Gates has talked about what has motivated him to donate the way he has, its no mystery. He says he was gobsmacked by how little money was devoted to the health problems experienced by poor countries and that comparatively small investments could have enormous impact.

Also, I think you are underestimating how terrible malaria is

> Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that in 2020, 241 million clinical cases of malaria occurred, and 627,000 people died of malaria, most of them children in Africa. Because malaria causes so much illness and death, the disease is a great drain on many national economies. Since many countries with malaria are already among the poorer nations, the disease maintains a vicious cycle of disease and poverty.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/faqs.html

I mean, that's bad, but those numbers aren't anything compared to what climate change is going to do. If the population of Earth drops by a billion over the next hundred years, that's 10M a year, on average. (I recognize that I'm not differentiating between premature deaths and a lack of replacement births, but still.)

Why do you think climate change will kill a billion people over the next century? Not saying you're wrong, just bewildered that you are able to make any kind of prediction on this at all.

Not sure where they got the number from, but every year the climates have become a tad more warmer with summer temperatures routinely being closer to 50C in India.

I've been hearing nearly all my life that coastal areas like Bangladesh, Mumbai, Kolkata, orissa etc are at a severe risk of drowning due to rising sea levels.

I've experienced first hand water scarcity in many parts of the country, but more prominently near the Deccan plateau due to rainfall failures and lakes, rivers drying up as a consequence of exploitation leading to crop failures.

Their 1 billion number doesn't seem too far off though if we take into account not many hospitable places have measures controlling resource usage and exploitation.

I mean we should also recognize the effect it's currently having. Not just what the immediate future holds in the form of many climate catastrophes. I've noticed that, in general, the younger someone is the more concerned they are about this immediate present and future of climate problems.

He's using capitalism rather than philanthropy on climate, and there's not really a shortage of capital in the climate space, its an incentives problem. Capitalism is of more limited use in the health of poor people, which is why he has focused his philanthropy there.

I think malaria is absolutely worthy of the investment. Malaria is one of those issues that isn't top of the mind for much of the Western world, but is one of the absolute major killers worldwide, right now. It's also relatively a low hanging fruit in terms of return for money spent vs improvements in human well being. Climate Change is a big deal, but is it killing as many people on an annual basis as malaria, with a solution that benefits the majority of people affected for a few billion dollars?

In fact, one might say that the easiest bang for the Gates buck in terms of addressing climate change is pulling their anti-malaria funding. ;-)

As glib as that option might be, the people most affected by malaria are disproportionately the ones least contributing to Climate Change in the first place, and tend to live in regions most affected by CC. I'd imagine the Gates could get far more bang for their CC bucks by lobbying for revoking the EPA/FDA/OSHA/VA. A few billions in the right super PACs and CC might be reversed ;-)

> I'd imagine the Gates could get far more bang for their CC bucks by lobbying for revoking the EPA/FDA/OSHA/VA. A few billions in the right super PACs and CC might be reversed.

So, your claim is that if we didn't have the FDA or EPA, then we wouldn't have climate change? I haven't such a ridiculous claim in awhile. What's the logic here? Even disregarding the other Federal agencies that you seem to dislike, how does the end of the Environmental Protection Agency hinder climate change in any capacity whatsoever? Is this just sarcasm implying that if more people die due to the absence of these agencies, then there will be less of a collective carbon footprint?

> Is this just sarcasm implying that if more people die due to the absence of these agencies, then there will be less of a collective carbon footprint?

Yes - see the parent comment I was replying to.

Ah, I misunderstood. I apologize.

I wouldn't allocate money solely on the scale of the problem faced. I'd allocate it according to where it has the best utility. And several billion towards malaria is likely a much better outcome for humanity than a few billion towards climate change. It will move the needle more for on malaria than for climate change.

I guess it's a matter of personal preference. If I was rich to the point that I could focus entirely on having an impact instead of making money, I'd basically ask myself a variation of Hamming's questions (originally meant as advice for academic researchers: 1. What are the most important problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not?).

To maximize impact you again should spend money not on the hardest problems, but on those where the money has the biggest impact. It's the definition :)

Consider two problems: one makes everyone's life 5% better and costs $100 to solve. One makes lives 20% better and costs $1 trillion. You have $100. Where does your money have the biggest impact?

This is malaria and climate change.

Look up the Copenhagen Consensus, which is a project that tried to rank interventions: what would you do if you had $75bn to spend on a good cause?

The founder is a controversial figure with niche views on climate science, but the judging panel was solid (lots of Nobel Prizes etc). Global warming barely made the list. It's the biggest priority for us in the west, but billions of poorer people are more interested in tropical diseases, HIV, education, etc.

Look up breakthrough energy. He's investing a lot into climate.

