Stuff You Should Know - The Future of Renewable Energy, Featuring Bill Gates

Episode Date: February 23, 2016

Renewable energy could be the key to ensuring the future prosperity and health of Planet Earth and humankind. In this very special episode, we sit down and discuss the possibilities with Bill Gates. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And this is, from my perspective, a pretty awesome, special Stuff You Should Know. It is, we don't normally have guests on the show. No, we almost never do. It's a very select group.

That's right. This may be the topper. Yeah, what happened last week? Well, last week, I was in Hawaii, and I got a text from you. And it said, buddy, I'm sorry to bother you on vacation, but Bill Gates wants to be on Stuff You Should Know. And you went, you mean old Billy Gates

from elementary school? Billy Bathgate? And I said, no, Bill Gates, the entrepreneur, co-founder of Microsoft, and philanthropist wants to be on our show, because his personal communications person got in touch and said, I know you don't normally do this, but would you consider making an exception for Mr. Gates?

Right, and we were like, we really appreciate that you did the research to know that we don't normally have people on. That actually was very kind. It was. Because we had other people that just assumed, like, well, you'd want to have this person on, right? Right.

We didn't listen to the show. We don't have guests normally. So we were like, Bill Gates, Bill Gates, like played by Anthony Michael Hall once on a made for TV movie on TNT, Bill Gates. And they said that Bill Gates. That's right. We said yes.

Watch, we're going to show up for the interview, and it's going to be Anthony Michael Hall. That would blow my mind. So we're recording this first portion of the podcast on renewable energy, which is a topic very dear to Mr. Gates's heart, and something he knows way more about than we do. So we're recording this before we go talk to him

in New York City next week. But through the magic of editing, it will be as if this is one seamless day. Seamless. Like he's in the studio with us. Right. So he wanted to talk about renewable energy. He's pretty jazzed about it, and you could say,

I'm pretty jazzed about renewable energy as well. It's amazing what's coming down the pike. And there's, yes, coming down the pike. It's very important, right? Because there's a lot of stuff that's going on right now in the 21st century, and coming in the next couple of decades that mean that we could really use renewable energy sooner than later.

One is that it's predicted that energy consumption worldwide is going to increase by 50% over 2010 levels, 30 years from hence. 50%, there's a lot more energy consumption than we're doing right now, and we consume a lot of energy, right? Yeah, in 2015, the world as a whole emitted 36 billion tons of CO2,

and that is 42% more than we did. 42% more than we did in 1990, and the goal is 80% below 1990 levels. So that's 122. 142, no, 122. That's what I said. Yeah, you got it right. 122% swing as.

In the wrong direction. Yeah, we need to get to and try and achieve, and this is not just the US, this is a world problem. It's global. Exactly, so you have two conflicting issues here. You have increasing energy demand, but you also have a desire to reduce CO2 emissions, right? Then, if you want to confound things further,

and this is where Bill Gates's passions lie. Yeah. You've got a lot of people out there, something like 1.3 billion people around the world who just don't have electricity at all. Yeah, 18% of the world's population without electricity at all. 70% of Sub-Saharan Africa, no electricity.

300 million people in India alone with no electricity, and that's not just, oh, well, you don't have all the mod cons. It's, you know, you don't have light to read by, and educate yourselves. Yes. Or to refrigerate your food and not catch foodborne diseases. Yeah, I mean, we could name out 100 reasons

why you need electricity in the year 2016. Exactly. So you've got a growing energy demand. You have a need to reduce CO2 emissions, and then you have a whole segment of the human population that needs access to energy, which means that if you can come up with some good renewable technologies, you can actually make all these things work

together. Yeah. But the key is, so if it's renewable, it's automatically basically clean, and it has to come soon to offset that energy increase, energy consumption increase. But because we're factoring the developing low income world into this, it needs to also be cheap and easily

accessible and reliable. Yeah, until, and this something that I'm sure Bill Gates hammers home every time he has a chance, if it's got to be viable, and if it's not cheaper and better than fossil fuel consumption, then no one's ever going to jump on board in a big way. Yeah, and if so, from this point on, Chuck, because he is coming on as a personal guest

to stuff you should know, I think we can just refer to him as Bill, our friend Bill. Yeah. Bill, our pal. Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait to see a week from now what we're seeing. Let's talk a little bit about who's

contributing to the problem. China, they're the world's top CO2 emitter. In 2014, at least, for 27% of global emissions with the US, number two at 15.5, followed by the EU, and 9.5 in India at 7.2. But everybody agrees that there's a problem, and let's try and reverse it. So they had a summit in Paris at the end of this past year,

where they all got together, all these nations, said, you know what, let's set some goals here. And the US, for their part, said, you know what, let's try and cut national emissions by up to 28% by the year 2025. So 28% from 2005 levels, right? And this whole Paris Accord, basically, the Paris climate talks that came in November,

