A Dire Warning About the End of Human Civilization

Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.

Trofim Maximov, a scientist who studies permafrost’s contribution to climate change, was seated next to me in the Antonov, shouting directions to the pilot in the cockpit. Once a month, Maximov charters the plane in order to measure the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere above Yakutia. He described the thawing permafrost as a kind of feedback loop: the release of greenhouse gases causes warmer temperatures, which, in turn, melt the permafrost further. “It’s a natural process,” he told me. “Which means that, unlike purely anthropogenic processes”—say, emissions from factories or automobiles—“once it starts, you can’t really stop it.”

Gates: Well, in providing energy we’ve had coal-mining accidents, natural gas pipelines blow up, you know, particulates causing bad health. And yes, nuclear, to get that to be used broadly, we need a completely new generation where it’s inherently safe because there’s no high pressurant. So that fourth-generation, designed-from-scratch nuclear is what a company called TerraPower is working on, and the demo plant that’s been done will prove out whether that can work or not.

Brancaccio: And you have an interest in that. Some of these newer approaches to generating nuclear power require enriched fuel, enriched uranium, and that worries people worried about the fuel getting into the wrong hands around the world.

Gates: That’s right. You always want to make sure that it’s never a source of weapons material. Eventually, you could move away from enriched uranium and just breed in the reactor itself. But, yes, nuclear has lots of challenges, but so does every other path. And because climate change is so important, we need to pursue many paths to make sure we actually get a solution because 30 years is a very short period of time.

Brancaccio: And to be clear, you actually have an interest in a company, TerraPower, that is trying to do work in this area with a new generation of nuclear power.

Bill Gates: That’s right. Because of my interest in climate, I got that going as a potential solution. You know, I don’t know that it will work, or even if it works that the public will accept it. But, you know, along with investing in many storage companies, raising the odds of solving climate is worth taking big risks if it proves out to be super-, supersafe.

Wyoming’s First Nuclear Facility to be Located in Kemmerer

Gates seems to have well-rounded opinions


Brancaccio: Can I ask why your goal — you make it very clear in the book — why is your goal net zero? I mean, you must have told your people a million times over the years, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” But you want zero, as in none, nada, zip. Wouldn’t phasing down our carbon dioxide and carbon production be more reasonable than setting success at zero?

Gates: If you don’t mind all the corals dying and Miami Beach disappearing and island countries being underwater and farmers near the equator starving and trying to migrate up to northern latitudes. You know, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years. So if you have positive emissions, you’re driving the temperature up on an ongoing basis. And that’s more crop failures, more days humans can’t go outside. It gets pretty extreme, and those natural ecosystems won’t come back.

Gates seems to have well-rounded opinions