Bill Gates offers guidance on what climate technologies he’s looking to fund

Bill Gates joined us at TechCrunch Sessions: Climate 2022 last week to discuss his priorities in terms of investment projects and technological breakthroughs needed to effectively address climate change. Gates provided an updated picture of where we’re at compared to the context in which he wrote and published his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”

Gates started off by providing his thoughts on the relative performance metrics of the world as it faced another global threat — the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic:

Well, the pandemic — it’s very easy. It’s 1,000 times easier to stop things from becoming pandemics than it is to solve climate change. And you have some countries who have less than 10% of the deaths of, say, the U.S. Yeah, so the U.S. was expected to do the best, and we did a terrible job. We didn’t diagnose people early … in the first 100 days we’d let it become widespread. Whereas people like Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, a bunch of exemplars got into action, even though they spend way, way less money on their public health systems.

The framing of the pandemic as a far “easier” challenge to address than climate change would seem to indicate a degree of pessimism about our chances, but Gates then pointed out the progress in certain areas that has occurred since he hosted a site gathering at the 2015 global climate talks in Paris. That led to the formation of Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization founded by Gates to foster climate action in a number of ways, including through its venture subsidiary, Breakthrough Energy Ventures:

If you look at where we were for COP26, the private sector engagement and the recognition that this is not just about the rich countries reducing their emissions, because that’s just the 25% — this is about innovation to get green premiums to zero so that the middle-income countries that are 65% of emissions can actually solve the problem. And so the understanding of what’s necessary — and this is still a field with a lot of naivety, you know, some of these offset things are complete nonsense — so if we keep driving innovation, I have to say the the companies in the Breakthrough Energy ventures portfolio are far further along in taking on some of these tough problems than I expected. So that’s gone incredibly well, and that’s a necessary part of the solution.

Despite progress, Gates admitted that some goals with respect to climate targets are likely already out of reach and cited a need to extend climate activism to geographies where it’s not currently a priority as one top ingredient in achieving further mitigation:

It’s still pretty daunting, and some of the more ambitious goals like the 1.5 C degrees, we’re extremely unlikely to meet that goal, but it’s not a nonlinear problem where if you miss you’re sorry you even played the game, right? This is a a largely linear thing. There’s these deep ironies, which is it’s the countries near the equator that suffer the most, so most climate activism is actually in temperate zones where, yeah, there’s some negative effects, but nothing this century that [will be] super disastrous, and so we do have to activate these countries that are in the tough areas where the the suffering will be pretty dramatic.

In terms of venture investment into climate technologies, Gates pointed out that Breakthrough Energy Ventures has done a lot to catalyze other investments from different venture sources into companies that otherwise might’ve not been targets because of the burden of due diligence and other factors. That could change, however, he cautioned, given what’s going on in the market at large at the moment:

Now that the macroeconomic cycle, stock market cycle, interest rate cycle is changing, probably as rapidly as any time in my lifetime, we’re going to have — like we had in 2001 — where the valuations were a little too high before, and they’ll go to the other extreme. Can we still capitalize other capital into these things? That’s unproven. So we’re gonna go through a winter period of a number of years.

Asked about specific opportunities, however, Gates was fairly confident about the availability of capital for projects that move the needle in certain areas, regardless of prevailing economic headwinds:

If you look at the source of emissions —  industrial, agriculture, land use — there are nascent things that might be able to solve that, but boy, can we use a lot of ideas. We’re seeing today that the Ukraine war is very disastrous where it is, but the knock-on effect is you might have more deaths in Africa than in Ukraine, because they’re a net food importer. So, you know, of all the things that are still a little bit undone … a new green revolution in terms of productivity that makes Africa a net food exporter in the face of population growth, climate change and tricky governance — that we still don’t have. We have a lot of innovation, but still not enough. So industrial and agriculture, particularly to help out Africa. Anybody who has ideas there — I do think, even through this downturn, we will maintain capital, enough capital for very good ideas. So pursue the ideas in those high-impact areas.

You can watch the full video interview with Gates below, which covers the above and other topics, including the state of nuclear power innovation, his thoughts on the crypto craze and Elon Musk’s erratic tweeting.