The day before the inauguration, while Lady Gaga rehearsed “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Washington, DC, forest fires broke out in Sonoma, Santa Cruz and Ventura, California, shocking climatologists who have never witnessed the state’s fire season if extend until January. NASA had just announced that 2020 tied with 2016 for the hottest year on record. While the Covid-19 pandemic was driving city dwellers to look for places that seemed safer, safer – Vermont, Kansas, Idaho – the FBI began arresting Americans who had rebelled at the United States Capitol. Online sales of “preparation” equipment (gas masks, food preservation kits) were rapid.
Bill Gates was at his lakeside complex in Seattle, preparing for his next effort to save the planet from mass extinction. For 20 years, Gates has studied the two global afflictions of disease and poverty. These efforts led him to consider climate change and its unpleasant impact on civilization. This month, Knopf will publish his latest book, How to avoid a climate disaster. Surprisingly, given the state of the world, it is an optimistic and confident book, full of solutions to a problem that President Jimmy Carter began to alert in 1977.
President Joe Biden’s inauguration last month had a major influence on Gates’ prospects. An earlier draft of the book included measures for a second term for Donald Trump. In November, after the election, he edited these parts, including provisions on how state and foreign governments in the United States could explain the absence of federal support. Another Trump victory, says Gates, would have left us “holding my breath for four years and trying not to be sad”.
“I hope Joe Biden remains healthy,” he told me during our first virtual interview in December, while sitting in a glass-walled conference room at the Gates Ventures known as the aquarium, where he has been meeting and trusting Microsoft teams. platform during the pandemic.
Seattle’s Washington Lake glistens over his shoulder, where far below a distant motorboat leaves a trail when Gates takes his favorite stance, bent with an ankle over his knee in an ergonomic conference room chair. Gates, 65, has faced intractable problems, from trying to eradicate polio to epic rivalries with Steve Jobs and Google. The Microsoft co-founder also raised the alarm early on the need to prepare for a global pandemic. Climate change is yet another challenge that Gates served on his own plate.