Miliardari contro: Elon Musk e Bill Gates, quasi nemici

Io penso che studiare sia meglio che polemizzare. E che Musk con queste uscite rischia di costruirsi un’immagine sbagliata, da uomo arrogante, oscurando l’imprenditore e l’innovatore geniale che è. Comunque: per discutere nel merito, riproduco l’introduzione del libro che Bill Gates sta per pubblicare. Il tema è come salvare il pianeta: vi convince la sua impostazione?
“Two decades ago, I would never have predicted that one day I would be talking in public about climate change, much less writing a book about it. My background is in software, not climate science, and these days my full-time job is working with my wife, Melinda, at the Gates Foundation, where we are super-focused on global health, development, and U.S. education. I came to focus on climate change in an indirect way—through the problem of energy poverty. In the early 2000s, when our foundation was just starting out, I began traveling to low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia so I could learn more about child mortality, HIV, and the other big problems we were working on. But my mind was not always on diseases. I would fly into major cities, look out the win­dow, and think, Why is it so dark out there? Where are all the lights I’d see if this were New York, Paris, or Beijing? I learned that about a billion people didn’t have reliable access to electricity and that half of them lived in sub-Saharan Africa. (The picture has improved a bit since then; today roughly 860 million people don’t have electricity.) I began to think about how the world could make energy affordable and reliable for the poor. It didn’t make sense for our foundation to take on this huge problem—we needed it to stay focused on its core mission—but I started kick­ing around ideas with some inventor friends of mine. In late 2006 I met with two former Microsoft colleagues who were starting nonprofits focused on energy and climate. They brought along two climate scientists who were well versed in the issues, and the four of them showed me the data connecting greenhouse gas emissions to climate change. I knew that greenhouse gases were making the temperature rise, but I had assumed that there were cyclical variations or other fac­tors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster. And it was hard to accept that as long as humans kept emitting any amount of greenhouse gases, temperatures would keep going up. I went back to the group several times with follow-up questions. Eventually it sank in. The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean. Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things: To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way. The case for zero was, and is, rock solid. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it. The only sensible goal is zero. The bad news: Getting to zero will be really hard. Because every plan to achieve anything starts with a realistic assessment of the barriers that stand in your way…”.