Green Premiums have helped solar power plants—like this one near Copiapó, Chile, shown in July 2017—become cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels Jamey StillingsIDEASBY BILL GATES JANUARY 22, 2021 12:08 PM ESTGates is an entrepreneur and philanthropist and a co-founder of Microsoft. He is a co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of Breakthrough Energy. He is the author of How To Avoid a Climate Disaster, to be published Feb. 16.
Icame to focus on climate change indirectly—through the problem of energy poverty. In the early 2000s, I learned that about a billion people didn’t have reliable access to electricity and that half of them lived in sub-Saharan Africa. (The picture has improved since then, though today roughly 860 million people don’t have electricity.) In remote villages, Melinda and I met women and girls who spent hours every day collecting firewood so they could cook over an open flame in their homes. We met kids who did their homework by candlelight.
I thought about our foundation’s motto—“Everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life”—and how it’s hard to stay healthy if your local medical clinic can’t keep vaccines cold because the refrigerators don’t work. And it’s impossible to build an economy where everyone has job opportunities if you don’t have massive amounts of reliable, affordable electricity for offices, factories and call centers. I began to think about how the world could make energy affordable and reliable for the poor. But the more I learned, the more I came to understand the dilemma of energy and climate change: although the world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. In fact, we need to eliminate our emissions, all the way to zero.
The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That’s the disaster we have to prevent. To stop filling the tub—to get to zero—we have to understand everything we do to cause emissions. Did you brush your teeth this morning? The toothbrush probably contains plastic, which is made from petroleum, a fossil fuel. If you ate breakfast, the grains in your toast and cereal were grown with fertilizer, which releases greenhouse gases when it’s made. They were harvested by a tractor that was made of steel—which is made with fossil fuels in a process that releases carbon—and ran on gasoline. If you had a burger for lunch, as I do occasionally, raising the beef caused greenhouse-gas emissions—cows burp and fart methane—and so did growing and harvesting the wheat that went into the bun. In short, fossil fuels are practically everywhere.
Some sources of emissions, like electricity and cars, get lots of attention, but they’re only the beginning. The biggest contributor to climate change is manufacturing—making things like steel, cement and plastic—at 31% of global emissions. Second in line is producing electricity, at 27% of emissions; after that comes growing things like crops, at 19%. Transportation comes in fourth, at 16%, followed by the emissions from heating and cooling buildings. These percentages are less important than the overall point: any comprehensive plan for climate change has to account for all the activities that cause emissions, and that’s much more than making electricity and driving cars. Unless you’re looking across all five areas—how we plug in, make things, grow things, move around, and keep cool and stay warm—you’re not going to solve the problem.
It’s also crucial to understand how much getting to zero will cost. Right now, the primary reason the world emits so much greenhouse gas is that fossil- fuel technologies are by and large the cheapest energy sources available. In part, that’s because their prices don’t reflect the environmental damage they inflict. In other words, moving our immense energy economy from “dirty,” carbon-emitting technologies to ones with zero emissions will cost something. These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums. For example, the average retail price for a gallon of jet fuel in the U.S. over the past few years is $2.22. Advanced biofuels for jets, to the extent they’re available, cost on average $5.35 per gallon. The Green Premium for zero-carbon fuel, then, is the difference between these two prices, which is $3.13. That’s a premium of more than 140%.
During every conversation I have about climate change, Green Premiums are in the back of my mind. Once you’ve figured Green Premiums for all the big zero-carbon options, you can start having serious discussions about trade-offs. How much are we willing to pay to go green? Will we buy advanced biofuels that are twice as expensive as jet fuel? Will we buy green cement that costs twice as much as the conventional stuff? I mean “we” in the global sense. It’s not just a matter of what Americans and Europeans can afford. We need the premiums to be so low that everyone will be able to decarbonize. That’s the solution to the dilemma of providing affordable energy for everyone without causing a climate disaster. Green Premiums help us answer questions like these:
Which zero-carbon options should we be deploying now? Answer: the ones with a low Green Premium, or no premium at all. In the U.S., electricity is a good example. The Green Premium is the additional cost of getting all our power from non-emitting sources, including wind, solar, nuclear power, and coal- and natural-gas-fired plants equipped with devices that capture the carbon they produce. Changing the entire U.S. electricity system to zero-carbon sources would cost roughly 15% more than what most people pay now. That adds up to a relatively low Green Premium of $18 a month for the average home, and it’s due largely to substantial drops in the cost of solar infrastructure over the past decade. Europe is similarly well situated.
