Bill Gates Wants In On Congress' Big Climate Infrastructure Push (theverge.com) 80
If the bipartisan infrastructure bill moves forward, Bill Gates says his climate investment fund will match $1.5 billion in government funds and put that money towards projects that are developing green technologies. The Verge reports: Breakthrough Energy, Gates' climate fund, laid out four different uses for the money: developing green hydrogen fuels, sustainable aviation fuels, energy storage, and technologies that take carbon dioxide out of the air. It said on Twitter that the money could "fast-track" commercial demonstration projects across the US. "Critical for all these climate technologies is to get the costs down and to be able to scale them up to a pretty gigantic level," Gates told The Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report on the announcement. "You'll never get that scale up unless the government's coming in with the right policies, and the right policy is exactly what's in that infrastructure bill."
The funding depends on whether a bipartisan infrastructure package ultimately becomes law. The bill still needs to pass the House after it passed in the Senate earlier this week. The package includes $25 billion for the Department of Energy for public-private partnerships, The Wall Street Journal reports. If the bill becomes law, Breakthrough Energy can apply for matching funds. If the bill fails, Breakthrough Energy could funnel its $1.5 billion toward projects in Europe and Asia instead, The Wall Street Journal says. Breakthrough Energy tweeted that it wants to work with the Energy Department to spur up to $15 billion in investments in technologies that might be able to help the US bring its carbon dioxide emissions down to net-zero. "Both Breakthrough Energy and the Biden administration have prioritized developing so-called 'direct air capture' tech," adds The Verge. "The infrastructure package includes $3.5 billion for four proposed regional hubs across the US, each with the ability to capture at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually (about as much as 120,000 US homes might generate from their energy use in a year). There's billions more in funding in the bill to build out a new network of pipelines and storage for captured CO2."
The report also notes that there's "$8 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure package to develop four regional hubs for 'clean hydrogen,' another focus of Breakthrough Energy's work."
The funding depends on whether a bipartisan infrastructure package ultimately becomes law. The bill still needs to pass the House after it passed in the Senate earlier this week. The package includes $25 billion for the Department of Energy for public-private partnerships, The Wall Street Journal reports. If the bill becomes law, Breakthrough Energy can apply for matching funds. If the bill fails, Breakthrough Energy could funnel its $1.5 billion toward projects in Europe and Asia instead, The Wall Street Journal says. Breakthrough Energy tweeted that it wants to work with the Energy Department to spur up to $15 billion in investments in technologies that might be able to help the US bring its carbon dioxide emissions down to net-zero. "Both Breakthrough Energy and the Biden administration have prioritized developing so-called 'direct air capture' tech," adds The Verge. "The infrastructure package includes $3.5 billion for four proposed regional hubs across the US, each with the ability to capture at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually (about as much as 120,000 US homes might generate from their energy use in a year). There's billions more in funding in the bill to build out a new network of pipelines and storage for captured CO2."
The report also notes that there's "$8 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure package to develop four regional hubs for 'clean hydrogen,' another focus of Breakthrough Energy's work."
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Does urban dictionary pay you for traffic to their site or something?
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https://summit.news/2021/08/12... [summit.news]
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In a world of nearly 8 billion people, in a country of around 330 million, 435 Members of the House of Representatives, 100 members of the senate. Are we incapable of working one problem at a time?
Also there seems to have a lack of "Leaders" who can deal with crisis management. Where the skill of taking advantage of the tools obtained to help one problem that were forced on us do to a crisis, can then be leveraged to help an other one.
The Pandemic had created an insurance in working form home, where many
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> Working from home, I don't need crap that are mostly status symbols,
Working from the office no one gives a shit that you wasted $3K on a suit / watch / etc. either. Anyone who spends > $3K on a suit/watch/etc. has more money then brains and is a fucking idiot. You could have invested that money instead.
> however If I were to be equipped with the Crap, they will deal with me as an expert,
If you want to work for someone who thinks wasting $3K on a suit is going to magically make you more producti
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Give the conspiracy theorists some time. They'll come up with something.