200 countries signed on to reduce their emissions. And it was lauded as a huge breakthrough. You got all these people together, and all these different countries, and they hammered out a document that's legally binding. But there's also criticism of the document, and that the emissions reductions are just totally voluntary. There's no teeth in the document to say,

well, here's the bad things that happen to you if you don't meet your reductions goals. Right. But as criticized as the document in the Paris climate talks were, there's also a real sunny side to the whole thing. And that came in some kind of between the lines message that came out of it.

And that was, developed industrialized nations are ready to put down some serious coin into renewable energy technology. Yeah, to the tune of the total, 100 billion euros per year to low-income economies to try and build them up and give them robust economies, which would help the world as a whole. Right, so this basically is this 100 billion euros a year.

That's a sizable chunk. And it represents kind of a funnel through developing nations, from developed nations to developing nations to renewable tech companies. So it's a roundabout investment in renewable tech. And there's a lot of stuff that just went from pie in the sky to, oh, now you're throwing some real money at this. We can make this happen now.

Yeah, because some stuff brand new, some stuff altering existing technologies. But it's all super exciting. Should we talk about some of these? What? The first one I have to say I love. If you remember in the state of the union address, in January, President Obama said,

something about turning sunlight into liquid fuel, I thought he was having an acid flashback. Right, up and away. In my beautiful balloon. But no, what he's talking about is a super promising process called artificial photosynthesis. And it's basically, well, it's exactly what it sounds. It's building machines that take CO2 emissions

and that contribute to climate change and using that actually in the sunlight to make fuel. Right, so you're using CO2 emissions as a raw material for fuel. Unbelievable. So basically, there's been a lot of stumbling blocks so far as far as the artificial photosynthesis industry is concerned.

But they've also had some really good breakthroughs recently. One was, it came out of the Department of Energy's Berkeley lab, where basically they took nanowire arrays. They made what they call a synthetic forest of nanowires. These nanowires collect solar energy and they transfer it to bacteria. And this bacteria mixed in with carbon dioxide and water

break down the CO2, so they catalyze it, into other components. Then another bacteria takes those components and builds them up into a usable fuel, like methanol. And all this happens in basically an artificial photosynthetic fuel cell is what it is, using sunlight to break CO2 emissions down into usable fuel. That's amazing.

It is. Something else I got going is actually taking water, CO2, and splitting this stuff up into its individual elements, and then essentially recombining them to form CH3OH, which is methanol, aka wood spirits. But you don't want to drink. Aka what you would get, it's like the simplest form of alcohol and what you would get when you would burn wood.

Well, it's the simplest usable form. Well, yeah. I guess the simplest form would be golden grain. Although you could probably put that in an engine. I wonder what would happen. I think it would work. Probably so. Yeah.

If you're out of fuel on the hills of Georgia, it'll work. It'll do the trick. So methanol is the simplest that you can use in an engine. And it's already being used. China is blending it into gasoline for regular cars at about 15% or less right there at the pumps. And their taxis and buses are running on up to 85% blend of methanol and gasoline.

Right. So it's a real thing. It definitely is a real thing. And one of the big problems with artificial photosynthesis has been that the catalyst to break the CO2 down into constituent components has required something like platinum. Platinum is a very efficient catalyst for that process,

right? Platinum also costs $1,100 an ounce. And if you're coming up with tech that you can sell cheap to the developing world, platinum can't be a major component of the whole thing, which is why that Berkeley labs breakthrough using bacteria to catalyze and synthesize this stuff is huge. Because one of the bacteria they're using,

the synthetic bacteria, synthesizing bacteria, is E. coli. You can find that anywhere, man. Just go grab a bunch of cilantro, throw it in there. You've got your synthesizing bacteria. Another big goal is to, well, and this is a goal for anyone making any sort of renewable energy machinery is to make them last super long. Because then you can amortize that cost over many, many years,

thus driving the overall cost down. And so long lasting is a big key. And then it's not just about building the machine that will actually, not in the case of the bacteria, they'll actually split up in these elements. You also need other machines around it. You can't just do that and say, throw it in the gas. Right.

