Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game. If tomorrow some other country invented cheap energy with no CO2 output, would that be a bad day or a good day? For anybody who’s reasonable, that would be, like, the best day ever. If all you care about is America’s relative position, every day since the end of World War II has really been bad for you. So when somebody says to me, “Oh, the Chinese are helping to lower the cost of it, or creating something that emits less CO2,” I say, “Great.” The Chinese are also working on new drugs. When your children get sick, they might be able to take those drugs. [emphasis mine]
I always assumed Gates wasn’t a Real American, and his denial of our true, exceptional position as Number One country forever and ever, Amen, thank you Jesus, is just another example.
That whole interview is worth reading. Gates doesn’t have any special insight into climate change or energy policy, but he clearly and unemotionally articulates a set of facts about energy and climate change that would cause the average conservative to have an apoplectic fit. I was struck reading it how much of conservative politics are based on denial and its kissing cousin, exceptionalism.
(via)
master c
His wife has really brought out the best in him.
Chyron HR
Yeah but does his MP3 player look like a condom packet? NO.
me
I’m going to burn my Windows CDs now. AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!
BH
Gates doesn’t have any special insight into climate change or energy policy?
Hmmm…
Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!
Chris
Worth reading especially to all the morons who bawled and threw tantrums because Obama’s supposedly selling out our relative position to India.
BR
The thing I want to hear from Gates is an acknowledgment that technological innovation isn’t going to resolve peak oil, and that growth has ended. Because until he comes to that realization, he’s only slightly less in denial than your run-of-the-mill wingnut.
salacious crumb
cmon we all knew Gates was a secret Bin Laden supporter. time to start boycotting to Microsoft Office products. after all they do contain those calligraphic Mooslim Sans Serif fonts. time to alert the Tea Partiers to call their Congressmen to remove MS Office from Congress
sherifffruitfly
Sure, on Gates’ somewhat moronic notion of “relative position” (which, to be fair, probably can be ascribed to a large portion of the American people).
A slightly less moronic version of the notion seems reasonable to me, however; call it the “lottery ticket version”:
Some lucky dog (i.e. country) is gonna win it (i.e. discover/invent cheap energy) – so why not us??? Of course, luck greatly prefers those who actually buy a ticket (i.e. invest significantly in cheap-energy-discovering-activities). So, partially counterfactually, it’s large and largely missed opportunity we as a country are passing up.
RalfW
What a one-world-government America-hating commie he is!
Oh, wait, he’s also a rapacious monopolist capitalist billionaire.
I’m so confused!
Napoleon
It makes me want to cry that all indications are that the two richest guys in this country, and not only are they number one and two but number three can barely see them in the distance, are by all indications liberals, but they do not fund liberal political causes like the Koch Brothers, Coors, Gallos, etc do.
kay
I don’t know anything about him, but I watched an interview with him and he said he was “lucky”. He meant “rather than particularly talented”. The aspiring MBA who asked him the question seemed surprised. hah! NOT what she was looking for.
Successful people in the US never say that. They attribute every success to themselves. To hear them talk, you’d think they were all born orphans in a sharecropper’s shack, and didn’t benefit at all from anything that existed when they arrived.
It was completely refreshing. He accepts reality. He was given things that were unearned, right at the outset, and he’s grateful.
I almost fell off my chair.
BR
@Napoleon:
Gates isn’t a liberal by any stretch. I think he voted for Bush. But he’s a nerd and is fact-oriented, and as we know reality has a well known liberal bias.
Punchy
Why does Gates care about climate change? He can afford the 1200 air conditioners needed to stay cool in 2015. Hell, he can just buy the air conditioner company.
BR
OT: mistermix – did you see Janet Napolitano’s response about the TSA bullshit?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111506797.html
Ridiculous. And of course Obama will get tagged with this too.
Steve
Back in the 1990s, Paul Krugman wrote a fascinating paper arguing that concerns about international competitiveness are almost entirely overblown. Even after 15 years of globalization, I don’t think he would change his mind.