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Hopefully he Succeeds (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm as critical as anyone on /. regarding Gates, how he acquired his fortune, and how the Gates Foundation is a big tax shelter. However, the items on that list are extremely important to me because they're extremely important to the future of this planet. Too many people think "going green" means using paper straws or using a Telsa that gets power from the local fossil fuel power plant. Those four items really are the most important steps to tackling the climate issue, and sustainable aviation fuels have been ignored by practically everyone because it's just so damn inconvenient (in fact, global recreational travel is something we should stop doing not only because of the CO2 produced by planes, but because every time a "hidden treasure" makes waves on social media, its ecosystem is soon trashed).
Having said all that, Gates is still a piece of trash and if assholes like him actually paid taxes (real progressive taxes that prevented them from becoming so obscenely wealthy in the first place) then we wouldn't need their charity for the governments of the world to tackle major problems like climate change.
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I hate to reply to myself but there is a fifth item Gates is overlooking: development patterns. Because of our suburban development pattern that creates unnecessary urban sprawl from every city in the U.S., we use an excessive amount of concrete which both creates a ton of CO2 and creates a lot of heat just by existing. We also tear down a lot of green land because of this and then use more fuel to get places because everything is so spread out. Suburban living is just as problematic as the other items on t
Re: Hopefully he Succeeds (Score:2)
re sustainable fuels for flight, that was something overlooked in the talk of the shape of Bezos rocket, the green fuel, it only outputs water. (hydrogen and oxygen fuel) That actually translates to increased capacity out in space, it has power to use hydrolysis to convert space ice into fuel. With some nuclear reactors on a water moon like Europa it becomes a gas station for rockets. So there is a sense of reaching levels with renewables not attainable without, if it can be tapped.
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Maybe you can vote for a zealot? Or an asset tax.
So sorry that you're under constant attack by lawless marauders, have been poisoned by polluters, have no remaining property and are on death's bed because of the 0% faith you have in government to solve any of those problems.
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Isn't Gates one of the supporters for higher taxes on the 1%?
Re: Hopefully he Succeeds (Score:1)
You should really look into what the Gates Foundation actually does in the name of philanthropy.
It is basically modern day colonialism, the fund buys the land for so-called equitable farming, then continues to own it and tell the farmers what they must produce, regardless of whether it is feasible or productive or improves their livelihoods, because they believe it is environmentally sound. Then when they realize it destroyed the land, they simply shut down any information about it. Schools funded through t
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I don't disagree with anything you're saying. It is indeed worse than the "tax shelter" I described it as, but I try to avoid going down that rabbit hole or I veer way off topic. When I said I hope he succeeds I truly mean it—but I still have cynical expectations for the reasons you mention, among others.
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Thing is $1.5bn is not a "big" investment. $1.5 trillion would be.
Gates seems to be wasting a lot of his money on nuclear too, suckered in by the promise of smaller and somehow completely safe reactors. That money could buy a lot of wind turbines that will start removing CO2 emissions TODAY.
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I'm as critical as anyone on /. regarding Gates, how he acquired his fortune, and how the Gates Foundation is a big tax shelter.
HAHAHAHAHA no.
However, the items on that list are extremely important to me because they're extremely important to the future of this planet.
Hydrogen fuel is wrongheaded bullshit for which there is no need. And if history is any indication, Gates will fuck up everything with which he is involved. His foundation has eradicated zero diseases because of their Big Pharma whore IP policies, and its influence on education has been overwhelmingly negative. We need to be taxing the rich, not just letting them decide how all the money is spent when they didn't build that anyway.
Having said all that, Gates is still a piece of trash and if assholes like him actually paid taxes (real progressive taxes that prevented them from becoming so obscenely wealthy in the first place) then we wouldn't need their charity for the governments of the world to tackle major problems like climate change.
No, it's worse than that. The assholes like him can not and wil
You should re-read the summary then. (Score:2)
developing green hydrogen fuels, sustainable aviation fuels, energy storage, and technologies that take carbon dioxide out of the air
All those things are a single, well-researched, developed and OPERATIONAL process (plus electrolysis for H2) - the Sabatier reaction. [wikipedia.org]
There's nothing to develop.
Audi already does the whole thing. [audi-mediacenter.com]
I.e. Either Gates is INCREDIBLY uninformed - or he's looking for a way to inject himself and his finances (and future patents) into future government funding to re-develop a non-not-invented-here adaptation of a 19th century chemical process.
