Two Bills and Climate Discourse
Whatever the motivation, elbowing teammates makes the game harder to win.
Midway through his N.Y. Times review of Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which calls the book “underwhelming,” Bill McKibben wishes that Mr. Gates could have found the time to talk to Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford University. Mr. Gates, it appears, postures as a geek but is not up on the latest technology.
Actually, however, as Mr. Gates is outlining themes in chapter 2, he notes “another argument you often hear [is that] … Between solar, wind power, hydropower we’re good …. Chapters 4 through 8 explain why I don’t buy that notion.” The text is italicized for emphasis, and no one familiar with Professor Jacobson’s work would mistake the reference to the “Wind, Water and Solar (WWS)” mantra under which the Professor asserts existing technology can solve the crisis. Mr. McKibben not only overlooked this key passage; in reading said chapters 4 through 8 he appears to have missed that Mr. Gates is answering Professor Jacobson, and respectfully disagrees. Mr. McKibben is thus unable to engage on these issues. This is unfortunate. Both men care about the planet’s future. Debating issues openly would enlighten readers of the Times and, possibly, advance the cause.
Bill Gates is a complex figure. Growing up in a suburban neighborhood, by high school he and his friend Paul Allen were in demand as programmers. He attended Harvard, dropped out, started a business with Allen. Between garnering speeding tickets and causing mischief with construction equipment after hours, he helped create the personal computer industry. Whatever your feelings about Microsoft, he has a clear record as an engineer and a manager. He is also a billionaire.
Mr. McKibben grew up in a suburban neighborhood, attended Harvard and graduated. After starting his career in New York City, he discovered nature, moved to the Adirondacks, and has produced books which combine a grasp of environmental science, winningly earnest personal perspectives, deep philosophy and moral fervor. His work increasingly questions the role of capitalism in the climate crisis, and has grown polemical, sometimes belligerently so. He does not like billionaires. He is, perhaps, not the best choice to write a thoughtful review of Gates’ book, but his heart is in the right place.
The two men have potential points of agreement, but a gulf separates them. This gulf says much about how we think about problems facing our society and discuss (or fail to discuss) policy solutions. It is a story of democracy in action — or perhaps not.
McKibben begins the review with a sly ad hominem: “First things first — much respect to Bill Gates for his membership in the select club of ultrabillionaires [sic] not actively attempting to flee Earth and colonize Mars,” not a compliment so much as a reminder that we are, after all, talking about one of those people. The tone is genial enough, mentioning Gates’ “usually endearing geekiness” and the “identical grins” displayed by Gates and his son in a photo. But then he turns: “Gates — who must have easy access to the greatest experts the world can provide — is surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts, and he’s worse at interpreting the deeper and more critical aspects of the global warming dilemma.”
McKibben misinterprets Gates’ ideas, even when he thinks they agree: “Gates correctly understands the basic challenge, which is to ‘get to zero’ as soon as we can.” This is, in fact, not what Gates thinks. Gates thinks that because the science says we need to get to net zero completely by 2050, we therefore must proceed not so much quickly as thoroughly and reliably. Success metrics should track structural progress and investments, how well we are laying the foundations for eliminating all sources of emissions (including electricity, but also challenging sources such as steel and concrete).
So if you want a measuring stick for which countries are making progress on climate change and which ones aren’t, don’t simply look for the ones that are reducing their emissions. Look for the ones that are setting themselves up to get to zero. Their emissions might not be changing much now, but they deserve credit for getting on the right path.
It is a commonplace among project managers that you should plan for the “longest pole in the tent.” Completion of a project requires tackling its most challenging components, not running up flashy quick wins. Gates’ stated goal is net zero by 2050; McKibben hears a need to make “huge progress in the next 10 years,” with any changes after that as just “mopping up” (here he alludes to Professor Jacobson). McKibben thinks the goal is “do as much as possible by 2030”; Gates says explicitly that “making reductions by 2030 the wrong way might actually prevent us from ever getting to zero.”
As evidence that Gates is not “geeky” enough, McKibben claims Gates underappreciates how cheap renewable energy has become, citing the Carbon Tracker Institute and “the analyst Ramez Naan.” Despite a name that sounds vaguely technical, CTI is a financial advocacy group, not a science body. Through coarse-grained analysis of “sunk assets” owned by fossil fuel companies, combined with projections of lower future prices, they encourage investors to divest fossil fuel stocks. Their work is not particularly geeky. Nor is it new — Mr. McKibben started singing their praises in Rolling Stone in 2012.