It has to be recombined into something usable. Well, yeah, and not only that, but it's got to be, I mean, there's all kinds of ancillary equipment that need to be used to make this whole thing work. Right. So I think the point is that you can't have a huge, just this huge thing if you're going to try to sell it to the consumer, right?

No. No. You have to be in the pumped gas. But you could create a huge thing if you were going to basically create a fuel refinery, an artificial photosynthesis fuel refinery, and then you could just sell it to gas stations. That would work, too.

Another problem here that you point out is they figured out how to split water in CO2 in separate processes, but not in one unit. Right. That's where that Berkeley breakthrough is such a big deal. See, I would say just bolt those two machines together and you got one machine. Right, exactly.

But they used two different kinds of bacteria to do two different jobs in the same machine. It's amazing. And one of the researchers points out that funding for this stuff is kind of a problem because funding doesn't get the same amount of money every quarter. Right.

Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low, and that's really tough. And it's a big challenge when you're trying to figure out these things because you might get a great idea one year where you need that dough and you don't have it. Yeah. So it's just a lot harder to manage

when the ebb and flow of funding comes and goes. But I think that's where this huge, that's where this big thing that came out of the Paris climate talks comes in. It's not like money is a thing of the past, but if you're creating something that really has legs as far as creating renewable energy is concerned, you're going to be able to find capital.

Yeah, right now the US Energy Department is renewing a $75 million five-year grant to Caltech's Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. So that's not pocket change. No. I'm sure it'll take more than that. You can do some research with that. So thumbs up to artificial photosynthesis.

Thumbs up. We're both a little excited. So as is our custom, I think we should take a break. Agreed. Stuff is shouldn't roll. So Chuck, there's this kind of this big issue, right? Where we have wind power and we have solar power. And some places are sunnier than others in the United States.

California. Or else in the world. Yeah. And some places are windier than others. Kansas. OK, so like Kansas can get all the wind it needs from wind farms if they wanted to. Probably.

California. Actually, I looked up Reno, Nevada, and Honolulu about the same amount of sunlight every year. Oh, wow. Did you know that? Yeah, but very different places. Very different. But so either one of them could subsist on solar energy.

Technically, right? But you've got a place like Seattle. It's not going to do very well for solar energy. Or London. Not going to do really well with solar energy. But if you're talking about, say, a national grid in, say, the United States, if you step back and look at it rather than like Kansas is one region and California is another

and say, actually, Kansas and California are parts of this larger grid, we just have to figure out how to get the wind power that's constantly in Kansas over to Seattle or the solar power that's in Reno over to Boston. How do you do that? And they figured out all they have to do is use existing technology, which is just basically a stepped

up type of power line. Yeah, I think this is amazing. There was a guy named Alex McDonald from the NOAA. From NOAA. That's right. And he kind of realized one day, hey, the wind's always blown somewhere. Like we've got the wind.

We've got all these power lines. Why don't we do this? Let's think of things in a different way and let's think of the US as one big all-encompassing interconnected grid, which it is. But we kind of don't think of it that way. No, he did. Exactly.

He said it's all connected. So why don't we do this? Let's switch over these power lines to direct current lines. Which Edison apparently was right. So they suffer a lot less loss. I looked up supposedly from a power station to customer. There's about an 8% to 15% loss. Using current AC lines.

Using what we have going now. And I believe if you switch over to the DC, it would cut that in about half. Not too bad. No. And beyond that, that means that you could transport electricity farther than you can now. Which means you can look at a national grid as something

whole. But you also can take, if you can connect these things better, if you can connect these regional grids into a comprehensive national grid, you can shuffle wind power from one region of the country to another, solar power from one region of the country to another. Yeah.

So what they did was they made this really cool computer model. And they said, let's figure this out. Let's divide the United States up into 152,000 squares. All of these are connected already. And let's input wind data from a couple of years. 2006 to 2008 nationally, just to see where we're at. Why not?

Let's see where the wind's blowing. Let's see where these grids are. And let's figure out demand where you need it most. Less windy places, obviously. Less sunny places, maybe. And let's figure out what's the smartest way to lay this out and where the best place is to invest in building these massive wind farms.

