‘Engineers ought to understand how complex systems can have feedback loops that go awry’
This week I read a bunch about Texas and Bill Gates, so I’m going to touch on both topics today. Let’s talk Bill Gates first bleh but stick with me I promise I’ll get some good burns in.
A big climate story this week was that Bill Gates released a book, called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which is his most extensive engagement in public discourse on the topic to date. In covering climate change funding over the years, I’ve written about Gates’s stances on climate a handful of times, and there is plenty to criticize in his philanthropy; if you want to read an entire book that does just that, I recommend No Such Thing as a Free Gift by Linsey McGoey, a pretty savage takedown. Now this is the “to be sure” part where I would normally say some nice things about all the good stuff Gates has done, but that’s not why you guys are here so let’s just pretend I did that and skip ahead.
So the main climate-specific case against Gates, aside from coming to the issue very late in the game, is that he is 100% fixated on innovation as the solution to the problem. He favors a narrow and overly linear set of climate solutions that lack any political, social, or power analysis. Now, this wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, because after all, new technology is important in the climate fight, but he’s also chronically dismissive of absolutely anything other than his particular set of preferred solutions.
Beyond Gates, this is reflective of a larger problem as more entities of power and wealth begin to engage with climate, but will only tolerate solutions that either reinforce or don’t threaten an economic status quo that has served them well. And because of the power of the people who prefer those solutions, if unchallenged, they’ll receive a disproportionate amount of emphasis.
Just to be clear, I have not read Gates’s book it just came out although goddammit I’m probably going to have to at some point, but I did read several interviews and reviews surrounding its release so that you don’t have to, and I have thoughts on many of his recent statements in the context of his overall track record on the issue so here we go.
To understand the book’s main argument, I thought Rob Meyer at The Atlantic did the best job of summing it up, and it is actually somewhat compelling. Meyer coins it the “Gates Rule: If given a choice of cutting emissions directly or reducing the cost of net-zero technology, the U.S. should choose the latter. American climate policy, in other words, should optimize for cost-reducing innovation, not for direct cuts in carbon pollution.” It’s not that Gates thinks direct cuts in pollution are unimportant, but given the United States’ unique position to create and lower the cost of new technology, that’s where we’ll have the necessary impact. In particular, he is preoccupied with the production of steel and concrete, which it’s true we do not have good carbon-free solutions for yet, but most people think of as kind of a “last mile” climate problem. Steel makes up about 8% of global carbon emissions, and concrete another 8%.
This argument is basically an extension of his past engagement on the issue. I think it’s safe to say that all of Gates’s climate mitigation funding has gone toward technology, mainly though his substantial personal investments in startups working on things like meat substitutes, better batteries, etc. His foundation’s climate-related funding (which until maybe five years ago was mostly non-existent) has gone mainly toward agriculture adaptation with a focus on, you guessed it, new technology to increase production. (Gates’s overall approach to agriculture in developing countries has drawn fierce criticism, including some from me.)
Again, these particular problems aren’t the wrong things to work on. But at the same time, Gates has, for years, gone out of his way to show contempt for climate activists, the divestment movement, the Green New Deal, basically any approach that is not the one he prefers—that is, solving the problem with technological breakthroughs.
He pays some lip service in this new round of interviews to the “passion” of activists, but belittles them in the same breath. As he told the Guardian, “Of the Green New Deal, the proposal backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that raises the goal of carbon neutrality in a decade, he is flatly dismissive. ‘Well, it’s a fairytale. It’s like saying vaccines don’t work – that’s a form of science denialism. Why peddle fantasies to people?’” This is, by the way, a frequent move that climate moderates make—casting those who make stronger demands than they are comfortable with as indistinguishable from the opposition. It is a dirty, dirty move.
Let’s see what else. Gates told Meyer that the best thing young people can do to fight climate change is “studying physics, chemistry, the economy, and the history of the industrial sector.” In TWO interviews, he made the same peevish joke denigrating climate protests:
“Well, what we need is innovation. So if they’re really strategic about what street they cut off, and some poor guy is blocked in traffic and he sits there and says: ‘God, I’ve got to figure out a way to make steel [carbon neutral]. I was being lazy, but now that I’m sitting here in traffic, I’m going to go home tonight and figure how to do this.’ Then it’s a very direct connection between blocking the traffic and solving climate change.” He smiles sarcastically.
“I don’t mean to make fun of it – in a way their passion is valuable. But it’s going to manifest in some ways that aren’t that constructive. So we need to channel that energy in a way that takes 51bn and moves it towards zero.”