Funded partially by financier-environmentalist Jeremy Grantham, CTI has produced brilliant financial guerilla work. But unsuspecting readers of McKibben’s review might think some obvious science has been overlooked — not the case. CTI doesn’t do science. They do financial activism.
And McKibben’s claim “Carbon Tracker Initiative explained last year, building new sun-and wind-power facilities is already, or soon will be, cheaper even than operating existing coal-fired power” needs qualification. A similar study by Bloomberg Financial concluded that new solar parks or wind farms are “competitive with existing coal or gas in countries that represent 46% of the world’s population.” New solar is cheaper in China, India, and some European countries. But in the US and the rest of North America, new gas still costs less.
In any event, falling solar costs are hardly “technical.” Nor are they lost on Gates: “It’s amazing how much the costs of solar and wind power have dropped in the past decade: Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020 and the price of a full solar system went down by 11 percent in 2019 alone.” Nonetheless, McKibben feels the need to lecture: “as the analyst Ramez Naam pointed out last spring, the price of solar power has dropped astonishingly in the last decade.” Is “astonishing” really so much stronger than “amazing”?
More fundamentally, Mr. McKibben’s impatience with details leads him to misinterpret Gates’ central concept, Green Premiums, “the difference in cost between doing something in a way that produces greenhouse gases and doing the same thing without the emissions.” These are an adoption metric: make green solutions affordable, and people will use them. But McKibben thinks that identifying Green Premiums for solar and wind betrays a lack of enthusiasm.
This misunderstanding is persistent. McKibben wrote in a blog months after the Times review “Bill Gates, in his recent bestseller on energy and climate, laments the ‘green premium’ that must be paid for clean energy.” Gates does no such thing. Green Premiums are not lamentable; they measure progress. A high Green Premium raises the priority for action. Gates is fully committed to renewables: “every path to zero in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for … between now and 2050 we have to build them much faster — on the order of 5 to 10 times faster — than we’re doing right now.”
If solar cells and wind turbines have gotten so inexpensive, why is adoption taking so long? Mr. McKibben looks at the low unit prices and assumes special-interest conspiracies. Mr. Gates examines broader end-to-end renewable implementation and concludes more is required to bring total costs down.
Making renewables fully affordable requires, first, a revamped grid capable of smoothing bumps in solar and wind generation, a point Mr. Gates makes at length in Chapter 4. Agreement comes from Ramez Naam — Mr. McKibben’s chosen expert — who urges “large-scale grids to integrate these [intermittent] resources.” Without transmission infrastructure, rollout of renewables is costly and unreliable. Breakthroughs are coming, true enough. A project linking Arizona to Washington State will go live in 2024, 17 years after its initial conception. This is good news but illustrates how issues of readiness linger.
Chapter 4 of Gates’ book also addresses challenges related to storage. Battery prices are falling, but requirements are frequently underestimated. Solutions need to address not only intraday intermittency (the usual scenario) but also backup storage for outages (more challenging) and intra-seasonal intermittency (quite challenging indeed). McKibben’s only reaction, again: prices are falling, so anything less than instant adoption indicates an industry conspiracy.
As for chapters 5, 6 and 7 — the remainder of Gates’ response to Professor Jacobson — Mr. McKibben offers no reaction. Mr. Gates identifies opportunities to reduce emissions from steel, plastics and concrete manufacture; from agriculture, deforestation, food waste (which accounts for 3.3 billion tons of emissions per year); from transportation. According to the first pages of Gates’ book, these areas account for 73% of emissions. “Getting to zero by 2050” requires addressing all of them. None of this, apparently, interests Mr. McKibben. His review displays no awareness of the remainder of the book.
How can this be? Would Mr. McKibben use a book review as a platform for rehashing his own ideas and dissing a potential ally? Such internecine feuds happen. McKibben himself has been attacked: Michael Moore, a true master of ad hominem, produced a documentary called Planet of the Humans that branded McKibben an environmentalist profiteer.
Responding in Rolling Stone, McKibben made two points: the attacks were dishonorable, and dividing the movement was wrong. The first point inspired particular passion:
“The filmmakers didn’t just engage in bad journalism (though they surely did), they acted in bad faith. They didn’t just behave dishonestly (though they surely did), they behaved dishonorably. I’m aware that in our current salty era those words may sound mild, but in my lexicon they are the strongest possible epithets.”
It is hard to believe that the author of these words would behave dishonestly now.
I prefer to believe otherwise: McKibben and Gates have frames of reference so different they can’t connect. Attacking Gates — a fellow climate advocate — disrupts unified action on the issue, but McKibben is not being intentionally spiteful or competitive. In a complex landscape, he can’t assimilate a point of view that doesn’t match his own instincts. And he is distracted by a desire to combine climate action with class politics.
