Bill Gates, who gave the world Microsoft and got $43 billion in return, is now planning to devote himself full time to philanthropy and hopes to study global warming to see what good his money can do there. Some advice: He should not forget what brought him to this party.
His fortune, he should remember, did not derive from paying heed to establishment wisdom, which could not see past today to tomorrow. And it did not come from a love of bureaucracy — which, in the form of the U.S. Justice Department, did its ill-advised best to cripple Gates’ company through anti-trust action. His fortune was rather the consequence of independent thought, entrepreneurial brass and technological innovation.
Just as Gates skipped around IBM on his way to software success, he should skirt the elite-crowd view summed up in Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” According to reviewers, it would have you believe human-caused warming will usher ocean waters over parts of Florida and Manhattan, instigate widespread disease and, generally speaking, make the Earth a lousy place to take up residence. It’s a wonder Gore did not warn there would be plagues of boils and locusts and deaths of all first-born children.
The truth that is inconvenient for the Gore movie is that science doesn’t come close to justifying his certitude on these predictions, anymore than it tells us that most plans to cap greenhouse gas emissions — such as the Kyoto accords — would do little, if anything, to stop the warming. Instead, the actual execution of a Kyoto-style plan might very well cause a worldwide recession afflicting, among others, the world’s poorest people. Gates told a Newsweek editor that, as he looks to environmental issues among many others, the world’s poorest are his chief concern.
The Earth has in fact been warming, though, and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide may have been a factor, meaning that some action in addition to adaptation may at some point prove useful. On top of still more investigation, the need would be to find cures less threatening than gradually rising temperatures, perhaps answers as innovative, fresh and powerful as the endless uses of personal computers.
We may be closing in on something of that order. A physicist at Columbia University, Klaus Lackner, has envisioned a device that he says would look like a goal post with Venetian blinds. It would in effect grab hold of carbon dioxide in the air and hang onto the carbon instead of allowing it to trap heat. Put a half million of them up, and you just might solve any problem of carbon dioxide making our planet too hot for comfort, he says.
The cost could be affordable, but first there are hurdles to leap, such as separating the carbon from the substance clinging to it and then storing or sequestering it. Lackner voiced confidence on a taped segment of PBS’s Lehrer News Hour, however, that the hurdles will be cleared because of the thousands of competing labs that are investigating what might be done.
Does this sound like a Bill Gates kind of venture or what? He just might make an atmospheric difference if, among the many projects he is contemplating, he does involve himself in global warming and devotes some of his billions to prompting such inventions. Find economic uses for carbon, and they might even have marketplace viability. The imperative for Gates would be for him to stick to the instincts that made him the world’s richest man and not succumb to the pleadings of environmentalists who want to confront climate change with human inhibition instead of human ingenuity.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