Hey, remember that time, not so long ago, when he stepped in and made AstraZ [wikipedia.org]
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Except at scale half of the energy to make hydrogen from water
is wasted. Sure there are cute tabletop lab experiments that do better, that's been true for decades. That's why hydrogen comes from fossil fuel. Scratch hydrogen off the list please, there is reason hydrogen cars went nowhere.
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As I've mentioned in another reply, I'm also pretty cynical about this turning into real results. However, I think it's important to distinguish the difference between developing these things and researching them.
No, it's bad stuff and needs to fail (Score:2)
Spending billions to make "capture" facilities that will only trap a million tons of carbon a year each? When the USA emits over six thousand million tons a year? No, that's money down the toilet that won't even make noticeable difference. Gates is an idiot who can't do math. Spend the billions on actual clean energy sources.
God, moron couldn't write an OS, could only steal or appropriate other's software, and now he thinks he knows how to spend money on climate issues? No he doesn't.
Won't matter the US government's (Score:2, Flamebait)
The US is bankrupt and the governments ability to hide it is fast disappearing.
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As long as people still value the dollar, the U.S. will never be bankrupt. While they should be cautious with spending to avoid too much inflation (there are a lot of weird variables right now so it's hard to predict what will happen), if the U.S. government doesn't take advantage of its ability to spend more than exists in the treasury then they are just failing to realize the potential of the economy.
We definitely should have cut back on spending between '14-'20, raised taxes, and raised interest rates. T
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"As long as"
Yes. The obvious implication being that anything to the contrary in the foreseeable future is extremely unlikely. I apologize, I forgot that on /. I must always be overly explicit.
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deficit spending is running @ almost 1 trillion a qtr now. And the only talk coming out of Washington is about mountains of new spending. The US is bankrupt and the governments ability to hide it is fast disappearing.
Not only spending, but tax cuts as well. The US has needed the opposite - increased taxes for a long time.... In bad times, deficit spending is OK - but that should be balanced by paying back in good times - e.g. the last 10 years or so, minus the pandemic where deficit spending again would make sense.
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deficit spending is running @ almost 1 trillion a qtr now.
The US GDP in 2020 was $21 trillion for comparison. That $1T doesn't sound so scary in that light, does it?
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In what universe - Never mind that GDP and government revenue are not the same and one might argue that over some ranges of reasonable taxation for a 'free society' they might even be inversely linked.
If an establised business came to you and said listen we are taking a _quarterly_ loss but its only equal to %4.5 of our _annual_ total revenues really nothing to worry about... I am totally sure your response would be something other than "great let me get my checkbook how much can I invest!"
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If an establised business came to you and said listen we are taking a _quarterly_ loss but its only equal to %4.5 of our _annual_ total revenues really nothing to worry about... I am totally sure your response would be something other than "great let me get my checkbook how much can I invest!"
I invested in Moderna in early 2020 when they cost $50 and had no income. So why not? A transient 4.5% loss can be perfectly OK and a good opportunity to invest.
That's rich (Score:2, Troll)
The man created a company that created some of the most inefficient personal computer software that's been wasting countless billions of CPU cycles and kilowatt-hours of electrical power for decades.
On the other hand, to his credit, he didn't create the insane current infrastructure of decentralized micro-services we all know today as "web 2.0", that's wasting infinitely more CPU cycles and electrical power [fullfact.org] than Windows ever did. Kill Big Data and you'll do something good for the planet for sure.
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...he didn't create the insane current infrastructure of decentralized micro-services we all know today as "web 2.0", that's wasting infinitely more CPU cycles and electrical power [fullfact.org] than Windows ever did. Kill Big Data and you'll do something good for the planet for sure.
So, you are one of those BS posters who makes a bizarre claim and then provides a link to make it seem more credible that actually undermines or refutes the claim, assuming that most people will not bother to click on the link.
The link reveals that in 2009 Google used 0.3 watt-hours per Google search, that is the only information about web energy consumption. Since Google does 3.5 billion searches in a day that means that: 3.5e9*0.3/24 = 4.45e7, in other words one 45 MW power plant provides all the power Go
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If we did that, then where will the billions of tech workers who have no usable skills find a job?
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HP Technical Support
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Sorry, I didn't mean outsourced tech workers.
$1 trillion on new nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now that's a plan I could get behind. As I just bitched about in my previous post, the problem with Biden's infrastructure plan is that it lacks imagination. It's spending a whole lot of money without resulting in the type of massive change that such money can buy.