Ok, thanks, I didn't know about that. 2B is a very decent amount of money. But it sounds more a VC that invests in highly risky, but ultimately profitable ventures. Carbon capture doesn't even feature in their wikipedia description (It invests in a variety of startup companies that are attempting to commercialize new concepts such as nuclear fusion, large-capacity batteries to store renewable energy, and microbe-generated biofuels).

My point is, if you're already willing to donate in the billions, why not use that money to literally pay people to find ways to capture the most amount of carbon, regardless of whether that's ever going to be profitable? 2 billion, let alone 50, will pay a lot of smart people's salaries plus expensive equipment for quite some time.

The ROI on this donation to stanford will be very similar to investing in carbon capture technology. I'll let you estimate that ROI.

My point is, see it as a donation, not an investment. You probably won't get richer by funding carbon capture, but you also won't get richer from having your name on a building on the Stanford campus.

Take a look at the current carbon capture tech and the potential carbon capture rates from existing technologies. We are orders of magnitudes off from what is needed. You will require a fusion (something Gates is already invested in) level advance to achieve meaningful carbon capture. 1B isn't nearly enough.

Ok, 1B isn't going to go very far there, but that's why I mentioned the Gates Foundation. That sort of money (50B+) could get us somewhere, and might inspire guys like John Doerr to chip in some more as well.

I mean dive deeper, they are funding carbon capture and currently no carbon capture anywhere close to profitability.

How many people die per year from natural disasters and where does that fit in the overall picture of human suffering? Take that figure and deduct by whatever amount is the natural baseline (since eliminating inclement weather is impossible). Fewer people die from natural disasters today than ever in human history and despite world population being at all time highs.

You can believe the hype about a particular issue being "the biggest problem facing humanity" or you can look at it with a sober analysis.

From your comment, I get the sense that you believe climate change isn't a top priority for humans.

I disagree, I hold the opinion that we humans are on course, and hold responsibility, for the sixth (current) mass extinction event. And that the cause of this has been human activity and our consumption habits [0].

Mass extinction, sounds sober, sounds like it might have an effect on humanity and human suffering on a global level, no? It may not be a concern if you are of the belief that humans _will not_ be among those included in this extinction event (and are wholly species-centered). I don't believe we will dodge the bullet of our own creation - it seems clear to me too few individuals are willing to change their habits to do. Let alone take the time to educate themselves on the topic.

Here are a collection of quotes in support of my argument, accompanied with citation:

"The overarching driver of species extinction is human population growth and increasing per capita consumption." [0]

"In the past 500 years, humans have triggered a wave of extinction, threat, and local population declines that may be comparable in both rate and magnitude with the five previous mass extinctions of Earth’s history." [1]

"Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century." [2]

"Our review lays out arguments clearly demonstrating that there is a biodiversity crisis, quite probably the start of the Sixth Mass Extinction." [3]

Does this sound to you like one of the biggest problems facing humanity? If not, according to your rigorous and sober analysis, what is?

Lastly, I'd like to know, where are you pulling "Fewer people die from natural disasters today than ever in human history" from?

-----

[0] "The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection". Science. 344 (6187): 1246752. [1] "Defaunation in the Anthropocene". Science. 345 (6195): 401–406. (2014). [2] "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice". BioScience. 67 (12): 1026–1028.(2017) [3] "The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?." Biological Reviews (2022).

Absolutely! I think there's a group of people who get sucked into the narrative of X being the world's largest problem, and then get really exasperated when people are working on anything other than X. They see inattention to X as almost an affront.

Substitute for X "climate change", "AI risk", "Nuclear risk", "Energy depletion". And interestingly the X's are mutually exclusive. So climate change maximalists and AI risk maximalists can be mutually exasperated at each other.

BTW, this is not to say one of the narratives is not true. But they can't all be the unique #1 problem.

I think Gates is interested in low hanging fruit where he knows his money can make an immediate and measurable impact at a large scale. Malaria is a good target because we know how to prevent Malaria. And realistically a lot of deaths can be saved with a relatively small amount of money, attention and coordination.

Energy is complicated and will take a lot more money to solve then he has.

The US government is already investing billions in carbon capture. Oil companies are also investing in this area. Coal companies are probably doing the same. I would guess Saudi Arabia is very interested in this area as well.

I don't think any rich companies or rich countries are spending much money on malaria. So Bill Gates probably feels like he can make a bigger difference there.

Goodluck convincing wealthy industrialized countries to do anything impactful when most of that wealth comes from exploiting the environment (or exporting it somewhere easier to exploit.)

Even a billionare will find himself running against trillion dollar interests trying to make real progress.

Eradicating malaria is a problem able to be sovlved.

if you were in that position i would hope that you would do some napkin math about the necessary scale of carbon capture. last i checked the most efficient process would require about 1000x the annual energy output of the world just to keep up with emissions.

it's an understudied area, research funding has the potential to go a long ways. eg coccolitophores are sparsely studied but have the potential for carbon capture at a scale not achievable by industrial facilities