These low Green Premiums mean that renewable energy sources like solar and wind can play a substantial role in getting the U.S. and Europe to zero. In fact, we need them to. We should be deploying renewables quickly wherever it’s economical to do so, and building the infrastructure to let us make the most of them—things like power lines capable of carrying clean electrons from wherever they’re created to wherever they’re needed.
Unfortunately, few countries are as lucky as the U.S. in this regard. They might have some sun but no wind, or some wind but little year-round sun, or not much of either. And they might have low credit ratings that make it hard to finance big investments in new power plants. So, they’ll have to get their electricity from other zero-carbon options.
Here’s another question the Green Premiums can answer: Where do we need to focus our research and development spending, our early investors and our best inventors? Answer: wherever we decide Green Premiums are too high. For example, advanced bio-fuels cost 600% more than the bunker fuel that cargo ships run on. No shipping business is going to voluntarily raise its fuel costs by that much.
In cases like this, there’s an opening for new technologies, companies and products that make it affordable. Countries that excel at research and development can create new products, make them more affordable and export them to the places that can’t pay current premiums. Then no one will have to argue about whether every nation is doing its fair share to avoid a climate disaster; instead, countries and companies will race to create and market the affordable innovations that help the world get to zero.
There’s one last benefit to the Green Premium concept: it can act as a measurement system that shows us the progress we’re making toward stopping climate change. What would it cost to use the zero-carbon tools we have now? Which innovations will make the biggest impact on emissions? The Green Premiums provide the answer by measuring the cost of getting to zero, sector by sector, and highlighting where we need to innovate.
Leaders around the world will need to articulate a vision for how we can lower the Green Premiums and make the transition to zero carbon. That vision can, in turn, guide the actions of people and businesses. Government officials can write rules regarding how much carbon that power plants, cars and factories are allowed to emit. They can adopt regulations that shape financial markets and clarify the risks of climate change to the private and public sectors. They can invest more in scientific research and write the rules that determine how quickly new products can get to market. And they can help fix some problems that the market isn’t set up to deal with—including the hidden costs that carbon-emitting products impose on the environment and on humans.
In the U.S., states can play a crucial role in demonstrating innovative technologies and policies, such as using their utilities and road-construction projects to drive technologies like long-duration storage and low-emissions cement into the market. And cities can do things like can buy electric buses, fund more charging stations for electric vehicles, use zoning laws to increase density so people travel less between work and home, and potentially restrict access to their roads by fossil-fuel-powered vehicles.
But you don’t have to be a politician or a policymaker to have an impact. If you’re a voter, you can hold your elected officials accountable for having plans to reduce Green Premiums and put us on a path to zero. As a consumer—or someone running a business—you can also send a signal to the market that people want zero-carbon alternatives and are willing to pay for them. When you pay more for an electric car, a heat pump or a plant-based burger, you’re saying, “There’s a market for this stuff. We’ll buy it.”
With the threat of climate change upon us, it can be hard to be hopeful about the future. But as my friend Hans Rosling, the late global health advocate and educator, wrote in his amazing book Factfulness: “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.” When we have a fact-based view of climate change, we can see that we have some of the things we need to avoid a climate disaster, but not all of them. We can see what stands in the way of deploying the solutions we have and developing the breakthroughs we need. And we can see all the work we must do to overcome those hurdles.