NO! (Score:4, Informative)
Massive waste of money!
For less $ you could build free replacements for the top 5% worst polluting power stations in the world; could even be new coal. A study was recently done looking at pretty much all of them and I think it was 70+% of all energy production CO2 or something amazing like that for just the worst ones. Fix the big flaws 1st and not even ideally fix them. FAST not a 10 year building construction project for a nuclear plant next decade... and not that next next gen nuclear that never happens in 5 years; like the fusion we've been waiting for a solution in 5 years for the last 40.
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Perfect is the enemy of good. Which side are you on?
I did not say to ban nuclear just that it's a massive waste of money and if you think your unrealistic plan to nuke money on one of the most expensive possible solutions has any chance... then you are not serious; to be polite about it.
Forget Germany, they are tiny, rich, responsible, and functional - in other words, they are unlike MOST the planet! As you should know, nukes take forever to build and cost a lot; meanwhile a small number of power stations
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Do not let the magical(100% renewable) be the enemy of the great(nuclear). I am on the side of lets decarbonize the entire worlds electrical and transportation sectors.
And your cost argument is bogus. Germany failed to decarbonize with wind and solar. If they had built nuclear they would be 100% clean right now. You do not have a viable solution to the intermittency problem. Germanys solution is to continue burning coal, and Russian gas.
And why did you shutdown nuclear instead of coal plants?
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It is always the same thing.
Here in California we try to reduce at home water use due to draught. However humans already use less 20% of it, with crops like Alfalfa using the largest share. But blaming individual homes is easier than taking on big agriculture (not talking about the small farms which too are struggling).
In terms of emissions, transportation takes the lion's share. Yet, we don't fix the fundamental problem (walkable cities, working public transportation, God forbid: housing near work!), but p
Hey Bill, we (Score:2)
a non paywalled link would be polite (Score:1)
A good private iniciative will be much effiicent! (Score:1)
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It would be nice to see some of them actually just do it themselves regardless. After all we've been hearing for years about how the private sector is so much more efficient etc.
Don't forget to invite Al Gore! (Score:1)
That guy flew all over the world in his private jet telling the world how we should care about the environment.
Crony capitalism at its worst... (Score:4, Insightful)
boldly, right in the face of the public.
Lemme see... Bill Gates backs the government mandating a bunch of stuff that would make no economic sense without the associated mandates, then he announces he'll invest in it. Many others in society have previously NOT invested in this stuff because they saw insufficient evidence of a path to profitability, but the moment the Biden administration changes the game and makes these businesses artificially viable, Gates who has billions of dollars available at the drop of a hat will jump in with his cash. Government manipulation of markets is improper, and NEVER goes by without bad effects, whether done by left wingers or right wingers.
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It's as if the whole point of building climate-viable infrastructure might not be maximizing profits.
The utter gall!
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LoB
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Government manipulation of markets is improper
This idea is ridiculous, put down Atlas Shrugged and join the party. Everyone from Adam Smith onwards has noticed that governments have to manipulate markets in order for them to be as close to free and fair as possible. If you simply let the invisible hand run things, it will fistfuck The People every time.
Or what? (Score:2)
What is Bill saying? If the government stumps up cash then he's going to help fix the place where he lives and if they don't he's just going to hold onto the money? That'll show them!
Bill Gates: because being a fucking twat is a life-long journey.
trust Bill Gates? (Score:2)
Something tests me Bill Gates can not be trusted. I wonder why.
LoB
Maybe not so green (Score:3)
"$8 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure package to develop four regional hubs for 'clean hydrogen,'
Creating this "clean" hydrogen may not be as clean [marketwatch.com] as people think. It takes energy to produce anything, and when it comes to separating hydrogen from methane, it's an energy intensive process [wiley.com].
Not to mention the storage facilities needed to hold that hydrogen have to be specially designed because hydrogen gas will escape just about any container it's put in [umich.edu].
Apply for a job (Score:2)
Flying without damaging his rep (Score:2)
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Yeah, and let's not forget that other hoax, "All of the Big Tobacco Money behind cigarettes causing cancer." Good thing we have brilliant perfessers like you do expose those lies!
OH GOODIE! BILL IS HERE (Score:1)