Bill Gates: The 2021 60 Minutes interview

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Bill Gates helped usher in the digital revolution at Microsoft, and has spent the decades 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 $2 billion 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? [00:00:51] Speaker 2: Absolutely. The amount of change, new ideas, it's way greater than the pandemic, and it needs a level of cooperation that will be unprecedented. That doesn't sound feasible. No, it's not easy. But hey, we have 30 years, we have more educated people than ever, we have a generation that's speaking out on this topic. 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. [00:01:27] Speaker 1: 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 economy. Of what we can see right now, of us sitting around here, what specifically would be impacted? [00:01:58] Speaker 2: Well, this cement 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. [00:02:10] Speaker 1: With potatoes, you're talking about fertilizer, the irrigation system that's used. [00:02:16] Speaker 2: All the tractors, the transport. [00:02:18] Speaker 1: Trucks that bring them to this restaurant. All that has to change. [00:02:22] Speaker 2: Hey, when you're going to zero, you don't get to skip anything. [00:02:26] Speaker 1: Gates says going to zero means eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions or else. If they wait a hundred years to do this. [00:02:34] Speaker 2: It's way too late. Then the natural ecosystems will have failed. The instability, you know, the migration, you know, those things will get really, really bad well before the end of the century. [00:02:50] Speaker 1: When you're talking about migration, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people trying to move from North Africa to Europe every year. [00:02:59] Speaker 2: 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 what we've experienced in the pandemic. [00:03:12] Speaker 1: 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 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? [00:03:44] Speaker 2: 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. [00:04:02] Speaker 1: 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 2.5 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 CarbonCure. They inject captured carbon dioxide into concrete. [00:04:31] Speaker 2: 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 5 percent, but they have a next generation they can get to 30 percent. [00:04:49] Speaker 1: 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. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Gates has already invested $2 billion 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. [00:05:18] Speaker 2: It kind of blows my mind, you know, what's the cost of making that stuff? [00:05:23] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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 harder to describe. [00:05:40] Speaker 2: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. It's so crazy, it's hard to describe. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Even -- yeah. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: How do you pitch that to investors? WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Well, they find geological formations, and they just pump water down into them. The energy they've used to pump it in, then they can draw that energy back out. So it's a water pressure storage thing, which, you know, when I first saw it, I thought, that can't work. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But you gave money to it? WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah, lots of money. [00:06:07] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Because cows account for around 4 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. [00:06:29] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This company, Nature's Find, is using fungi, and then they turn them into sausage and yogurt. Pretty amazing. [00:06:38] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: When you say fungi, do you mean like a mushroom or a microbe? WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's a microbe. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The microbe was discovered in the ground in a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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. [00:06:57] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This is the yogurt. [00:06:58] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Oh, this is good. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Wow. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I've had like cashew yogurt or oat yogurt. It's sort of along those lines. [00:07:05] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah, with the burgers, they're, you know, like beyond impossible. They're getting close to the real thing, but you can still tell. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Uh-huh. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: These, I'm not sure I could tell. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I'm more of a burger expert than I am a yogurt expert. [00:07:19] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Uh-huh. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Gates never planned to focus on climate change. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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. [00:07:48] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah, so this is the most recent one, which is about clean hydrogen. [00:07:53] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So you're reading thousands of pages every few days on topics. [00:07:58] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah, my reading is key and then asking questions when it doesn't make sense. [00:08:05] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Gates isn't just looking to cut future carbon emissions. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Were you always a big proponent of nuclear? WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In 2008, he founded TerraPower, a company that has redesigned a nuclear reactor. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This is your prototype? [00:09:08] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Exactly. TerraPower's natrium reactor. This is a rendering. We haven't built it yet. But here's the nuclear island right here. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This is the reactor? WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Exactly. [00:09:19] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Gates says TerraPower's reactor is less expensive to build, produces less waste, and is fully automated, reducing the potential for human error. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Gates and Director of Engineering Lindsey Bowles showed us what they say is another key to its safety. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: What is it that we're looking at here? [00:09:36] Speaker 3: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So these individual fuel pins are actually where the uranium fuel is, and that's what generates all the heat in our natrium reactor. [00:09:44] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This is what everybody is worried about? WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yes, exactly. [00:09:47] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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. [00:09:55] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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 TerraPower reactor won't use water to cool down the fuel rods. They plan to use liquid sodium. [00:10:12] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The liquid sodium can absorb a lot more heat, and so we don't have any high pressure inside the reactor. [00:10:21] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In October, the Department of Energy awarded TerraPower $80 million to build one of the first advanced nuclear reactors in the U.S. [00:10:30] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Nuclear power can be done in a way that none of those failures of the past would recur because just the physics of how it's built. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I admit, convincing people of that will be almost as hard as actually building it. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But since it may be necessary to avoid climate change, we shouldn't give up. [00:10:52] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You've been criticized for being a technocrat, saying technology is the only solution for tackling climate change. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: There are other people who say, look, the solution's already there. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's just government policy is what really needs to be focused on. [00:11:06] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I wish that was true. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I wish all this funding of these companies wasn't necessary at all. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: We won't even come close. [00:11:19] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Gates credits young activists for keeping climate change in the headlines, but he knows some consider him an imperfect ally. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Are you the right messenger on this? WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Because you fly private planes a lot, and you're creating a lot of greenhouse gases yourself. [00:11:34] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah, I probably have one of the highest greenhouse gas footprints of anyone on the planet. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's kind of ironic. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: My personal flying alone is gigantic. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Now, I'm spending quite a bit to buy aviation fuel that was made with plants. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You know, I switched to an electric car. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I've used solar panels. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And so I'm offsetting my personal emissions. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Those are called carbon offset. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Right. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, you know, it's costing like $400 a ton. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's like $7 million. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So you're paying $7 million a year to offset your carbon footprint. [00:12:21] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yep. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: 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. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It just seems overwhelming if every aspect of our daily life has to change. [00:12:47] Speaker 2: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It can seem overwhelming. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But you are optimistic. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: There are days when it looks very hard. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: If people think it's easy, they're wrong. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: If people think it's impossible, they're wrong. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's possible. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It's possible. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But it'll be the most amazing thing mankind has ever done. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That's what it has to be. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah. WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Yeah, it's an all-out effort, you know, like a world war, but it's us against greenhouse gases. [00:13:17] Speaker 1: WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Bill Gates' advice on how to combat mistrust in science at 60minutesovertime.com, sponsored by Pfizer.