Bill Gates' climate plan and the lure of technosolutionism

🌎 The pandemic experience is reason to take this debate beyond the binary.

Mar 19, 2021

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Bill Gates has been thinking about climate change.

A new book ensued, ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’, which received quite a bit of coverage recently (TRF + Devex + Al Jazeera + WSJ + Politico).

His basic argument is that in order to achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions, investment in technological innovations is needed to slash emissions in sectors like steel, cement, and agriculture.

According to Leah Stokes from MIT Tech Review:

He slices pollution into sectors by the size of their footprints—working his way from electricity, manufacturing, and agriculture to transportation and buildings. It’s helpful for distinguishing between the bigger technological problems (cement) and the smaller ones (airplanes).

Without the benefit of being a fly on the wall at the Gates Foundation headquarters, this is an imaginary account of how the thought process unfolded: start with the usual Gates angle of focusing on how technology can solve world problems, in this case “the fiendishly difficult problem of how to further global development while reducing emissions”; combine with a coolly analytical way of approaching it, for example breaking down sectors of the economy by contribution to industrial emissions, to pick out those that make up the largest chunks; highlight sectors that are overlooked, for that splash of unique insight that will grab attention. And there you have it—a breakthrough plan.

Fictions aside, this is a rational way to look at the problem, and it carries the allure of simplicity. That kind of approach tends to work best on paper; less so in the ‘real world’. And this didn’t go unnoticed by commentators: while the book was making headlines, I observed a number of experts well versed in climate policy and politics collectively roll their eyes at Gates’ solutionism approach.

Here’s Leah Stokes again, with a succinct take on the criticism:

A lot of the necessary technology already exists. By focusing on technological innovation, Gates underplays the material fossil-fuel interests obstructing progress. Politics, in all its messiness, is the key barrier to progress on climate change.

Zahra Moloo was more scathing in this piece in Africa is a Country, which argues that Gates’ approach amounts to a strategy that perpetuates capitalism:

Indeed, when it comes to problems like climate change, the COVID pandemic, global health or pretty much anything, Gates seems to believe that technology fixes will offer magic bullet solutions. This ideology—it is indeed an ideology—is termed “solutionism” by Evgeny Morozov. In its simplest form, Morozov writes, solutionism “holds that because there is no alternative (or time or funding), the best we can do is to apply digital plasters to the damage. Solutionists deploy technology to avoid politics; they advocate ‘post-ideological’ measures that keep the wheels of global capitalism turning.

This is no longer a fringe view, incidentally. Case in point: an interview published by the New Scientist this week, in which former Bank of England governor Mark Carney puts his weight behind calls to rethink capitalism in order to tackle the climate crisis.

Back to Gates: I see the negative reactions by commentators as a healthy and well-founded scepticism about the pitfalls of technological solutions, which I’ve written about before. Even if we see deploying technology as a way of avoiding messy politics, as Moloo asserts, we still can’t avoid the politics—because deployment of technologies does often come with power dynamics, winners and losers, assumptions about the nature of the problem to be solved. Beyond industry, for example, emissions are tied up with the development infrastructure countries choose to invest in—and making the right choices on that front is pressing for parts of the Global South that have already experienced climate change impacts for some time.

But even if it's not consciously intended as a way to keep the wheels of capitalism turning, Gates’ approach is at the very least a tacit acceptance that those wheels will keep turning in the way that they are—with the implication that we must work within that framework—and it’s that mindset which is a fundamental obstacle to change.

Still, there is a counter-argument. Take the example of vaccines—for which Gates has also been accused of technosolutionism—and more specifically vaccines in this pandemic. They are as close as it gets to a silver bullet. Our ticket out of the depths of a debilitating crisis.

The technology solution doesn't appear magically, nor is it going to solve the COVID crisis unilaterally. Developing and deploying vaccines has involved unusually singular political focus and a mammoth effort—pre-existing investment into R&D; unprecedented collaboration, cutting red tape to speed up the normal course of development and regulatory approval; concerted efforts to get past deployment issues.

It's also revealed some of the problems of relying on technology to this extent, including ways that deployment can intersect with politics: how power accumulates with those who develop and can afford it; how skewed access can sink people and places into deeper inequality; how they can't solve a problem on their own—we still need other public health measures such as testing, distancing, surveillance.

But vaccines remain a technological tool with a strong and decisive impact on this health crisis.

In this light, the experience of the pandemic begs the question: can we afford to dismiss Gates’ argument—does dismissing it outright deprive the world of potentially powerful ways to tackle climate change?

A more fruitful strategy to achieve the goal of slashing emissions might be to engage with the politics tied up with it. And this should involve resisting the temptation to turn the debate over Gates’ technological solutions into a binary choice of either completely embracing, or completely dismissing it.

A final note from the week’s soundtrack 🌎

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