Microsoft founder Bill Gates explained to the BBC that it’s not hypocritical for him to fly private jets. He funds Climeworks, a business that does “direct air capture that far exceeds my family’s carbon footprint.”
Furthermore, he told the BBC, he spends “billions of dollars on . . . climate innovation.”
Gates was interviewed in Kenya where he was looking at farming and malaria, reports Anman Frangoul for CNBC. He also told BBC that he thinks the wealthy countries should reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to zero and look for ways to help low- and middle-income countries do the same.
Developed countries need to innovate in reducing emissions so “they can turn to the middle-income countries and say, ‘OK, you know—India being a good example—here’s how you make steel, here’s how you make cement’.
“For the low-income countries, as you get rich, you’re much more resilient against climate disasters and so improving . . . those economies through health, education, agriculture is . . . what we owe to the low income countries.”
Image of a private jet at Sun Valley, Idaho, is by Thomas Hawk and licensed by Creative Commons.
That’s certainly not equitable: the rest of us take the bus, and he uses a charter jet. Bernie Sanders has a solution for that, of course: “There should be no billionaires.” That would fix high-fliers like Gates.