Right. And they also were extremely cautious in their inputs into this model. They excluded national parks and mountain slopes where you can't put windmills or solar arrays. Sure. They anticipated electrical demands in the future. And they basically used all of the low-end figures

they could find. And even with those low-end figures, Chuck, using these DC power lines and putting new windmill and solar array outfits around the country in the right places, they came up with the idea that we could cut CO2 emissions from power plants in the United States by 80% of those 1990 levels by 2020, I think, 2030. That's insane.

Which is the goal that we want. Exactly. 80% less. And again, they point out we were really cautious in our projections here. So this is the low-end. This is the least we could do by doing this. And this is using technology that's all available right now.

Yeah, you point out the one big caveat is that if electric cars really take off, like a lot of people hope they will, that they're going to have to ramp up production because they'll just be using a lot more power. Yeah. And they also said that in the United States, it's not necessarily a problem with even finances

or certainly not technology that is usually just political will. Like say, one part of the country doesn't want to depend on another for its power for some weird reason. I could totally see some Georgia senator being like, we're not going to depend on Kansas for our wind, for our power. I guess I could see that too. I could totally see it. But if you're taking this concept of the high-voltage grid

and creating it from scratch in an area in the developing world that doesn't have a grid to speak of. Yeah, they could really benefit. Exactly. Just build it there, and that's just the way it is. Yeah. It's super unhyped about that one. That one is.

Which one's your favorite so far? Well, that one so far. OK. This next one is neat, but I just can't even wrap my brain around it. What, photovoltaic paint? Yeah. Basically, instead of a solar panel,

how about solar paint, Jack? Right. How about painting your roof with paint? Right. Or with shingles that are made from this stuff. Yeah. Which they already have, but they're clumsy and cumbersome. This stuff, if you're using photovoltaic paint,

you're using paint that's mixed with colloidal quantum dots. Yeah, that's where I get lost. Or some sort of nanoparticle. And there are different types of nanoparticles that create an electrical charge when exposed to sunlight, right? Yeah. Well, if you have paint that's got a bunch of these

mixed in with it, and you have a way to jack your house's power lines into said paint, you can generate electricity just from painting your house. Yeah. And it's super flexible. It's easily transported, which is a big deal. Sure. And if they can get costs down, which it

looks like they're starting to do, and get efficiency up, I think that the record right now is somewhere around 8% efficiency. So 8% of the solar power that hits these things is converted into electricity. Yeah. Still not enough, but it's substantial and it's growing. But if you can get these things up,

this could be extremely helpful for not just people in developing countries, people in remote areas. Like if you want to live off the grid, just paint your house with this stuff. Yeah, the whole side of your home, the roof of your home, you could paint your cell phone, in theory. Yeah, you could paint your car. Paint your dog.

Power your dog. Don't paint your dog. You probably shouldn't paint your dog. This one is a bit mind-blowing, and it seems slightly more far-fetched as far as making it the realistic way to go. Well, that's the thing. They found that it works, but can you

make it big and widespread and mass-produced? Right, I think so. So using colloidal quantum dots, I'm not quite sure how handy those are, how easy to find those are. There's another group that's working on making plastic ones. Yeah, not a bad idea. Plastic solar cells, like nanoparticles, made out of plastic that react to solar energy

and create electricity. And as we know, we love to mass-produce things as plastic, and we can do it cheaply. So that could definitely have a huge impact on it. Once you start making something out of plastic, that automatically means it's available for cheap. Yeah, good point. We're masters of plastic.

I think the world needs a t-shirt that says that. Masters of plastic. That's a good band name. Opening up for colloidal quantum dots. Nice. Not bad. You got anything else on that? No, I guess, yeah, I think the high voltage power lines

are my favorites so far. Yeah, I'm still going with that. And here's one thing that I know we're going to talk with Bill about. Our friend Bill. Because his people that we were talking to said, Bill gets really excited about batteries. Yeah.

And the future of batteries. And I think everyone in renewable energy is excited about batteries because batteries are awesome. And they can do a lot of things. They could potentially solve one of the big problems that if we don't get those power lines hooked up, you could at least generate a bunch of wind and store them in a huge battery array for future use.

