Bill Gates: Young people needed to help solve energy problem

In an annual letter on Monday, Gates urged engineers and scientists to unlock the energy sources of the future. “It’s obvious that many women would spend more time doing paid work, starting businesses, or otherwise contributing to the economic well-being of societies around the world”.

Gates in the letter said the foundation was trying to bring the best scientists and thinking together, with the Centre for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation “to look at disease populations, mosquito control, diagnostics and vaccines”.

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.

Despite the ambitious task at hand, Gates says he believes that the world will have a clean energy breakthrough within the next 15 years. Given all the hours women in developing countries spend collecting water, for example, “if women had access to clean water, it changes everything about their time”.

The virus has spread to at least 32 countries and already a number of Britons have been infected, as well as cases in Ireland and wider Europe.

“It ends up robbing women of their potential”, Gates said in an interview. And still, he says, he worries that the effort so far is not equal to the challenge the planet faces in the coming decades. “And Redistribute it more evenly between women and men”.

“If I had to sum up history in one sentence it would be: ‘Life gets better – not for everyone all the time, but for most people most of the time.’ And the reason is energy”, he writes. “I guess I should do a Bing search and see if there are more uses of my name that I don’t know about”. The personal computer. The Internet. “When innovators work on urgent problems and deliver solutions to people in need, the results can be magical”.

Apple’s defenders – a cohort that includes most of the rest of the tech industry, as the Financial Times observes, including the Reform Government Surveillance group Microsoft belongs to – would argue Gates is oversimplifying the issue, especially with his hypothetical of a bank tying a ribbon around a hard drive.

He suggests that he’s excited about new ways to make wind and solar power available to people even at night, on overcast days, or in areas that don’t get much sun or wind ever – like through batteries that have huge storage capacity. “We need a massive amount of research into thousands of new idea – even ones that might sound a little insane – if we want to get to zero emissions by the end of this century”.

Gates applauded the Obama administration’s decision to lead the 19-nation Mission Innovation initiative to increase government spending on basic R&D. “In short, we need an energy miracle”. She says new types of stoves and other inventions could also help.