Bill Gates Says Coronavirus Measures are Nothing Compared to What He’s Going to Do to You to Stop Global Warming

National governments have stepped aside and let Bill Gates decide the fate of nations with regards to coronavirus.

There is no reason to believe they won’t do the same with global warming.

BBC News:

Fifty-one billion and zero – the two numbers Bill Gates says you need to know about climate.

Solving climate change would be “the most amazing thing humanity has ever done”, says the billionaire founder of Microsoft.
By comparison, ending the pandemic is “very, very easy”, he claims.

Mr Gates’s new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, is a guide to tackling global warming.

Don’t underestimate the scale of the challenge, he told me when we spoke last week.

“We’ve never made a transition like we’re talking about doing in the next 30 years. There is no precedent for this.”

Fifty-one billion is how many tonnes of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere each year.

Net zero is where we need to get to.

This means cutting emissions to a level where any remaining greenhouse gas releases are balanced out by absorbing an equivalent amount from the atmosphere. One way to do this is by planting trees, which soak up CO2 through their leaves.

The answer, says Mr Gates, will be an innovation effort on a scale the world has never seen before.

This has to start with governments, he argues.

At the moment, the economic system doesn’t price in the real cost of using fossil fuels.

Most users don’t pay anything for the damage to the environment done by pollution from the petrol in their car or the coal or gas that created the electricity in their home.

“Right now, you don’t see the pain you’re causing as you emit carbon dioxide,” is how Mr Gates puts it.

That’s why he says governments have to intervene.

“We need to have price signals to tell the private sector that we want green products,” he says.

That is going to require a huge investment by governments in research and development, Mr Gates argues, as well as support to allow the market for new products and technologies to grow, thereby helping drive down prices.

Yet Mr Gates was famous for arguing that regulation stifled innovation when he was building Microsoft into the multi-billion-dollar behemoth it is now.

Bill Gates is a cruel master.

We are in for a rough ride.