Or a solar field and store that in batteries. Right, so theoretically, you could do all this now. But the problem is the costs are so monumental in creating batteries that are big enough to back up a power grid that you are actually, in some cases, doubling or tripling the cost of electricity. And Bill Gates actually wrote, this guy's no schlub. He wrote a paper on energy.

Bill Gates is no schlub? He's no schlub. I don't know if you know this or not. But he wrote a paper on energy innovation. And he points out that if batteries double or triple the cost of electricity, if you somehow figured out a way to generate electricity for free, it would still cost two to three times what it does now

if you're backing up the grid with the battery, which to him and a lot of other observers says, we need a better battery. And again, one alternative to that is to get around the idea of batteries at all by creating that high voltage power grid that can spread wind and solar energy throughout an entire nation. Yeah, but just like the consumer level,

I know that Mr. Elon Musk and other really smart people are trying to develop these batteries that can just do a better job for your home solar setup. Sure. Because there's still a long way to go even now. But yeah, but if you can create a battery that can store wind power or solar power, then you don't have to have a fossil fuel plant

to back up the solar wind power for cloudy days or at night, or days when the wind just won't blow, exactly, no matter how hard you wish. The saddest days. So I believe Musk's is we're not really covering that, but weren't his lithium ion base, the big announcement? Yeah. Recently?

Yeah. Yeah. What's it called? The Tesla wall? The power wall. Power wall. Tesla power wall. Yeah.

So yeah, they're lithium ion batteries that you can charge while you're hooked up to the grid or whatever, or if you've got solar, whatever. You're backing up your home's electricity. And I think each battery lasts for eight hours. The point is they're huge, and they're expensive. And if you're extrapolating batteries on to helping the developing economies of the world,

you need to have cheap and small and portable, right? Yeah. And there's a lot of this. The idea of coming up with a better battery is essentially the holy grail as far as renewable energy goes. It would solve a lot of problems. It underpins almost every renewable energy project, and that wind and solar are ephemeral.

They don't happen all the time. So you need to find a way to store the excess amounts that come to you when it is sunny and when the wind is blowing. So batteries are extremely important. And there's a lot of people working on them right now. Yeah. The one that is super promising that we're covering here is called the flow battery.

And forget what you thought about your mom and dads and your grandpa's batteries. Just throw them in the trash. Well, don't do that, I think. Throw them in the ocean. I should not say. Throw it in the fire. No, no, no.

Definitely don't do that. Shoot it into space. The flow battery, my friend, is where it's at, I think, as far as the future is concerned. So well, there's many different versions of flow batteries. There's actually one that I saw as brand new that uses lithium ion technology along with the flow system, which we're going to talk about in a second.

The one that's a lithium ion can actually store, the combo can actually store 10 times what a regular flow battery can. Oh, nice. Which is great. The downside is, and there's always a downside, is its power delivery is 10,000 times slower than a conventional flow battery.

It takes a while to charge a phone. It's like, we got lots of power stored. They're like, what's the bad news? Yeah, you can't use it. It's 10,000 times slower than what you're used to. But once you break down the standard flow battery, it's pretty ingenious. So with a flow battery, you have two receiving tanks

and two holding tanks, right? Yeah. And as the liquid inside, the fluid inside, is an electrolyte fluid, right? Yeah. So basically Gatorade. It's a fluid that contains an electrical charge. And as it flows from receiving tank to holding tank,

it actually creates a charge or transmits this charge and charges itself, right? Yeah. Or powers whatever you want. The cool thing about flow batteries are, well, we should say one of the drawbacks is that they're big. They need to be big. Yeah.

They think about the smallest you could come up with is, say, the size of an aquarium. Yeah, well, it's also an advantage because they can be as big as you want. That is an advantage. You can create one literally the size of a football stadium if you want. If you have enough Gatorade.

They could store all the energy of an entire solar field. Right, exactly. Solar panel. Right, so the great thing about a flow battery is it will store this charge indefinitely. Like the electrolyte fluid is never going to lose its charge permanently. It can always be recharged by moving it from receiving tank

to holding tank. Yeah, and I think the biggest advantage is it's instantly recharged when you replace that fluid. Yes. I don't think there's even any lag time. It's just boom. Right, pretty neat. It's going again.

So Chuck, what we've been talking about so far as far as batteries are concerned is the way to store electricity. Yeah. But there's actually other stuff you can store too to generate electricity from, and heat's a big one. Yeah, because we've talked again and again about how just sort of archaic and weird it

is that we still create heat to spin a turbine, to create steam to spin a turbine, just like we did in the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, as fancy as you want to get using a nuclear rod, you're still generating steam to spin a turbine. That's the whole point. That's the end result, right? Yep, amazing.