He has clear disdain for any strategy that is non-linear or multidimensional, and I would argue, he is intentionally obtuse about the political and social dimensions of climate change. As Bill McKibben points out in his review of the book, Gates mocks the idea that “divesting alone” will solve the problem, as if any divestment activists ever thought that. “They understood that weakening the fossil fuel industry was simply one key part of the job of rapid decarbonization, just like engineering. That is, the activists were thinking multidimensionally, which Gates is so far not.” Further, for all of Gates’s obsession with lowering costs of carbon-free technology, McKibben points out that he seems to actually be behind the curve in understanding how far along much of this technology already is. Carbon-free energy sources like solar power are already on par with or cheaper than dirty competitors, and cost is not the biggest obstacle to lowering emissions.
So why aren’t we moving much faster than we are? That’s because of politics, and this is where Gates really wears blinders. “I think more like an engineer than a political scientist,” he says proudly — but that means he can write an entire book about the “climate disaster” without discussing the role that the fossil fuel industry played, and continues to play, in preventing action.
Political scientist Leah Stokes makes a similar point in her review, noting that “politics, in all its messiness, is the key barrier to progress on climate change. And engineers ought to understand how complex systems can have feedback loops that go awry.” Climate-change denial, she notes, is not mentioned in his book, and “Gates never makes the connection to his fellow billionaires Charles and David Koch, who made their fortune in petrochemicals and have played a key role in manufacturing denial.” Quite the contrary, Gates has had very kind things to say about Charles Koch in the past.
People often, too generously I believe, describe Gates as having a “blind spot” when it comes to politics. That he’s too much of an engineer. But I’d say there’s a bigger problem here, and it’s not limited to the founder of Microsoft. He is steering away from certain dimensions of climate change—either acting like he doesn’t understand them or brushing them aside when they don’t fit into his math problem—because they challenge an economic system that he plays a big role in, and that he has benefited from tremendously.
I suspect that Bill Gates doesn’t engage with the political barriers preventing climate action because those same political barriers protect status quo capitalism in which industry can behave pretty much however as it pleases. He may truly believe that capitalism is the solution to climate change and other social problems, but he also is entirely unwilling to entertain the arguments of people challenging the system that he sits atop.
As more corporations, billionaires, political conservatives, and even moderates become involved in climate action, we’ll continue to see this circling of the wagons. We’ve already seen it in the embrace of carbon dioxide removal by billionaire donors, Republican and moderate Democrats, and the oil industry itself (Brian Kahn wrote a great post on this topic recently). I get a lot of press releases, and I’m constantly getting pitches about some company’s commitment to tree planting or carbon capture technology. Carbon dioxide removal in some form is a component of most pathways to 1.5 degrees. But the idea that these technologies would be sufficient or should even be a main focus is ridiculous. And yet, those interested in protecting the status quo will give them a disproportionate amount of emphasis because they play by the rules of a game that they are winning.
And that is precisely why the power analysis that Gates dismisses is so important. Unless these powerful interests are dismantled, or drastically realigned so they share the rest of the planet’s interests, we will only ever broach a sliver of the work necessary while everything else remains entrenched.
Infrastructure week
OK, now on to Texas, where you may have heard, millions of people lost power, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities as usual, after atypical winter storms pushed their energy infrastructure beyond its limits. Here are a few thoughts that I found to be true and important while reading about this disaster.
This is another step along the way to a new normal in which there is no normal. While the connection is not as solidified and intuitive as climate change’s connection to fires, drought, heat waves, and some storms, there’s a growing body of evidence that extreme winter weather is connected to rapid warming in the Arctic. As Emily Atkins put it, “the climate is drunk again.”
Texas’s isolated, unregulated energy grid made it more vulnerable. There were many factors across every energy source that contributed to the massive outages. But one issue is that Texas is “the only state in the continental US where the grid is almost entirely independent from neighboring states, making it more difficult to import power in case of an emergency.” Why, you may be asking? To dodge federal regulations.
State deregulation was also a factor. Not only have unregulated energy markets not lowered prices for customers, they also run on slim, necessarily competitive margins. As a result, “without the guaranteed customers that come with a regulated market, investment in the sector has stagnated; since deregulation, the state’s overall power-generating capacity has not kept pace with growing demand (pdf).”
This kind of thing will keep happening, and not just in Texas. As extremes continue and more of our stuff becomes necessarily reliant on electricity, power grids will struggle. Setting aside Texas’s unique missteps, it’s shortsighted and also just gross to find satisfaction in infrastructure failures in a state whose politics you don’t agree with. California has had its share of blackouts, after all. Everyone’s number will come up, and the crises will be cascading, as the one in Texas is.
