 Bill Gates was on Fox News Sunday this last weekend. He was there to promote his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. If this interview is anything like the book, Mr. Gates has a deep flaw in his solutions and ideas about the future. It's not his fault. Most people are working under the same assumption. We can just electrify everything and continue business as usual. This is wrong, however. I've seen no evidence that we can generate enough clean electricity to simply switch from fossil fuels to renewables. And I'm completely in favor of using solar, wind, geothermal and other green energy production, but we just can't generate our way out of this crisis. Two years ago, I wrote an essay in response to the Green New Deal called The Low-Tech New Deal. In it, I do the math about solar generation and found that we have to cover the state of New York in solar panels to give us enough power to fuel our energy hungry lives. This is just an illustration, as other energy sources would obviously come into play. But the real problem is an energy generation, but instead it's our energy use. And I encourage you to read that Low-Tech New Deal for more information on that. But today we're going to talk about Bill Gates and his interview on Fox News Sunday. So let's break this down into a few different parts. First, they talk about Texas's power crisis. This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. If the Biden administration is going to try to eradicate fossil fuels in the United States, every state is going to constantly have challenges like what America has seen take place in Texas right now. And government Abbott's ludicrous claim that green energy sources were at fault for the Texas power outage has been thoroughly debunked, and we don't need to get into that here. The problem in this discussion, though, is that everybody involved is simply accepting the idea of long-distance energy generation and transmission as the only way to power a state or community. There is a reliability issue that will have to design the system, including more transmission. You know, Texas over time will want to connect up so that when it does get shorted just, it's able to draw on other parts of the country. Yes, of course. If in our current state of affairs, Texas has been connected with the eastern or western power grids of the U.S. this problem might have been avoided not only because of the available external energy coming into Texas, but also because it would have regulated these companies to be more resilient and fair to their customers. Imagine, however, if long-distance transmission was a secondary backup power source instead of the primary. And this is personal for me. I have family in Texas who are without power and are still boiling their water. So what if instead of having energy plants far away and long-distance transmission lines as the primary source of energy in our grid, we had instead community micro grids tied to independent small and medium-scale production sites. These micro grids could be tied together so that if one community's wind turbine went down, the neighbors might be able to provide the needed energy. In this scenario, the large production plants would only provide backup power. A single U.S. wind turbine, a completely average one of 1.6 megawatts, can produce enough power for 460 homes on a monthly basis according to the USGS. If our little village of Cooksville, where we live, had a wind turbine on the outskirts, we could power all 30 or so homes here plus provide plenty of power for the surrounding countryside. Or we could have 10 acres of solar panels in poorly producing agricultural fields near the village and get the same amount of energy. Now, this is much more energy than what we'd need, which means that when our wind and solar are producing extra, we can transmit that to other communities where it's cloudy or calm. Power companies don't want this idea to take hold because they can make money by controlling the large production plants and the long transmission power lines as a dominant monopoly. If Texas had micro grids, this might have been a different story. Now, of course, one perceived problem with this micro grid and community generation approach is energy storage. But again, decentralization offers a solution. For example, in our home, we have a 10 kilowatt battery and 500 gallon hot water storage unit. If every house in our village had this, we could store 300 kilowatt hours and millions of BTUs for water and space heating. Frankly speaking, turning energy into stored heat in a water tank is much more efficient than saving energy as electrons. But if you consider this as a way to store energy, this distributed system coupled with super efficient wood stove fired by sustainably harvested firewood would provide enough heat and power even here in Wisconsin. Next they get into whether or not climate change exists and whether or not climate change is at fault here and we're not going to go through whether or not climate change is real. It is. But it's worth clarifying the point that Bill Gates tries to make. Well, the change in the wind pattern is allowing those cold fronts to come down from Canada more often. There's a pattern of wind that as you, as it gets warmer, that breaks down. The reason we're