The debate over biotech crops has become predictable.
In his 2012 annual letter from the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, who has a near-religious faith in technology and innovation, argues that an “extremely important revolution” in plant science, i.e., genetically-engineered crops, can help farmers in poor countries by giving them access to new varieties of crops that will better resist disease and adapt to climate change.
Days later, the Center for Food Safety, a Washington watchdog group and persistent critic of Big Ag, pushed back, saying that biotech crops had failed to deliver on their promise to alleviate hunger, and that Gates would do better to support low-cost “agroecological techniques” that don’t depend on patented, genetically-engineered seeds.
The conflicting claims and supporting data are hard to sift through. Will disease-resistant biotech cassava answer the prayers of Christina Mwinjipe, a farmer in Tanzania, whose crops are threatened by diseases, as Gates writes? Or will patented genetically engineered crops prove disastrous for the 1.4 billion farmers in the global south who now save seeds from one season to the next, as Andrew Kimbrell, executive director for the Center for Food Safety, argues?
The voices of farmers are rarely heard in these debates. (They’re probably working too hard.) But data released this week indicates farmers, through their actions, are voting for biotech crops.
Most of that growth — 8.2 million hectares — came from the developing world, lead by Brazil and India, the report says. The growth rate for biotech crops in developing countries was 11 percent, twice as fast and twice as large as industrial countries at 5 percent or 3.8 million hectares.
“Unprecedented adoption rates are testimony to overwhelming trust and confidence in biotech crops by millions of farmers worldwide,” said Clive James, the report’s author, in a statement. It must be said that James is an unabashed supporter of biotech crops but as best I can tell, his numbers haven’t been challenged. [click to continue…]
The risk of disruptive climate change grows every day. John Holdren, the White House science advisor, said last year that we have three options: Mitigate, adapt, suffer. If we don’t mitigate (meaning reduce emissions), we’ll have to adapt (move to new places, develop new crops, build sea walls). If we do neither, we’ll suffer. But, as regular readers of this blog know, there’s a fourth option–geoengineering.
Geoengineering is term used to describe planetary-scale technologies that are designed to counteract the climate effects of past greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. I’ve been fascinated with geoengineering for about two years, and this week FORTUNE will publish my story, The Business of Cooling the Planet, about three startup companies that want to save the planet by capturing carbon dioxide from the air. This topic is so important that I’m planning to expand the story into a short e-book in the next couple of months.
The FORTUNE story begins by describing how Microsoft founder Bill Gates became an expert on climate and energy:
One of the cool things about being Bill gates is that if you are curious about something, you can find smart people who will teach you whatever it is that you want to know. About five years ago Gates decided that he wanted to learn about climate change, so he arranged for two of the world’s leading climate scientists, David Keith of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, to organize a series of seminars. Since then, Keith and Caldeira have recruited scientists, energy experts, economists, and policy wonks to deliver about a dozen detailed presentations to Gates. He prepares by doing hundreds of pages of reading, some quite technical; the ensuing discussions, which last three or four hours, can be intense. “Bill has the intellectual curiosity of a very bright graduate student,” Caldeira says, “but a graduate student whose time you are not supposed to waste.”
This is no academic exercise. Gates has been convinced that the risk of global warming is worse than most people think. He can see that the world’s governments have failed to curb the emissions caused by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. In June 2010 he put together a coalition of business leaders, including GE’s Jeff Immelt, to urge Congress to invest more in clean-energy research, but that’s not happening. So the Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist has stepped into the breach to become the world’s leading funder of research into geoengineering— deliberate, large-scale interventions in the earth’s climate system intended to prevent climate change and its repercussions.
Since 2007, Gates has given about $4.6 million of his money to Caldeira and Keith for geoengineering research. Intellectual Ventures, a private company funded in part by Gates, has explored such technologies as building an 18-mile-long hose, tethered by balloons, that would spray tiny particles into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays. Gates has even attached his name to a patent application for ocean-churning technology designed to sap the strength of hurricanes, which appear to be getting fiercer because of global warming.