Gates is certainly right as well. Of course, I would love to see us beat China to that CO2 innovation so we can be the market leader and guarantee a whole lot of new American jobs. But if China gets there first, it’s not as though things will actually get worse for us; they will still get better.
Jeff
Let’s call conservative “exceptionalism” what it really is–
jingoism.
Exceptionalism can have a positive face, if it means living up to a set of ideals that are identified with our country
for instance, the Declaration of Independence, or Jeffersonian
democracy. Where it becomes pernicious is when it becomes an excuse for living down to our basest impulses in the name of our ideals.
Steve
@Napoleon: Liberal billionaires who support liberal causes are engaging in philanthropy. Conservative billionaires who support conservative causes are either making an investment or protecting one. There’s somewhat more urgency on the conservative side because there is a measurable payoff.
Jeff
@Punchy: I dunno,
maybe he wants to live in a world where he doesn’t have to buy 1200 airconditioners.
p.a.
Is a belief in American exceptionalism an example of American exceptionalism? Did the British Parliament have a committee on un-British activity? (flossing, perhaps?) (oh-back a generation or two, the British working class could floss with their fingers ;- P ) Were there un-Canadian activities- impoliteness? etc…
water balloon
It was becasue of Bill Gates that I was able to understand Glenn Beck.
About a year ago, Gates gave a speech about development in Africa. He talked about better medications and family planning and such. Glenn Beck spent an hour on his radio show accusing him of being a fabian socialist who wanted to institute death panels. What he was saying about what Gates said didn’t match what Gates actually said, but because he kept repeating “listen to his words!” he’s able to convince his audience that he’s telling the truth.
He does this all the time. He pretend a quote means something that it clearly doesn’t, and then pats himself on the back for getting his subjects to damn themselves with their own words.
liberal
@Steve:
This is exactly the difference.
I think Soros and (Lewis?) that guy who started Progressive Insurance are exceptions, but by and large centrist/liberal tycoons tend to support charity, and right-wing ones tend to (relatively, at least) support agitprop that will help them keep their ill-gotten gains.
liberal
This is incoherent talking from a man who built his entire wealth on sucking economic rent out of the economy.
Sure, drugs could be discovered anywhere. That’s not the question. The question is, rather, are people who are going to want the drugs going to pay exorbitant rents for them, as they do now? If so, where are the rents going to go?
liberal
@Steve:
Depends on who the “nation” is. Certainly “globalization” has resulted in downward pressure on income in many occupations.
Wouldn’t be so bad, except that rent collectors aren’t forced to compete. They’re still free to suck the blood out of the rest of us.
mistermix
@BH: By “no special insight” I mean that he’s articulating a very standard interpretation of climate change and its relationship to energy policy, and he’s a realist about the amount of carbon we should be emitting: zero.
Napoleon
@BR:
I would love to see a link to where he said that. He has been careful to never say anything on politics as far as I can tell although every time he opens his mouth on a subject where you can discern whether he as a general world view/thinking process that would help you determine his predisposition he appears liberal. On top of that his dad, who works for him now, had come out clearly on the side of “liberal” solutions to certain issues (he even penned op-eds on why the estate tax should not be touched, even though his family would be the biggest beneficiaries of the change in the country).
Napoleon
@Steve:
That is why I used the phrase “liberal political causes”.
Napoleon
@liberal:
Peter Lewis, and it was something like his granddad who started it. That said at least I live in the village that is home to Progressive Insurance (their corporate gym is our village fitness center) so at least I can take comfort that much of the tax dollars that keep the roads in good shape, etc aren’t coming from someone like the Kochs.
Dennis SGMM
If it doesn’t show up as a positive in next quarter’s earnings statement then it’s not going to happen in America. I’d bet that most American energy companies devote immensely more resources to getting tax breaks and eluding pollution controls than they do to funding research.
Steve
@Napoleon: I guess I wasn’t clear. When rich liberals donate, they hope to receive an indirect benefit at best from making the world a better place. Rich conservatives expect to see a direct payoff from electing conservative politicians. That’s why conservatives have more urgency to spend their money on politics.
azlib
Gates does not really care who invents a low cost carbon free energy system (if such a thing is even possible). He knows that the companies that will profit from it are not likely to be the original inventor. His business is proof of that. Microsoft has never been an innovation leader in Computer Science. They did commoditize and market products very well. In some cases they did it in violation of ant-trust laws, but that is a different story.