getting these extreme cold events in winter, while one might expect more mild conditions due to global warming, is simple. First, conditions on average are more mild. That is the warming and global warming. On average, our monthly temperatures are warmer. But we do get more extreme weather, but it's a short-term event. But that's what sticks in our mind is that extreme short-term cold weather event, not the warmer temperatures overall. So this is kind of a problem of human psychology and it makes it hard for us to understand climate change on a really intuitive level. So here we're getting more arctic air escaping because of warming temperatures. And I'll explain this with an analogy maybe you've experienced. Have you ever been swimming in a lake and you dive down below the top four or so feet of water and you feel that really cold underlying water? Well, you feel a line of demarcation between the warm surface water and the cold deeper water as a thermocline. This is the boundary between two adjacent but different bodies of water. And the reason the temperatures are so drastically different is because they don't mix. Other densities are different. And so this also happens in our atmosphere. The very cold masses of the polar regions were segregated from the warmer southern air because of the difference in density. They couldn't mix. They would hit, but they wouldn't mix. Now, as the arctic warms faster on a relative basis than the sub-polar regions, the temperatures are less different and then they start mixing. And occasionally the barrier between them breaks down and cold air streams into the southern areas. And we get these polar vortexes. So thanks to climate change and the warming arctic, the cold air that is there escapes and gives us colder snaps in the winter even if the average temperature in the winter is higher. So it's not easy to grasp this intuitively. Actually, it's counterintuitive, but it's so often misunderstood. I wanted to spend just one second talking about why. Another thing they talk about is if we change to a green, carbon-neutral economy, won't people lose their jobs? But the reality is that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs, that the coal miners in West Virginia. And the short answer is yes, they will. And I'm tired of politicians and other prominent people trying to soft-pedal this issue. Here's Bill Gates, for example. Things that those workers do will be important. In fact, we're going to have to almost triple the size of the electric grid and build all that transmission. Frankly, I'm surprised because when this happened at another point in history, the capital-driven part of society that is business owners, the government, and other interests were too happy to put people out of work. And now here I'm talking about the Industrial Revolution, where many farmers, weavers, and other cottage industries went under because factories and fossil fuel-driven machines came online. The wealthy and the powerful were glad that people were out of these old jobs because they could work for less money in the factories. One of the first blog posts I wrote as part of the Low Technology Institute was in defense of Luddites, who you probably know about them when anyone talks about somebody who's technophobic. They're called a Luddite, right? Well, the Luddites raged against the changing economy during the Industrial Revolution, not the technology itself, but it was how the technology was changing their society. That was the problem. If we all agree that at some point in the future, fossil fuels shouldn't be part of our way of life, then why are we trying to subsidize jobs of yesterday? The answer is, like so many other problems, money, power, and politics. Now, as our economy must change on a fundamental basis, many of our jobs also have to change. And I argue that many of us would benefit from working 20 to 30 hours per week in our jobs and then spending 10 to 20 hours per week is the other production that we otherwise must outsource to others and pay for, just simply because we don't have the time to do them for ourselves. Some job sectors will be completely eliminated, while others will need more people. Becoming an electrician today, especially one that knows how to work with DC and solar panels, is a safe bet for future job security, but we don't hear about that nearly as much as the coal miner who is now out of a job. And this is not to mention that most coal job losses are due to the fact that large surface mines out west need less manpower to drive these huge machines than the previous underground mines. Production is up, but the job numbers are down, according to Brookings. So it's not the Green Power Revolution that would cause the loss of these fossil fuel jobs. They can decline because of market forces. If it's cheaper to automate, then these companies aren't going to keep people on the job just to keep them on the job. Bill Gates is putting forward a goal of zero missions by 2050. And he's saying that this is the soonest we could possibly get there, as opposed to 2030, like in the Green New Deal. There's no magic date that it's all great until then, and it's terrible once you cross the threshold. It's pretty linear as far as we know. 2050 happens to be the soonest realistic date for the world to