Bill Gates: The 2021 60 Minutes interview

bill gates helped usher in the digital  revolution at microsoft and has spent the. decade since exploring and investing in innovative  solutions to some of the world's toughest problems. global poverty disease and the coronavirus  pandemic which he spent nearly two billion dollars. on now he's focusing on climate change agreeing  with the overwhelming majority of scientists. who warn of a looming climate disaster the good  news is gates believes it's possible to prevent. a catastrophic rise in temperatures the bad news  he says in the next 30 years we need scientific.

breakthroughs technological innovations and global  cooperation on a scale the world has never seen. the story will continue in a moment. you believe this is the toughest challenge  humanity has ever faced absolutely the amount of. change uh new ideas it's way greater than the  pandemic and it needs a level of cooperation.

that would be unprecedented that doesn't  sound no it's not easy uh but hey 30 years. we have more educated people than ever we have  a generation that's speaking out on this topic. uh and you know i got to participate in the  miracle of the personal computer and the. internet and so yes i have a bias to believe  innovation can do these things he's talking. about innovations in every aspect of modern  life manufacturing agriculture transportation.

because nearly everything we now do releases  earth-warming greenhouse gases mainly carbon. dioxide into the atmosphere he took us to his  favorite burger joint in seattle to explain. you're talking about changing everything in the  economy i mean every aspect yeah the physical of. what we can see right now of us sitting around  here what specifically would be impacted well. this cement uh would be made in a different way  the steel in the building would be different.

you know the meat and the burger is a big  deal these you know all this plastic and paper. potatoes with potatoes you're talking about  fertilizer the irrigation system that's used. all the tractors the transport trucks  that bring them to this restaurant. all that has to change hey when you're going to  zero it you don't get to skip anything gates says. going to zero means eliminating all greenhouse gas  emissions or else if they wait a hundred years to.

do this it's way too late uh then the natural  ecosystems will have failed the instability uh. you know the migration you know those things will  will get really really bad well before the end of. the century when you talk about migration you're  talking about hundreds of thousands of people. trying to move from north africa to europe every  year exactly the syrian war was a 20th of what.

climate migration will look like so the deaths per  year are way 10 times greater than than what we've. experienced in the pandemic in a new book how to  avoid a climate disaster gates outlines all the. solutions he believes we need he says the u.s has  to lead the world getting to zero greenhouse gas. emissions by 2050. he supports president biden's  decision to rejoin the paris climate agreement but. is asking the administration to massively increase  the budget for climate and clean energy research.

to 35 billion dollars a year you've said  that governments need to do the hard stuff. but not just go after the low-hanging  fruit what's low-hanging fruit. passenger cars part of the electric generation  with renewables the things everybody knows about. that's getting almost all the money not the hard  parts which is the industrial piece including the. steel and cement those pieces we've hardly started  to work on no one thinks much about cement and.

steel but making it accounts for 16 percent of all  carbon dioxide emissions and the demand is only. growing the world will add an estimated two and  a half trillion square feet of buildings by 2060. that's the equivalent to putting up another new  york city every month for the next 40 years so one. innovative company gates has been pouring money  into is carbon cure they inject captured carbon. dioxide into concrete what they do is they stick  co2 in here and the cement and they mix them up.

and so you're able to actually get rid  of some co2 by sticking it in the cement. right now they get rid of about five percent but  they have a next generation they can get to 30. percent the carbon has been just injected into  this so it's captured it so it's not going to be. released into the atmosphere that's right gates  has already invested two billion dollars of his. own money on new green technologies and plans  to spend several billion more in 2016 he also.

recruited jeff bezos mike bloomberg and nearly two  dozen other wealthy investors to back a billion. dollar fund called breakthrough energy ventures  making long-term often risky investments in. promising technologies it kind of blows my mind  you know what's the cost of making that stuff. gates regularly consults with the fund's team  of top scientists and entrepreneurs who've so. far invested in 50 companies with cutting-edge  ideas to reduce carbon emissions what's like.

the most far-flung idea you've backed there's  one that's so crazy it's even hard to describe. it's so crazy it's hard to describe even yeah  how do you pitch that to investors they find. geological formations and they just pump water  down into them the energy they've used uh to. pump it in then they can draw that energy back  out so it's it's a water pressure storage thing.

which you know when i first thought i thought  that can't work but but you gave money to it. yeah lots of money because cows account for  around four percent of all greenhouse gases gates. has invested in two companies making plant-based  meat substitutes impossible foods and beyond meat. but farming the vegetables used to make  many meat alternatives emits gases as well. so gates is also backing a company that's  created an entirely new food source. this company nature's find is using fungi  and then they turn them into sausage and.

