Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
So on the demand side [for energy], there have been a variety of policies that globally have been way over $50 billion a year of tax credits, raising the price of electricity through things like renewable portfolio standards, so the total amount of money that's gone into sending a price signal to push up demand versus what would happen without it has been gigantic.
On the supply side, for innovation, you'd say, go look at those R&D budgets, and they haven't moved far for years. In the case of the US - which is the majority of R&D funding across every category you can name: health, energy, whatever - it's been about $5 billion a year from the Department of Energy.
Intermittency [in availability for wind and solar] changes the economics, particularly this requirement that the power company at all times be able to require power. That's large.
We need to get a broader awareness. People say climate change is really bad, but painting that picture of what you're putting at risk.
Now, if you're rich, you can spend a lot of money, Netherlands-style, and reduce that. But Bangladesh or parts of India, like Calcutta, they just simply won't be able to afford that kind of protection.
More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.
The government's ability to select scientists and pick things that are fairly strange, because politicians don't like failures. They're only in office a short term, and many of these things take a long time.
Finally, assuming that many of those are fulfilled, which won't be easy in tight budget times, we're taking the supply side at the basic research level, because that's where government is absolutely fundamental.
Other paths would include making nuclear fission cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it, so that could be scaled up.
The only role other than paying their taxes, whatever those are, the only role for philanthropy broadly - of which the rich should give disproportionately - the more, the better - and I think there is a positive trend in that direction - there are certain risk-taking things, like trying out a new type of charter school or funding a new kind of medicine.
Bangladesh is largely a river delta, and the rising sea level means that when storms come in, the human sanitation is backing up, the ability to farm.
The most important thing was the creation of a... a standard, where hundreds of companies build hardware that can all run the same software.
Philanthropy, although it's tiny compared to the government, it's 2% of the US economy, which is the largest percentage, other than the Middle East.
Finding information is either a software question or a question of how much information is online.