"The next administration must recognize not only that climate change is a real problem but also that we are not on course to solve it. The next president needs the courage to discard our current feel-good but ineffective solutions. Ending our reliance on the fossil fuels that have powered two centuries of economic growth will require an energy revolution."
"Many policies focus on solving global warming by investing in solar and wind, but over the coming quarter-century, these technologies will contribute only marginally to the solution. Moreover, they are not competitive now and will be mostly inefficient for at least 25 years."
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Excerpts:
- "Fixing climate change will require what philanthropist Bill Gates calls an “energy miracle“: a massive increase in research and development, by far the most effective way to find new breakthrough technologies cheap enough to outcompete fossil fuels. If that happens, we will have fixed global warming, because everyone will switch to cheaper energy sources."
- "Green energy innovation initiatives launched at the Paris Treaty talks by Gates, other business leaders and about 20 governments are an excellent start. Gates is investing $2 billion in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, and President Obama and fellow leaders have promised to double global green energy R&D to $30 billion annually in 2021."
- "But this is only a start. A panel of Nobel laureates for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate project found that we should not just double research funding but increase it more than six times over, to $100 billion a year."
- "Speaking of climate change in catastrophic terms easily makes us ignore bigger problems, including malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria and corruption."