COMMENT #1: I understand and appreciate your skepticism about conspiracies. However, before the covid attack and the sell off in the stock market last March, you did not believe in conspiracy theories at all. You thought the world was run by stupid people and they were incapable of doing anything like what we are witnessing. You commented many times your surprise at how well funded and organized this has been. I wished back then you were right. Now I hope your wrong again (about conspiracy). So maybe a little humble pie is in order the next time you say you don’t believe in conspiracies.
JM
REPLY: No. There have always been conspiracies to try to do things. What I have said and it still holds today: no CONSPIRACY has ever SUCCEEDED. This is a clip from “The Forecaster.” I always traded against these people. I was asked to join many times. I have always refused. I was invited by Edmond Safra to the IMF dinner he put on in Washington renting the entire National Gallery. I was told by them, “Join us.” They had the IMF in their pocket. I said no, I advised the people to whom the IMF went to ask for money.
This has been a conspiracy that has been better funded than I expected. That is true. Mainly because it is a merger of Gates, Soros, and Schwab. Each had a different objective, but they agreed to combine. Like the Democrats. It is really a conglomeration of many groups from women to transsexuals and socialists all with only a common objective of hating Republicans. Individually, they have different goals.
They cannot create a conspiracy to manipulate a market. If they even could, then they would not blow up and constantly ask governments to bail them out. That alone proves my point — conspiracies do not succeed.
As for this elaborate conspiracy to change the world economy, they will destroy much of our world economy, inspire war, but their grand dream of forcing and controlling this Fourth Industrial Revolution will be transformed into dust. We will begin to witness its faults by 2022.
COMMENT#2: Where can we run to? Seriously. I think this is really the most important question now. I can’t help but wonder what would happen if 80million Trump voters moved to Texas. TC
COMMENT #3: Hi Martin, It is truly insightful, having watched the inauguration of Biden on the UK BBC1. It is all hope and glory, patriotism, great times ahead etc…..presented by them. Am seriously thinking of ‘Fucking off’ to another country as am getting older (46yrs). Truthfully, am thinking Indonesia, despite their earthquake/volcano/ history. Its time, for me and my closest, to move on. Am tired, as you are, of this bullshit. Just wanna normal life!!!!! Thanks for all you do…..you appear to be a normal guy, trustworthy et al, whilst mixing with the ‘average’ persons of this world. You don’t need an ego trip, so am just telling you that I trust you and that you are a good guy (despite what I’ve read!!!) As we say in the UK…. Cheers Mate, all the best
COMMENT #4: Thank you so much. We have some great pretenders here in the UK claiming they get calls from intelligence all night and they proclaimed Trump would arrest everyone. I cannot believe how many people believed this stuff. You are the only respectable voice in the extreme left and right confrontation.
REPLY: I understand this looks really depressing, like a violent storm about to strike. Capital will make its decision pro or con by February. There may yet be a rise in separatist movements. There is a lot up in the air. I am getting emails from around the world. I had to do a video interview this morning from Germany.
Brisbane has imposed a $50,000 fine for not wearing a mask. In Florida, we did not go insane. Most small businesses survived and we did not have draconian lockdowns. Florida has about 2 million more people than New York, and while New York reported 17,839 new cases, Florida had 15,445. The open policy in Florida has fewer COVID cases than New York, proving that the lockdowns have failed to work. Instead, lockdowns are destroying jobs and ensuring that there will be nothing to return to since the WHO is already telling people that 2021 will be WORSE than 2020! Even the number of people who have caught COVID in a restaurant is just 1.4% of the COVID cases. That does not justify destroying restaurants and society.
Armstrong Economics Blog/Revolution Re-Posted Jan 20, 2021 by Martin Armstrong
QUESTION: I just can’t understand why the military armed forces and secret intelligence services all agree with the Marxist left. Why?
MG
ANSWER: Make no mistake about it. The left seeks to enslave everyone out of fear. The mass of the military, military establishment, and the intelligence services want war. They do not want peace. After the collapse of Communism, they did not like that. Their budgets were reduced and it inspired a feeling of not being needed. Then they needed to create a new enemy and that became terrorism. They had no nuclear arms and their ranks were the size of perhaps an enrollment in a university. But they needed to be pumped up into a global threat. They fully knew of the plan for 9/11. The first crew even drew the Twin Towers on the walls of their cell with planes going into them, advertising they would be victorious.