The whole notion that we have to invent everything first to be competitive in a global economy is a ridiculous and ultimately self-defeating bit of hubris.
Napoleon
@Steve:
I think you are right as to motivation, but in my opinion the motivation is misplaced (which of course goes beyond what you were covering).
Bill Gates spending $10m on domestic politics that push univeral healthcare and the public option could easily yield health benefits way bigger then you could buy with putting $10m into, say, free clinics, yet they don’t do that, even thought the indirect benefit could easily be larger. I suspect it is because they do not want to “dirty” their hands with politics and second suffer the PR blowback from the corporate media.
El Cid
It’s a nice fantasy to imagine the right going after Gates so strongly and viciously that he would become the next monster conspiratorial master of all money lord Great Satan like Soros, but it won’t happen.
PeakVT
Gates is advocating the sensible, small-c conservative approach. However, I think he and others that advocate an innovation-dependent strategy underestimate the challenge of creating large amounts of energy from new sources before the world’s current sources go into serious decline. That’s why there needs to be strong pushes on both the generation and conservation fronts. Right now both efforts are rather feeble, and big-C Conservatives (who are better described as reactionaries) are opposed to anything that sounds like conservation, so even less is likely to get done over the next 2 years. As you can see, the US has quite a bit of room to conserve without reducing it’s citizens’ quality of life.
Chris
I read an interview of Harrison Ford a few years ago where he said the same thing – that the only way he’d managed to get the career he had was through “luck. Bags and fucking bags of it.” The only other factor he mentioned was perseverance, but he was quite clear that he could never have become a rich star without simple luck.
No surprise that rich people with that degree of honesty turn out to be liberal or moderate.
J
Gates’ refreshing statement is directly contrary to the gospel according to (St.) Thomas Friedman, according to which, as I read it, people can’t and shouldn’t be concerned about the well being of their fellow citizens or descendants (let alone anyone else in the world), but can and should be moved by the fear of losing out in competition with China.
The Republic of Stupidity
And it would appear that denial and exceptionalism got carried away whilst roaring drunk one night and produced one of the ugliest babies you’ve ever seen – the Tea Party…
Further proof that cousins should never marry…
jcricket
@Chris:
It doesn’t have to be this way. In other countries where the conservative party isn’t bat-shit insane you can imagine lots of sane people being conservatives.
But in this country it basically means you have to hate the poor, the brown, the gay, the immigrants – and believe that magical unicorns will spew money out their poopers when taxes are cut to zero.
In Sweden the conservatives are arguing, for example, that the top tax rate should be dropped from 55 to 50% (or similar) – but only because the surplus continues to grow, unemployment is reasonable, there’s no debt to pay down and social spending’s already quite high. I’d be happy to have that debate.
Or in France, the conservatives (much pilloried) are arguing that retirement age should be moved up a little, or the extra-pension benefits rail workers get should be reduced to the merely generous pension benefits regular gov’t workers get. I’d be happy to have that debate.
It goes on and on. I’d be happy to have a reasonable debate about whether we should pay for public art, or whether bus-rapid-transit or light rail is the right addition to road funding, whether single-payer or the Swiss-model is better, or whether 50 or 45% is the right millionaires tax bracket. Instead it’s all about mooslem terr’ists, taxes can never go up, gub-mint waste and SOZIALIST takeovers of healthcare.
Is it any surprise anyone with half a brain, or more importantly, those with more brains than most of us choose to avoid Republicans like the plague?
gwangung
@Napoleon: Meh. They spend billions on international health care. They spend millions in domestic reproductive health issues. By any stretch of the imagination, their charitable dollars have been for liberal causes, and have been for 25 years.
They may not be the causes you want them to spend it on, but that’s getting to be more than a little presumptious.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Chris:
Paul Newman and William Shatner have said the same thing…
I have to admit, thought…
One of my all-time favorite quotes, and I attribute it to Branch Rickey (could have originated elsewhere…) is:
Martin
Gates also suports raising taxes on the wealthy in order to fix the deficit, so yeah it’s just a matter of time before James O’Keefe is inviting Gates over to the dildo boat.