The story goes on focus on three startup companies that are working on
A straightforward, albeit audacious, way to cool an overheating planet: Build many thousands of big machines to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
The companies are Carbon Engineering (in which Gates is an investor), Global Thermostat and Kilimanjaro Energy. They are all a long way from making any money from carbon dioxide removal, and indeed there are many skeptics who say the costs of pulling CO2 from the air are so high that it will never make business sense. [click to continue…]
2010 has been a bad year for climate, and an even worse year for climate policy. But for that very reason, it’s been a good year for geoengineering—the notion that humans can deliberately manipulate the climate and cool the earth.
Official Washington is starting to take geoengineering seriously: The Government Accountability Office and a bipartisan task force of experts convened by the New America Foundation will soon report on geoengineering. Bill Gates has invested in geoengineering research. Environmental groups–notably Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist of Environmental Defense Fund–have engaged in the conversation. On a parochial note, at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference last spring, Stewart Brand talked about why geoengineering is important, to a rapt audience that included Bill Ford and Lee Scott.
David Keith
David Keith, a leading scholar of geoengineering who administers Gates’ $4.6 million grant with with Stanford climate scientist Ken Caldeira, also spoke at Brainstorm Green. So I was pleased to have a chance to reconnect with him at the excellent annual conference run by the Society of Environmental Journalists at the University of Montana in Missoula. I expected him to be pleased by the momentum gathering behind geoengineering lately, but I was wrong.
“I think things are moving too fast,” David told me. “Research programs can be killed by spending too much money too fast.” Besides, he said, people need time to wrap their head around geoenginnering. (Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post recently described it as playing God with the weather. ) “This is a topic—the first time people hear about it, they have wild ideas,” he said.
As I’ve written before – see this, this and this – geoengineering raises a host of thorny ethical, political and governance issues. Who gets to control the earth’s thermostat? Who decides if and when to deploy geoengineering techniques? Which should be used?
At SEJ, David was on a panel with Dane Scott, director of the center for ethics at the University of Montana, and journalist Eli Kintisch, author of a recent book about geoengineering called Hack the Planet. They all seemed to agree that the technology to cool the earth now exists—either by reflecting sunlight back into the sky, an approach known as solar radiation management, or by capturing carbon dioxide from the air. (Keith has a for-profit startup called Carbon Engineering designed to do just that.) They also agreed that the moral ethical issues surrounding geoengineering are daunting. [click to continue…]
Can a massive government spending program bring us closer to a clean energy economy and help fight climate change?
Absolutely, say some of the America’s most powerful CEOs and ex-CEOs, capitalists all.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Jeff Immelt of GE, Ursula Burns of Xerox, Tim Solso of Cummins and former CEOs Chad Holliday of DuPont and Norman Augustine of Lockheed Martin, along with venture capitalist John Doerr, came to Washington today to release a new report calling for the government to invest in energy innovation.
They’re calling for $16 billion a year to be spent on energy R&D. That’s more than three times the current Department of Energy research budget—although last year’s stimulus package included a one-time boost of about $37 billion for the DOE.
Yes, it’s a lot of money, but as John Doerr put it: “Americans today spend more money on potato chips than we do on energy R&D.” Yikes.
The CEOs held a press conference at the Newseum and then took their message to the White House, where they were scheduled to meet with President Obama. They were also headed for Capitol Hill, which energy-and-climate legislation has been stalled for months.
“Our job is to keep agitating and be a force for positive change,” Immelt said at the press event.
If America doesn’t get its clean-energy industry going, the GE chief said, “everybody else around the world will. This is a primary pillar of national competitiveness.”