What worldviews filter environmentalist perceptions? In his book about two leading environmentalists of the 20th century, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, Christopher C. Mann offers one framework:
I think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets — Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness …. Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an overarching order that should not casually be disturbed.
Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize for his work starting the Green Revolution is the Wizard in Mann’s chronicle. William Vogt, whose 1948 book The Road to Survival was arguably the foundation of the modern environmental movement and inarguably the forerunner of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, exemplifies the Prophet. Wizards seek better ways to support our lifestyle; Prophets hope we can repent our excesses.
Gates sees through a Wizardly prism. He explicitly names Borlaug as a hero, and speaks of “breakthroughs” and “innovations.” McKibben is less comfortable with the label Prophet, but it fits. Reviewing Mann’s book, McKibben wishes the Prophet standard-bearer were someone less quirky than Vogt — indicating McKibben’s team loyalty. McKibben quibbles with the dichotomy, noting that solar panels could either be Prophet-like (rooftop solar, enabling freedom, independence, small communities) or Wizard-like (large scale solar plants). But when he discusses solar, McKibben almost always means the residential rooftop variety, lauding the freedom from utilities and corporate greed it promises ordinary citizens.
McKibben views the climate crisis as a morality play. There are good actors who care about the planet and bad actors driven by greed. The solution is for the good actors to engage in political activism that exposes and vanquishes the bad actors. Again from his blog:
That’s why we need to pay attention to the only other piece of good news … And that’s been the growth of movements to take on the fossil fuel industry and push for change. If those keep growing — if enough of us divest and boycott and vote and march and go to jail — we may be able to push our politicians and our banks hard enough that they actually let us benefit from the remarkable fall in the price of renewable energy. Activists and engineers are often very different kinds of people — but their mostly unconscious alliance offers the only hope of even beginning to catch up with the runaway pace of global warming.
So if you’re a solar engineer working to drop the price of power ten percent a year, don’t you dare leave the lab — the rest of us will chip in to get you pizza and caffeine so you can keep on working. But if you’re not a solar engineer, then see you in the streets.
McKibben’s vision requires climate technology to be simple — trivial, even — to emphasize that moral failure is to blame. Technical processes are opaque; engineers turn some crank, and cheaper solar panels emerge. Feed the boys pizza and the process accelerates. Lower the cost, and implementation follows automatically, after cadres of activists overcome recalcitrant, greedy bankers and utility managers.
(Snarky aside: most engineers lowering the price of solar panels work in China. The pizza may cost more than McKibben thinks.)
McKibben wrote The End of Nature — a gorgeous book — in the aftermath of James Hansen’s Senate testimony in 1988. This episode can be seen as another morality play: a heroic scientist defying the inertia and resistance of the bureaucracy in which he works. McKibben certainly views the story this way.
But in Chris Mann’s re-telling, another interesting figure emerges: Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico. Domenici is an unlikely hero. During his six terms in the Senate, he earned mostly negative reviews from environmental groups. He shows up late, admits he hasn’t done the pre-reading, and seems not onboard with the program:
Thinking about the implications … Senator Pete Domenici, Republican from New Mexico, recoiled. Nobody, he told the hearing, will “move in areas such as this until we either have a disaster or we have absolute concrete proof. And even when we have that, it seems that we need a game plan of some type.” And he asked the panel, “Have any of you put forth a concrete proposal which I assume would involve both further investigations and a course of action?” The answer he was clearly looking for was “yes” — followed by specified steps to reach an explicit target, which could then be evaluated for feasibility. But that was not what he got.
Domenici raises two issues reflecting a businessperson’s approach (rather than an activist’s). The first is adoption. Raising awareness alone is insufficient. What will make people act? The second is solution-orientation. Knowledge workers do not elevate issues to management without having answers in mind, or at least next steps. Not morality, exactly — this is business etiquette. It is bad manners to raise a problem and then say “here, you figure it out.” Rather than a tale of good versus evil, the Senator looked for problem-solving, and a plan.
Gates’ book operates within this milieu. In a 2019 interview, New York magazine’s David Wallace-Wells asked Gates what “a meaningful solution to the challenge [of climate mitigation] looks like.” Gates’ reply:
There’s a long answer to that. I would like to help educate people on what a plan really means. A plan involves looking at all the sources, electricity, transport, industry, buildings, and land use/agriculture and really saying, “Okay, what are the possible paths that get you to these dramatic reductions, and therefore what are the missing inventions?” Fortunately, there’s not any one path. …I want to help educate people because I have not seen anything that’s worthy of the word plan ….
