But is he the right person for the job?
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In their annual letter for their foundation this year, the Gates’s expand on these two wishes in a playful note addressed to high school students. The theme of this year’s letter: “If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” The goal is to inspire an invention to bring down carbon emissions and light up unelectrified parts of the continent safely. “And by installing special new power lines we could make even more use of solar and wind power”.
In their letter, they even go on to describe how, though nearly everyone craves more time and energy, the words hold a different meaning for those in “rich countries” and those in “the world’s poorest families”.
“I’m sorry to say this, but if you think that, you’re wrong”. The most surprising statistic he found during the course of his research, he revealed, is that the amount of electricity consumed per person in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, has decreased.
They’ve made a tradition of releasing an annual letter on philanthropy. On much of the globe, she wrote, responsibilities for maintaining a home, raising children and caring for the elderly still fall primarily on women and girls, sometimes keeping them from education and paid work.
A rallying cry for urgencyThe young people the couple spoke to in Kentucky live in Appalachia – a region of the USA where poverty is high and many families work in coal mines.
Gates says his wife is particularly active on issues such improving paternity leave time, which companies such as Facebook have recently improved (in light of founder Mark Zuckerberg becoming a father).
Gates is also adamant that scientific solutions to our warming planet must come from a partnership between government agencies and the private sector, a plan that he feels would have bipartisan support given that in the past such collaborations landed humans on the moon and created the Internet. “You might just have the answer”, Gates writes.
In a separate interview to promote the letter with news agency Bloomberg, Gates provided more detail on how a global clean energy R&D push could be orchestrated and offered an insight into why he is so confident a breakthrough will materialise.
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Critics of Gates’s ideas about energy say his focus on the need for advanced technology, beyond today’s capabilities, ignores the subsidies directed to fossil fuels today and downplays the last few years of rapidly dropping renewable costs. Changing that, Gates writes, will require both innovation – “clean energy, better roads, and running water” – as well as a broader challenge to gender-defined roles.