yogurt pretty amazing when you say fungi do you  mean like a mushroom or a microbe it's a microbe. the microbe was discovered in the ground in  a geyser in yellowstone national park without. soil or fertilizer it can be grown to produce  this nutritional protein that can then be turned. into a variety of foods with a small carbon  footprint this is the yogurt oh this is good.

wow i've had like cashew yogurt or oat yogurt it's  sort of along those lines yeah with the burgers. they're you know like beyond impossible they're  getting close to real thing but you can still tell. these i'm not sure i could tell no i'm more  of a burger expert than i am a yogurt gates. never planned to focus on climate change but while  working in africa with the foundation he started. with his wife melinda in 2000 he came to see just  how vulnerable those in developing countries are.

to the effects of rising temperatures so 15 years  ago gates started educating himself on climate. change bringing scientists and engineers to his  office in seattle for what he calls learning. sessions he also reads voraciously books and  binders full of scientific research yeah so. this is the most recent one which is about clean  hydrogen so you're reading thousands of pages. every few days on topics yeah my reading is is  key and then asking questions when it it doesn't.

make sense gates isn't just looking to cut future  carbon emissions he's also investing in direct air. capture an experimental process to remove existing  co2 from the atmosphere some companies are now. using these giant fans to capture co2 directly  out of the air gates has become one of the world's. largest funders of this kind of technology but of  all his green investments gates has spent the most. time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear  energy arguing it's key to a zero-carbon future.

he says he's a big believer in wind and solar and  thinks it can one day provide up to 80 percent of. the country's electricity but gates insists  unless we discover an effective way to store. and ship wind and solar energy nuclear power will  likely have to do the rest energy from nuclear. plants can be stored so it's available when the  sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. were you always a big proponent of nuclear  in 2008 he founded terrapower a company that.

has redesigned a nuclear reactor this is your  prototype exactly terrapower's naturing reactor. uh this is a rendering we haven't built it  yet but here's the nuclear island right here. this is the reactor exactly gate says  terrapower's reactor is less expensive to build. produces less waste and is fully automated  reducing the potential for human error gates. and director of engineering lindsey boles showed  us what they say is another key to its safety.

what is it that we're looking at here so these  individual fuel pins are actually where the. uranium fuel is and that's what generates all the  heat in our natrium reactor this is what everybody. is worried about yes exactly in a normal reactor  it's water that's flowing past and heating up. and it'll boil and generate a lot of high pressure  that high heat and pressure can cause an explosion. like in chernobyl in 1986 when radioactive  material was spread for thousands of miles but.

gates says the pteropower reactor won't use water  to cool down the fuel rods they plan to use liquid. sodium the liquid sodium can absorb a lot more  heat and so we we don't have any high pressure. inside the reactor in october the department of  energy awarded terror power 80 million dollars to. build one of the first advanced nuclear reactors  in the u.s nuclear power can be done in a way that.

none of those uh failures of the past would  recur because just the physics of how it's built. i admit convincing people of that will be  almost as hard as actually building it but. since it may be necessary to avoid climate change  we shouldn't give up you've been criticized for. being a technocrat saying technology is the only  solution for for tackling climate change there. are other people say look the solution's already  there it's just government policy is what really.

needs to be focused on i wish that was true i  wish all this funding of these companies wasn't. necessary at all without innovation we will not  solve climate change we won't even come close. gates credits young activists for keeping  climate change in the headlines but he knows some. consider him an imperfect ally are you the right  messenger on this because you fly private planes.

a lot and you're creating a lot of greenhouse  gases yourself yeah i'd probably have one of. the highest greenhouse gas footprints  of anyone on the planet you know my my. personal flying uh alone is gigantic now i'm  spending quite a bit uh to buy aviation fuel. uh that was made with plants you know i switched  to an electric car i've used solar panels.

i'm paying a company that actually at a very high  price can pull a bit of carbon out of the air. and stick it underground and so i'm offsetting  my personal emissions those are called carbon. offsets right so you know it's costing like 400 a  ton it's like 7 million dollars so you're paying 7. million a year to offset your carbon footprint yep  he's encouraging others who can afford it to buy. carbon offsets and green products so that what he  calls the green premium the added production costs.

for reducing carbon emissions will go down and  quality of products up driving the innovations. that may get us to zero it just seems overwhelming  if every aspect of our daily life has to change it. can seem overwhelming but you are optimistic yeah  there are days when it looks very hard if people. think it's easy they're wrong if people think  it's impossible they're wrong it's possible it's. possible but it'll be the most amazing thing  mankind has ever done that's what it has to.

be yeah it's an all-out effort you know like a  world war but it's us against greenhouse gases. bill gates advice on how to  combat mistrust in science. at 60 minutesovertime.com sponsored by pfizer.