologies as opposed to more po