change all of these source of missions, which are actually quite broader than most people are aware, because it's got things like steel and cement, not just cars and electricity. Mr. Gates is right in that it's going to be hard, and he does point out correctly that it isn't just transportation and energy production that causes greenhouse gas emissions. He's essentially saying that if we want to keep living as we are right now, it will take almost 30 years to transition our economy to zero emissions. He might be right on that timeline, but his premise is flawed. We can't keep living this way. Waiting 30 years for zero emissions is a death sentence for many species, ecosystems, and human communities, not to mention individuals. If that's the price we have to pay to keep driving, flying, and living in overheated, poorly insulated homes as we are right now, that cost is too high. The hard fact is that unless our way of life fundamentally changes, we can't make the carbon emission changes we want, and that is an unpopular opinion, and I don't hear anyone making that point because it is just so unpopular. We have to accept the fact that the next generation's lives will be fundamentally different than the previous generations. We can choose that to be a proactive shift in our society and our economy away from fossil fuels and emitting gases right now, or we can let the world continue to heat up as we try to maintain a grasp on the business as usual model as Mr. Gates is pushing. Now, Mr. Gates says that he is the imperfect messenger on this issue, and nobody's perfect. We're not perfect, nobody is. But it does make it somewhat problematic the way he frames it, so let's listen. That's absolutely right. I am offsetting my carbon emissions by buying clean aviation fuel and funding carbon capture and funding low-cost housing projects to use electricity instead of natural gas, and so I have been able to eliminate it, and it was amazing to me how expensive that was. That cost of being green, the green premium, we've got to drive that down. So Mr. Gates is freely admitting that he is an imperfect messenger on the green economy because he lives in a large house, or houses. He flies frequently and has other high emission tendencies. He counters this by stating that, well, I pay for it by buying carbon offsets, and it's surprisingly expensive, and I understand his argument that if he pays for the carbon he emits, its ill effects are counterbalanced. I get that mindset, but that's only true from a very narrow point of view, and it's not sustainable or an answer for the large-scale problem that we're facing. As most of us are not able to afford this method, and even if we could, we couldn't pay enough carbon offsets to counteract all of our emissions. If Mr. Gates wants to be a leader, he should model the behavior he wants to see. Mr. Gates goes on to address critics from the environmental movement who think more drastic cuts are needed. He calls net zero emissions by 2030 unrealistic because that approach doesn't reckon with the enormity of the changes necessary. But again, he's arguing for continuing our current way of life without drastic changes to our day-to-day lives, which is either shortsighted or disingenuous. As we'll see here, the only changes he mentions in our daily lives in this interview are climate-driven mass migrations and dealing with increasing natural disasters. How will our daily lives be different? Well, the migration that we saw out of Syria for their civil war, which was somewhat weather-dependent, we're going to have 10 times as much migration because the equatorial areas will become unlivable. You won't be able to farm or go outside during the summer. The wildfires, even the farming productivity in the south of the U.S., the droughts will reduce productivity very dramatically. I'll give Mr. Gates the benefit of the doubt because I have not read his book, but unless he has real concrete steps that individual households and communities must take to fundamentally change their way of life to one that is more resilient, self-sufficient, and completely different from today's energy-intensive way of life, he has misdiagnosed the problem facing us as one of not enough green energy available when the real problem is we're addicted to using too much energy. I'd be glad to speak to Mr. Gates or anybody about this. Please leave your reactions and comments below, but keep in mind that facts, figures, and concrete proposals will win the day. Just sticking your head in the sand and denying the future crisis is not a response, saying, I don't want that to be my future. I'm sorry, there are facts on the ground that just say we have to do something. And so, you know, send me your concrete proposals on how we can keep living the way we do. So my name is Scott Johnson, and I'm from the Low Technology Institute, a 501c3 research organization in order to find ways to houth, clothe, and feed ourselves in a future without fossil fuels. If we had money, we'd put it where our mouth is. So if you'd like to support us, please visit our website, lowtechinstitute.org, and see how you can help us. You'll find all kinds of practical, down-to-earth solutions for you, your family, and your community to build resilience into your everyday lives. Thanks for watching.