Among the rank and file, I get a lot of emails. According to soldiers sending in emails, they put it as pro-Trump being 70% and concede that the military will probably spit in a civil war. But the “military” does not include the National Guard. They are who Pelosi disrespected by calling them “weekend warriors” on a phone call to the Pentagon asking for Marines. Her attitude is similar to any dictator who seeks to retain power. They always expect the military to kill their own people. Just look at Venezuela.
However, you must also look deeper. I have written before about the Nika Revolt which is an incredibly important event that leaders are well aware of. The troops inside Constantinople would not kill their own people and the emperor was about to flee the city. His wife told him to order in a legion that was not Greek and were encamped outside the city. He did. They came in and massacred 40,000 people.
Perhaps you are too young to remember the “Kent State Massacre” where the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed and wounded nine other students on May 4, 1970. Then 10 days later, on May 14, two students were killed (and 12 wounded) by police at Jackson State University in Mississippi. This was all about the protests over the Vietnam War. President Nixon established the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. It concluded that the killings were unjustified. It was found that even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The report declared that 61 shots fired by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given. They just panicked. It was held back then that the Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators. That probably will not be the case this week.
The Gallup Poll at the time was interesting for the view was 58% of the people blamed the students. Just like the Capitol Siege, they looked at all the photographs, and 24 students were indicted with the May 4 demonstration or with the one at the ROTC building fire three days before. Five cases, all related to the burning of the ROTC building, went to trial. One non-student defendant was convicted, two other non-students pleaded guilty, and one was acquitted. All other charges were dismissed. As for the National Guard, five guardsmen were indicted and claimed to have fired in self-defense which was accepted.
It was during the Russian Revolution where the government expected the military to fire on the people. Yeltsin stood on the tank and begged them not to kill their own people. The troops stood down and the government fell. We too will reach such a point. However, if you look at the actions of Pelosi and the rhetoric coming out of CNN that anyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi or a member of KKK, there is no intention of the Biden Administration to be inclusive. This is a leftist purge, and make no mistake about it, they will NEVER tolerate opposition. It is the very nature of all Marxists — they need total control to force their ideals upon the world.
The Entire Dutch Government resigned today showing that career politicians are just corrupt and this is what we will see as revolutions start to unfold. The resignations came after a scandal involving the mismanagement of childcare funds where the politicians demanded thousands of families into financial hardship had to repay the money they were given. An investigation revealed last December that tax officials wrongly accused thousands of working families of fraud. They ordered them to repay childcare benefits between 2013 and 2019.
This is yet another example of how corrupt governments have become and why Republics always fail. It is time that we give DEMOCRACY a try where people MUST be qualified to run for office and the term limit is one time ONLY. No career politicians. The people must oversee the bureaucracy or our future will always be in jeopardy. All legislation MUST be voted on by the people.
Creating an online means to vote can easily be secure. You vote with your Social Security number which is then crossed reference to the income tax records and SS payments for disabilities. That way one vote per LIVING person – no dead people and no-nonsense of mail-in ballots. You cannot scan the same vote twice and no human counts the votes. If we can buy secured online from Amazon, surely we can also vote in a secured manner.
The tyranny unleashed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter is unimaginable. What right do they have to censor people around the world and block anyone with whom they disagree? Zuckerberg and Dorsey will go down in history as tyrannical leaders who have sought to rule the dialog of the entire world. They have no such right and more and more countries need to stand up and block them from even being seen in their countries. Only then will the shareholders of these entities wake up and realize that they are being complicit in absolute tyranny which is a violation of human rights internationally. Especially when Bill Gates has targeted Africa to reduce the population.