I love it. And if that floats your boat, if that made your eyes just pop out of your head, go listen to our electricity episode, which is one of my all time favorites. Yeah, we did one on nuclear power too, right? We did after Fukushima. That's right.

So you can actually store that heat, correct, in the future, now even. There's condensing solar power plants, and they take the heat from the sun. So they're not storing the energy. There's no way they're not storing the energy. I looked, and it seemed like everybody was just talking about the heat.

But they also have to store the solar energy as well. What a waste, right? So at the very least, they store the heat, and they usually store it as molten salt. But they found out that if you use a supercritical fluid, which is a fluid that's heated to a point where it basically no longer recognizes the distinction between liquid or gaseous form,

and it can do all sorts of crazy stuff, if you take a supercritical fluid, you can take the thermal heat from the sun and store that heat in there, and then use it later on by releasing that heat to heat water and generate steam to spin a turbine. Also another great band name. Spin a turbine?

No, supercritical fluid. I agree. I think if you wanted to name your band, just look into renewable energy, because there's like cool names all over the place. Or just call your band Bill Gates. Our pal Bill. Not bad.

You got anything else for now? No, I mean, I could sit here and talk about this stuff forever, but let's talk to Bill Gates about it instead. Great idea. And Chuck, we will do that right after this break. Stuff you shouldn't grow. OK, everyone, we are back. We are in a hotel room in New York sitting with Mr. Bill Gates,

which is a little unusual for us to say the least. It's an unusual Monday, for sure. It is. His folks reached out and asked if we would make an exception about having a guest on the show. And we thought about it for about 0.1 seconds and said, of course, we'd love to have Bill Gates on the show. So thank you, sir, for being here. And we already recorded the first part

of the show on renewable energy, specifically a few different technologies in the future that are pretty exciting. And so I think Josh wanted to go ahead and kick it off with a relevant question. So we got kind of into the nuts and bolts of some of the tech. But one of the things we didn't cover,

and we wanted to hear from you, is what are some of the obstacles that this renewable tech that's just right there on the horizon, what's keeping them from being deployed now, especially in the developing world? Well, when we think about energy, one of the key things is reliability. If you just have energy when the wind blows, when the sunshine,

that's not very helpful. If somebody's freezing in their apartment on a winter night, they need energy. If you're going to build a factory, say, to build cars, that, because of your huge capital cost, needs to run 24 hours a day. And so it's got to have reliable energy. And so the market isn't just for energy,

the market is for totally reliable energy. Unfortunately, a lot of the breakthroughs we've had, wind and sun, those directly generate electricity. And storing electricity is very, very hard. All the batteries in the world today would not store every laptop, every car, everything, would not store an hour's worth of global energy use.

And batteries haven't improved much. In the last 100 years, they're less than three times better than the battery that Edison, if he were revived, would recognize, which was a lead chemistry battery. It's really the lithium ion has given us an improvement. But in order to really work for the grid, you'd need a factor of 10, which, anyway, it's very tough to make that work.

And so if we need to pursue breakthrough paths that don't assume a storage miracle, like if you could take the sun directly and make liquid fuels, just say gasoline, but any hydrocarbon that's liquid, that's easy to store. You put it in a big metal tank. You put it in a pipe. And the whole infrastructure is geared towards the transport. Infrastructure is geared towards liquid hydrocarbons.

And so if you could possibly do that, it would have a big advantage. And we talked about artificial photosynthesis technology. It doesn't seem quite promising. Yeah, and actually, that brings up something that we've done quite a few podcasts on different technologies in the future for renewable energy. And I feel like every time we cover one,

we both end up thinking, well, this is the one. This is fantastic. And I guess my question is, while going down different paths is great for innovation, when should people start focusing on, all right, now this is the one that we should put our efforts into? Well, the capitalism is very good at this. At the start of the auto industry,

if you'd really handicapped things and looked at the steam cars, the electric car, and the internal combustion engine, you probably would have guessed that the internal combustion would not succeed. Steam car. The mechanics of all that explosion and those metal parts fatiguing, it just seems so dangerous

