Solar, wind energy isn’t enough to battle climate change: Bill Gates

Everyone knows that climate change is a major problem, so does billionaire Bill Gates. However, he believes that the current approaches to combat it aren’t just enough and are completely ineffective.

In a recent interview with Axios, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that he believes that the current approach for fighting climate change is ineffective and dangerous. He said that many people look at renewables as the solutions for Earth’s climate change, when actually they are just a tiny piece of the solution.

Gates claimed that the focus on solar and wind is as ‘dangerous’ as the belief that we can solve the climate change issue without making any sort of trade-offs. Gates informed about his pie chart showing the causes of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, reported Futurism.

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The philanthropist said that many people just focus on electricity, which is just one slice of the pie, when they should look at it as a whole. “A lot of people think renewable energy, wind and solar, has gotten a lot cheaper, isn’t that it? Well, electricity is only a quarter of the problem. In fact, we’ve got to solve the entire 100 percent.

“You know, unless somebody has the pie in their mind that electricity’s 25%, agriculture’s 24%, transport’s 14%, unless they start with that, we’re not really talking about the same problem,” said Gates.

He said that manufacturing and building too produce greenhouse gases, contributing to 21% and 6% respectively in the pie chart along with 10% other sources. Gates said, “We’re very far away from getting all these sources down to zero, which is what we have to do to solve this problem," said Gates.

Gates said that if the world is going to have any hope of avoiding a climate catastrophe, people need to change much more than their electricity source.

Since the past few years, Gates has been a crusader for climate change and has started many initiatives under the same issue. The Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation has zeroed in on climate change philanthropy, and also Gates supports a $1 billion private fund for helping entrepreneurs launch clean energy firms, as per Geek Wire.