Now let’s be clear—there is obviously some self-interest at work here. GE and Cummins, which makes diesel engines, would both benefit if the government helps research and finance clean energy. (See GE and Washington: Too cozy?) The same is true for Kleiner Perkins, which has invested in startups that need financing to get to the next level, companies like the biofuels firm Amyris and Bloom Energy, which makes fuel cells.
But this group was brought together by Gates, who is spending more time focusing on energy and climate, and it includes retired CEOs like Holliday and Augustine, who have no stake in government handouts or guarantees. Call me naïve if you like, but I think they they’re putting their time into this because they are worried about the future. As they write in the report:
the energy challenge is much worse than most people realize. The problem is already imposing a heavy burden on our nation—a burden that will become even more costly. The economic, national security, environmental and climate costs of our current energy system will condemn our children to a seriously constrained future unless America makes significant changes to current policies and trends.
Or, as Immelt put it at today’s event: “It’s really easy to be cynical about whether something can actually be done. But I’d say status quo for this country is a losing hand, right now. We’re falling behind some of our global competitors.”
To push their agenda forward, the business people formed a group called the American Energy Innovation Council. You can download their 32-page “business plan for America’s energy future” here, and watch them talking about energy. Here’s a short video in which their make their case:
Because I’m a skeptic about the ability of government to spend that much money smartly–my preference would be to find market mechanisms to invest capital in a variety of technologies, and keep politics out of it, or simply to put a steep price on carbon and let the chips fall where they may–I asked several of the CEOs why they had confidence that a centralized approach made sense.
Immelt noted that GE is in the health-care business as well, and said the National Institutes of Health has been very effective. That NIH spends about $30 billion a year, most of which supports research done at universities. “The NIH is a pretty good model,” he said. Partly because of work done at NIH, he said, the U.S. is the world’s leader in health care, at least when it comes to innovation and technology. The report notes that Gleevec, a cancer drug, came out of work done by an NIH-backed researcher. Presumably there are many more examples.
I also talked with John Doerr after the event. Naturally, being a venture capitalist who made his fortune from information technology (Kleiner funded Google, among others), he cited the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where the Internet got its start, as an example of successful, government-backed R&D.
“So much of America’s prosperity can be traced back to those investments,” Doerr said. “ARPANET essentially created the discipline of computer science. ARPANET funded radar. ARPANET created the computer-assisted design industry.”
There’s no reason, he said, that the DOE can’t do as well. “The national labs are already doing some really good work,” he said. They just need more sustained support. Government loans, he said, can play a key role in bringing proven technology to scale.
One final note: When I saw the names of climate scientist Ken Caldeira and geoengineering expert David Keith listed on the AEIC’s “technical review committee,” I asked Gates whether he thought some government funding should be used to research geoengineering. Gates has made small grants of his own to Caldeira and Keith to fund research into ways that humans can deliberately manipulate the climate to deal with the threat of global warming. (See Is Geoengineering Inevitable?)
While geoengineering isn’t mentioned in the report, Gates said it’s worth researching. “Fortunately,” he said, “we’re a long ways away from anyone would have to look at deploying” geoengineering technology. “But you’d want to be fully informed,” particularly if, as seems likely, other countries that fear climate change do their own geoengineering research.
There’s lots more at the American Energy Innovation Council website, including a model budget on how the $16 billion could eventually be spent–basic energy science ($2.6b), nuclear fission ($1.0b), nuclear fusion ($400 million), efficiency ($2.1b), renewables including solar, wind, bioenergy, geothermal and hydropower ($2.4b), fossil energy including clean coal ($1.3b), electricity transmission and distribution ($1.2b), as well as large-scale pilot and demonstration projects.
Said Chad Holliday: “We don’t see a better investment that our country can make in future generations.”
People will, of course, argue about the priorities. But isn’t it time that we get going?
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Jeff Immelt of GE, Ursula Burns of Xerox, Tim Solso of Cummins and former CEOs Chad Holliday of DuPont and Norman Augustine of Lockheed Martin, along with venture capitalist John Doerr, came to Washington today to release 
