Gates On Climate Change: 'We Need A Miracle'

I do think with some tuning, the Breakthrough Energy Coalition group that we're putting together will have some characteristics of a venture fund to invest in these breakthrough ideas.

Are there riskier things along the lines of geoengineering that we should be trying at this point?

Geoengineering is, at best, a backup strategy to buy ourselves time, if we don't move quickly enough and things like the ice melting and methane release are happening in a nonlinear way that we don't expect. I support research on geoengineering and a dialogue on geoengineering. But it really is like a fire extinguisher that puts the flames out for decades as opposed to a real solution.

The word geoengineering also covers another class of things, like the free air capture of carbon. There is a Harvard professor named David Keith who has a startup company called Carbon Engineering that is working to build a prototype plant. The cost per ton you pull out of the air is still super high. And it is not clear that will ever become cheap.

(Gates is an investor in Carbon Engineering.)

That idea that energy companies tend to take a long time to develop and are not ultimately profitable seems like a hard sell for a youngster looking to make their way in the world.

Well, they have a long time frame. And the science is pretty cool and interesting. As a percentage of young people, we don't need a huge, huge percentage. We need less than, say, the NFL needs.

Science in general has so many spin-off benefits in terms of what we are going to do in materials and basic understanding. We have environmental problems other than climate change, too—species extinction and lots of things going on in the ocean. There is plenty of room for science that is not quite as daunting as being the person that makes the energy breakthrough.

Who would you hold up as a role model for teenagers these days?

I think Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page—some of the IT people that took a risk and did amazing work that has changed the world. A few dozen more people like Elon Musk would be great.