Manfred Weber (CSU) of Germany has joined the initiative from Greece to grant all citizens vaccinated against Corona free travel in Europe. He was also seeking a ban on plastics. He has joined the movement to introduce a new EU-wide vaccination certificate. “We support the proposal of the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis for an EU-wide recognized vaccination certificate that enables free travel in the Schengen area,” he told the Bild newspaper. The alternative is that “every country sets its own rules, a fragmentation that nobody wants,” he added. According to the information, the topic will be discussed by the 27 heads of state and government on January 21, 2021, at a virtual EU special summit.
We are approaching the very same exact policy of Adolf Hitler. The freedom to travel will be suspended using COVID as the excuse to keep you safe from non-conformers. I stated that our 2020 WEC in Orlando may be the last. I could see what was coming and it is arriving rapidly. To stop civil unrest and the threat of revolution, they are going to use COVID to restrict movement. They are turning our free society into a prison camp and there is nobody willing to stand up in our defense. This is why Schumer and Pelosi are doing their utmost to crush all resistance — “Papers, please!”
This is the collapse of our free society. It is over. Socialism is unsustainable so they are moving to authoritarianism. Everything is unfortunately on schedule. May God have mercy upon humanity.
COMMENT: Marty; like you, I am a programmer. I see the future is very much like the Matrix. I do not understand why people in government feel the need to control everything and everyone. This is not the world I want my daughter to grow up in and she is just three years old.
PO
ANSWER: These apps that people are so eager to download for a virus that has a 99.5% survivability rate is astonishing. I agree, this is like the Matrix insofar as we seem to be living in a dream that we are somehow free when we are not. Personally, I am so glad my time is nearly up in this nightmare. They know the majority are just subservient fools. Stanley Milgram proved that the average person will even torture another as long as they are told to do so. He called it — “Obedience to Authority.”
Indeed, the New Norm is intended to bring in the Great Reset whereby offices vanish, commuting comes to an end, and travel will be forever restricted. However, vital to pulling this off is continued social distancing and masks. Why? This is being employed to combat civil unrest. It is also intended to separate the mindless sheep who obey whatever the government, says which complies with Stanley Milgram’s studies on “Obedience to Authority”.
The Germans put on trial after World War II said that they were just following orders. This inspired Milgram to investigate because many argued that the Germans were just different and could kill the Jews without remorse. At the Nuremberg Trials, those Germans simply said they were just following orders.
Stanley was perhaps the most important psychologists of all time as far as I am concerned. Instead of coming up with a theory, Stanley actually investigates and arrived at a conclusion nobody suspected was even possible. He hired actors to pretend to be shocked by a person whenever they lied. Stanley took random people off the street in the United States and elsewhere to see if the Germans were really a different species. He discovered that people would shock others in a torture setting as long as they were told that was what they had to do.
Stanley concluded his studies which shocked the world. They were published in his book – “Obedience to Authority.” I bring this up now BECAUSE this is precisely what is being carried out today. We have people wearing masks when there is no serious pandemic and yelling at others who do not. Some are violently attacking people who do not have a mask.
What is being carried out is a well-defined psychological tactic because they instill fear in the mass herd of human sheep and then they count on the obedience of authority to control society. I have stated before, a friend of mine grew up behind the Berlin Wall. When the wall fell, his father went and got his Stasi file. He was shocked to discover everyone he thought was a friend was telling the government everything he had to say against the government. When he came home, my friend thought his father went mad. He began punching holes in the walls and ripping out microphones. Until his death, he refused to ever speak to anyone outside his immediate family.
This is the reasoning being social distancing and wearing masks. This (1) provides justification to arrest people who try to gather together to resist, and (2) as in France, they can put you in prison for 6 months for not wearing a mask, or (3) in Melbourne, Australia there have been incidents of people attacking even women on the street who do not have a mask on. This is raw tyranny and how they are deliberately seeking to breakdown society to make the population controllable as was the case under communism.
Field Marshall Hermann Wilhelm Göring (1893–1946)
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Interrogator: With respect to a Democracy they argued, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States, only Congress can declare wars.
Göring replied: “Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
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This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
Green Premiums have helped solar power plants—like this one near Copiapó, Chile, shown in July 2017—become cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels Jamey StillingsIDEASBY 
Centinel2012 