30 years after Domenici’s comments, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster reads like a “top-down” business strategy, a high-level plan. It defines scope and objectives, identifies key issues and looks to kick off deliberations that are collaborative, constructive, incremental and highly inclusive — knowledge workers will recognize the genre.
Business culture is driven by talk. A manager who thinks a document needs more work will say “this needs socialization.” More discussion produces better plans — and participants feel engaged to realize them. Gates’ conclusion reflects this:
My hope is that we can shift the conversation by sharing the facts with the people in our lives — our family members, friends, and leaders. And not just the facts that tell us why we need to act, but also those that show us the actions that will do the most good. One of my goals in writing this book is to spark more of these conversations.
Professor Jacobson, by contrast, takes a “bottoms-up” approach. His work is remarkably detailed, but narrowly prescribes a single solution, based on tight constraints (no nuclear, only three technologies). This approach is useful for political activism. Jacobson proposes a non-impossible technology mix, then says only “political and social will” is missing — a smooth handoff to someone looking to start a movement (Jacobson has advised Bernie Sanders). Followers are asked to agitate for the plan, not to help improve it.
However, this style leaves little flexibility for tradeoffs, creativity, or indeed discussion, and the Professor’s responses to challenges have sometimes been brittle. In 2017, a group of 21 scientists raised issues as part of peer review. Professor Jacobson sued them and the journal that published their criticism for $10 million. When it became apparent that the suit would be litigated, he dropped it. He complained the objections required him to respond to questions from reporters, taking him away from his work. This is a weakness of “bottoms-up” stabs at solution: a small group of secret-keepers own the vision, a heavy burden.
Meanwhile, McKibben’s style has grown increasingly belligerent since 2008 or so, when he “realized we were in a fight, not a discussion.” Personal attacks — Rex Tillerson is “the most reckless man in America” — help galvanize activists and whip up support for political candidates (McKibben has written for Bernie Sanders). At the same time, McKibben also merged his climate activism with views on post-capitalist economics and social inequality. For those of like mind, this amplifies his message. Unfortunately, it also leaves less leeway for making common cause with others. While McKibben’s latest book Falter includes some passages that recall his early earnestness and lyric appreciation of nature, it is dominated overall by scornful denunciations of rich technology magnates, their greed and outsized leverage. His dismissive Times review of Gates’ book fits this mold.
Gates is not blameless. Claiming to be “an engineer not a political scientist,” he nonetheless begins his book belittling stock divestitures (then explaining that, in the end, he sold his fossil fuel stocks anyway). Unfortunately, divestiture is McKibben’s pet project. In the Times, McKibben complained that “activists are barely mentioned” in Gates’ book. This in turn is unfair — the book is dedicated to activists and scientists. But McKibben already feels slighted and so perhaps in no mood to absorb the rest of the book.
The result is discourse that leads nowhere. In a pickup basketball game, when teammates throw elbows fighting for a rebound, someone will yell “same team!” Someone should do that here. Even after the successful passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, climate advocates have continued jostling each other, in ways that may undermine the bill’s effectiveness. Our Madisonian democracy uniquely demands discussion and compromise, but in the past 60 years our game has deteriorated — we’ve gotten worse at managing pluralism and getting along. Ad hominems, no matter how nobly intended, threaten the process.
In a complex world, we mostly cope as Justice Potter Stewart did, relying on intuition when we cannot provide precise definitions. We have gaps in our ability to construct rational worldviews; we plug them with pragmatic intuitions.
But perhaps it is incumbent on us to reflect, occasionally at least, on the bounds of our perspectives, the assumptions that limit us, where our intuitions might mask simple bigotry. Reading billionaire Bill Gates’ book, McKibben, ever the Sunday school teacher, sees a camel who cannot pass the eye of a needle. With a little tolerance and imagination — qualities so much in evidence in the best of McKibben’s work — perhaps he might see a servant entrusted with many talents, investing rather than burying them, believing optimistically that such faith will be rewarded.
Instead, we have the poetics of scorn and division on display in the Times review. Which is unfortunate. Some mutual support might produce dialog. There is much on which McKibben and Gates agree, and much they could learn from each other. Bill McKibben has earned his position as a prophet, a voice of moral authority and the poet who made us feel the immense gravity of the climate crisis. But say what you will about billionaires, Bill Gates has also shown some chops, as a manager and as an engineer. His book deserves an attentive read. Besides — he could spring for an awful lot of pizza.
For a longer discussion, see my essay Two Bills and “Reconciliation.”