and so hard to get right. And the thing that made it win is the energy density of gasoline. Gasoline, one of my favorite books on this is called Physics for Future Presidents, that has some basic things that should be broadly known. Gasoline is 10 times as energy dense as our best batteries are. So when you switch from a gasoline car to an electric car,

that's why your range goes down a lot, and yet the weight of those batteries is way more than your gasoline tank was before. So Henry Ford happened to bet on internal combustion. A few other people bet on those others, and they had companies that were pricing their products and talking about the maintainability of their products. And over time, the internal combustion

went out so dramatically that it's hard to even remember that those things were there although if you go to the right museum, those are still there. This energy thing will be the same way. I mean, high wind sounds like the jet stream, it sounds like a crazy idea, the solar fuels are what you're calling synthetic photosynthesis.

If it doesn't work, people say, well, of course, that was silly. And if it does work, people say, well, of course, that was brilliant. When nuclear energy came along, there was a quote from the head of the Atomic Energy Commission that electricity will be too cheap to meter. Now, unfortunately, he underestimated the complexities of radiation containment, all of the safety things, which in my view means that we need a whole new generation of reactors

whose safety characteristics are dramatically better and different than what we make today is called third generation. We need this fourth generation that will be like that. So I think we need to go down about a dozen different paths. And even one that is still worth exploring is called carbon capture and sequestration. We're still burning the hydrocarbon,

but with a little bit of extra chemistry, you take that flue gas, which is about 12% CO2, and you convert it to liquids. And then, of course, you have to have to find some long-term storage. Right. And you use that as a feedstock for artificial photosynthesis, I believe you can, or they're working on it now.

Right. Greenhouses have enhanced CO2. So plants love CO2. In fact, plants had a hard time. CO2 got down to about 170 parts per million. And plants, you even saw plant chemistry change because that's very tough. That's when photosynthesis, C4 chemistry, evolved, which may as corn happens to use right now.

Now we're up at 400 ppm. But in a greenhouse, if you run it up to 2%, 2000 ppm, then some plants actually go quite a bit faster. We've done some episodes before. We did one specifically on how the automobile became the dominant form of transportation in the US. And from what I remember, it seemed like the answer was there was a lot of lobbying behind it.

And a government got involved, and now we all drive cars. gasoline-powered cars. What's the role of government today in getting renewables out there, especially in developing countries? Yeah, New York City actually couldn't figure out how they were going to deal with horse manure. And so cars had to compete with horses.

But horses did have some serious drawbacks. Later, we figured out that the nitrous oxides and things coming out of the tailpipe of the car were a problem. But at the time, it was a dramatic improvement on what came out of the previous tailpipe. Renewable energy, when you get to, say, India, which is paradigmatic because they still are not giving their citizens even a tenth of the electricity

per person that we provide. So the idea of lights at night or refrigerating food or cooking with a stove that doesn't pollute your lungs, most of Indians don't have that. So on behalf of their citizens, they want to move to have what we have, which is an energy-intense lifestyle. And if all Indians got everything we have,

they wouldn't have admitted as much greenhouse gas per person as we have until well after the end of this century. So in a certain justice sense, their electrifying their society will save lives. And it's not a bad thing. And yet the world wants them to do it with a constraint that we didn't have, which is to not emit the greenhouse gases.

So if we can do the invention, we can fund the R&D, and maybe even the first few pilot plants to get the economies of scale and learning for benefits, then if we can offer to them a form of electrification that's non-polluting, then you get the best of both worlds. If you can't do that, then they have a dilemma, which is the imperative

of getting their citizens what we already have versus this global problem. And so that's why if we didn't have innovation, I wouldn't be very optimistic that the climate change problem would get solved. In fact, some people think it's easy to solve, and that could hold us back from making these long-term investments.

Right. One thing we often hear from listeners when we podcast on stuff like this is what can I do just in my home? And I know that you made a point about just the light bulbs that people are using now. And little differences like that can help. But in a bigger picture, where does your average Joe fit in?

Well, the United States uses twice as much energy per person as other rich countries do. So Europe and Japan would be less than half of us. Canada's a lot like us. And it's partly the way we built up our infrastructure. We live further away from our work generally. We have more lighting around our house, more air conditioning. My favorite energy author who lives up

in Canada, Voslaw Smeal, when he shows a picture of what houses look like in the 50s, where there weren't many lights on at night and what they look like now, he looks at how big American cars are. So he would say, hey, the US, for a lot of reasons, should be more reasonable about resource usage. That alone is not going to solve climate change. The idea of using as little as you can, it's smart.