Martin
@The Republic of Stupidity: Louis Pasteur, but most Americans think it was Edna Mode in The Incredibles. You’re riding well ahead of the curve crediting Rickey, though.
Chris
@jcricket:
I vote in France and voted UMP (center right, Sarkozy’s party) in the last election – haven’t decided about 2012 yet. Objectively, I’d say, I’m not even left wing. What I want back is the post-WW2 status quo in which left wing parties agreed to support the free market and right wing parties agreed to support the welfare state.
In other countries, where that agreement still holds, I’m happy to have conversations with the right (on economics at least).
Over here, where the right wing party has committed itself to sinking the welfare state, and is also batshit insane and completely full of shit on top of that, I’m just not interested.
El Cid
@Martin: I propose “dildo boat” as a new tag.
Paris
“Gates doesn’t have any special insight into” anything and never has. He’s as visionary as the Village Idiots. I will grant his usefulness as pisser off of the conservatards.
kay
@Chris:
Well, he sort of ticked off what he started with, in his oddly high-pitched and droning voice.
I think he gets that he was provided with this set of existing “benefits” which to me goes to an acknowledgment that someone paid for all that, and it wasn’t him.
I really think that’s the key to being a conservative. You have to somehow convince yourself that you were born, and a whole country and infrastructure just sprang up that second, and then it disappears when you personally no longer need it.
DaddyJ
I’m glad that Mr. Gates is expressing these opinions, but it seems a bit ironic. I’d characterize Microsoft as the most negatively “exceptionalist” tech company of the last 20 years.
Alwhite
one thing that seriously scares me is that most people do not really understand how different the world will be for us when America is recognized as having been supplanted as the world leader. Its like not recognizing the advantages of white privilege; if you don’t see it you have no idea what it would be like to live without it.
Its tough living in America’s twilight but not as bad as it is going to get. It will be made much worse by the people who refuse to admit it is happening.
stormhit
@DaddyJ:
There’s like 7 or 8 of this type of comment in this thread. They’re all equally laughable and ridiculous.
Alwhite
@stormhit:
Thats true! Mr Gates is a true genius – he stole another’s work, pawned it off on a desperate corporation with the barb well hidden & when the hook was set reeled in the big bucks through unethical, anti-competitive steps that would have made John D & Carnegie blush.
He then used the huge bundles of cash generated to buy up actual innovators or derail competitors.
How could anyone ever comment that small & floppy is not a technology marvel?
gene108
I have not idea why people think Gates-Buffet-Soros-etc. are liberal. They are practical people, who see the problems a lack of investment and fiscal irresponsibility by the government will continue to cause.
daveX99
As a zealous GNU/Linux & Open Source advocate, my default position is to hate anything Bill Gates does or says.
The quote you posted is interesting, though. And impressive. However, I’m suffering some cognitive dissonance while recalling how Microsoft operated with BG in charge.
Try rewriting that quote, but replace ‘US’ with ‘MS’, and you see my problem. Gates was pretty cutthroat in the PC & software market. Seems that maybe now that he doesn’t have such a direct financial stake in who innovates what, he fan afford to be magnanimous.
If he’s changed, then great – better late than never. I just hope that the righty business folk for whom Gates is like unto a god will be swayed.
jcricket
@Chris: Well, I think you’re sort of proving my point. In France there is a “conservative” (not right wing) party that isn’t bat-shit insane (Sarkozy’s party). Same with Germany, Sweden, elsewhere.
Yes, disturbingly in each of these countries there seems to be an animated right-wing shaped much like the US – xenophobic, racist & diametrically opposed to the welfare state.
I guess the future of these countries depends on whether those groups grow and they end up with a party containing everyone to the left of Atilla the Hun and the “right wing party” – or there truly are two parties representing “left of center” and “right of center” with the right-wingers a fringe force.
You can see the results in America where a dominant political party is taken over by nutjobs.