Billionaire Microsoft founder and climate activist Bill Gates said Monday that large-scale economic shutdowns are “nowhere near sufficient” to curtail climate change. Rather, we need “to get rid of emissions from all the different sectors.”
Gates made the remarks during a keynote address for the National Academy of Medicine’s 2020 annual meeting, which this year was titled, “Confronting Urgent Threats to Human Health & Society: COVID-19 and Climate Change.”
“The change in behavior, like driving less or flying less, is helpful but nowhere near sufficient — 2020 is a great example of this,” Gates said. “We’ve cut down carbon emission with these drastic changes in the economy, but the reduction in emissions is actually quite modest.”
He noted that this year, even with the implementation of large-scale economic shutdowns in many places around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic, the global emissions rate was only cut by 8%, according to International Energy Association estimates.
“Simply shutting down [the economy] is not going to get [us] to our goal,” he concluded. “So just like we need innovation for COVID-19, we also need that to get rid of emissions from all the different sectors and bring down climate change.”
“This crosses many areas,” Gates continued. “How we make electricity, how we make industrial products, grow food, cool our buildings, and all of transportation.” – READ MORE
Listen to the insightful Thomas Paine Podcast Below --