It's good discipline. It's good for the world. It allows those same resources to be used by other people. And remember, energy is still causing local pollution. Coal plants, the understanding of what particulate does to health and how that's bad for our health, that continues to increase. And so cutting down on energy usage

is not just a good thing for global warming. Cutting down on water usage makes that water available for the ecosystem, for farming and lots of things. So being smart about, hey, how much energy do we use? And why do we use so much? And did we pay attention to that funny label that, thank goodness the government now requires that appliances have energy usage labeling because people

were wasting a lot of money buying a cheap refrigerator who would increase their electricity bill dramatically over time. We still have that in terms of how we build houses, that it would be worth putting more into the original building to have less heat leakage in the winter or cooling benefits in the summer. We really should put more into that capital expense, which

is easiest when you do the initial build instead of the retrofit. But even the retrofit is sometimes worth doing. So there is still a role for the average person in fighting climate change, I guess, or being responsible with energy usage beyond forming a human chain blocking off a fossil fuel power plant or something.

Well, we're all complicit in using fossil fuels today. And so if there was a choice of going cold turkey, I don't think most people would choose that. The way people can contribute, they can set an example through their own use, their voice about, hey, we care about this issue and we want these long-term investments to be made, that is super important.

And if they can go to Africa and see what it's like to live without energy, once you visit, that will become part of your value system to think how can we treat those lives as having equal value, whether that's health or energy or all the things that we take for granted. So we got one last question. Yeah, just on a personal note, I was kind of wondering,

I was thinking the other day, I'm in my mid-40s now and have my first baby. And I think that's the point, at least in my life, where I start looking at where I am and as I speed toward the grave and what have I done with my life. And I was wondering, was there a defining moment in your life where you kind of stopped and said, I'm Bill Gates, I've accomplished quite a bit, and now I'm

going to focus on the future of the world. And did having kids have something to do with that? Or what was that for you? Well, I've been super lucky in that my early exposure to computers and lots of great people around that. So building Microsoft and being fanatical about that kept me busy and very happy in my 20s, 30s. Then in my 40s, I had gotten married at 38.

My first child was born when I was 41. I started to gain more balance. And I knew that somebody younger than me should eventually take over Microsoft. So I started broadening my learning. I've always liked science. But during the Microsoft days, I couldn't keep track of the latest in math or biology

because I was a fanatic about software and didn't believe in vacations. And that's why I even waited to start a family because I knew I wouldn't have enough time for it. So in my 40s, I broadened my horizons a bit. And then when I was 45 was when Melinda and I started putting money in the foundation and saying, OK, that would be the next career.

And in the same way that I'd had two wonderful partners in Microsoft, Paul Allen in the early days and then Steve Ballmers, we built it to be a large company, Melinda would be an even more equal partner in this third partnership, which was making the foundation go. And so that's been a learning journey. Every year, we get smarter about, OK, what should the foundation do?

Bringing in great people to help us there. But it was traveling to Africa. It was learning that all these resources really should go back to society in some way. Meeting Melinda, some of the things Warren Buffett talked about were leaving lots of money to your kids is not a good thing. I particularly highlight Melinda in the time

we spent in Africa as sort of opening my eyes that, hey, there were things that could have a dramatic effect if we were smart about giving back the money the right way. Well, Bill Gates, thank you very much for being on Stuff You Should Know. Much appreciated. Quite an honor, thank you for talking with us. Hey, I'm honored to be your first guest.

Thanks. Thank you. Can we get a picture? Sure. OK. Wow. That is going to be tough to talk. Holy cow.

Yeah. What a guy. Yeah. I was nervous. Oh, you were fine. Do you think he liked me? I think he loved you. Do you think he liked me?

When he let you sit on his lap and he stroked your beard, that's a clear sign that he was fond of you. Well, I thought he might get mad when I told him he had spinach in his teeth, but he'd seem to take that well. Well, he took it in stride. That was all off Mike. Yeah. The behind the scenes cut coming soon.

No, that was amazing. And thanks to them for reaching out. Yeah, big thanks. Yeah, best of luck, obviously, to his efforts in the future. Yeah, go renewable energy. Hurrah. If you want to get in touch with us, we'd love to hear from you.

You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.