As one environmental engineer put it, “Grids cannot weather anything that comes at them,” Grubert says. “We need to think about this from a justice perspective, and make sure people aren’t dying because they don’t have access to energy.” That means, in addition to improving more centralized, capital-I infrastructure, we can look to places like Puerto Rico, and how they’re working to establish more nimble, green energy micro-grids, and establishing mutual aid networks that can respond faster than authorities.
Links
- Of the City of Boston’s $2.1 billion in private contracts during the Walsh administration, just 1.2% went to Black- and Latino-owned firms. Advocates have filed a federal complaint over discrimination.
- Jessica Valenti points out that it’s not the pandemic forcing women out of the workforce; it’s fathers who don’t share the burden of domestic work.
- Two women in Florida dressed up like grandmas to try to get the vaccine. In another case, a wealthy Canadian couple tried to sneak vaccine doses meant for Indigenous elders.
- Men are more skeptical of COVID, masks, and vaccines, and that is especially true of men trying to “project masculinity,” according to research from Dan Cassino who is a friend of mine from college and also an excellent cook.
- Tons of fresh water and forests that are less prone to wildfire could attract millions to the Great Lakes during climate change.
- A lot of people are hitting the pandemic wall right now. Our fight or flight stress systems have been overloaded for months and are burning out, leading to emotional exhaustion and difficulty dealing with even little problems that accumulate.
- I loved this panel discussion that reappraises the nu metal genre. Whether you are a closeted fan of these bands or you take joy in shit talking about them (I’m in the latter category, although System of a Down and Deftones whip ass), there’s some super insightful stuff in here about male emotion in rock, whiteness in metal, and why we denigrate certain genres and subcultures.luke oneil @lukeoneil47My dentist Staind won’t stop emailing me February 18th 202119 Retweets316 Likes
Super-Link
One article I wanted to call special attention to is from Jessica Kutz at High Country News, a nonprofit outlet that does amazing work covering the West. In “The fight for an equitable energy economy for the Navajo Nation,” Kutz profiles Nicole Horseherder, a Diné activist who has been fighting the coal industry on Black Mesa for many years. A big focus is the recent closure of the Navajo Generating Station, but the article gets into the damage extractive industry has done to the nation’s water supply, how coal has been a big part of the Navajo economy and identity since the 70s, and the push to now build new energy infrastructure that actually serves the Navajo Nation.
I especially like the focus on the desire to not merely replicate the extractive relationship between the Navajo and US economies, this time with renewables, but to actually break colonial patterns. Here’s a really good part :
Many residents of the Navajo Nation still lack electricity in their homes, but for decades their coal made the lights on the Las Vegas Strip visible from space. While the tribes’ water was depleted to slurry coal, the energy their land produced powered the Central Arizona Project, an extensive canal system, which used the electricity to move water from the Colorado River down to Phoenix and Tucson. Development was booming outside the reservation, but families like the Horseherders hauled water from community wells at chapter houses miles away to care for their homes and animals.
Listening
Maybe everybody is already talking about The Weather Station, but I have been listening a lot lately and would go so far as to say that her latest record Ignorance, has to be the best music made to date that is explicitly about climate change. What it does really well is explore the topic as it relates to her life and emotions, avoiding the peril of being overly literal or maudlin. I do love one particularly direct line in Robber, a song that is about the oil industry’s climate disinformation campaign: “Permission by laws, permission of banks / White table cloth dinners, convention centers / It was all done real carefully.” Far more than a polemic though it’s just a really beautiful record.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/M_BRoP1yqjo?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0
Watching
You’re the Worst. Aya Cash forever.
What a smorgasbord of an issue!
Not a lot of progress on the radiator/pet bed drama, aka the ongoing tensions in the corner of the office we ironically refer to as the “cuddle corner,” because all three pets always wants to cozy up there without actually getting close to one another. Everyone hates the cat, the cat wants to be left alone, one dog wants to cuddle with the other, and the other dog is terrified of everything, so it’s a real delicate balance. To be clear, there is an abundance of resources available to all parties involved—three beds, up to five blankets, a radiator, a rotating cast of toys—but as always it’s the distribution of the resources that cause tension.
I mentioned last week that I tried to put up a cardboard wall between two of the pet beds and everyone hated it, and that there’s a real lesson in there. My friend and family member by law Josh pointed out that it could be a children’s book about how we build community, not walls, which is so true. But I would also make one addendum to the lesson of this book, which is that sometimes building community means getting close to those you do not even particularly like.
But you know what. I DO like you people and I welcome you to cozy up in this cuddle corner anytime, and just to be clear I mean virtually not in a creepy way this is only a metaphor.
Tate