Agreement to lower Greenhouse Gas emissions. I am pleased to have bill gates back at this table. I read the letter which will be released right after this show. It is interesting to me that with all the concentration on the foundation and all the great things that have taken place in terms of poverty and health, two things have come out of it. Agriculture and your understanding of how crucial it was in second is energy. So you pose this question. If you could have a superpower, what would it be and you could include anything. You could defy gravity or see said,h walls, but you what . I said energy. Everyoneing energy for would transform their life as much as anything that i could think of. Lightea of flipping a switch and the lights come on or setting the temperature to hot or cold, if you went to somebody in africa who doesnt have energy and said that was possible, it would seem as bizarre as somebody flying or seeing through walls. It really is a type of superpower. Americans have the equivalent of axle onns pushing an their behalf so that their lights light up and their materials get made and their food gets made. Modern life is that much about energy intensity. You show two things, a global map of the world and you show africa at night. Parts of africa are almost dark. The extraordinary thing is that 1. 3 billion people do not have electricity. In africa, unless we do better than the current expectation 80 of the people without electricity will be in africa 30 years from now. They have not progressed that much and when you go there at night, melinda and i were in the suburbs driving along, it is here he because all of it is people burning things in big oil barrels. Think this is like some strange movie, not a normal city. The goal coming out for you and others is to cut Greenhouse Gases by 80 by 2050. As long as you are emitting Greenhouse Gases, it stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Not all of it, but most of it. The rest goes back into the soil or the ocean. But that long time in the atmosphere means that as long as you are increasing co2, as long as the emissions are above zero you have a positive warming trend and that is what creates the Strange Weather and causes crops not to go as well. Particularly in an equatorial region youre getting to heat levels that plants and humans do poorly at. Ironically you should go to the northern latitudes. There is a net benefit there but a lot of heat in humanity, particularly the poorest live in an area where the heat will cause a terrible problem. Overwhelmingly us take a forecast that doesnt assume incredible innovation, that will continue. That we are on today is we will not be able to make a change away from that will stop innovation to me is the answer to most problems in putting energy. So i think of india, because they dont have electricity there collecting firewood destroying their environment, the women are breathing smoke to the children and they get respiratory diseases, its awful for their health, they do not have lights at night to read, they cannot keep fresh food colts they do not get protein in the diet. Theres every reason why india should have electricity. Great for their people unfortunately their straightforward path to get there is cold. But india is big enough that if they go down that straightforward path we will not need any of our Climate Change goals and today we have no alternative that is even close to as cheap, including reliability which is a fundamental characteristic of energy systems. India ast power cheaply with other things as you can with coal. Only with innovation can you square the circle and say should india electrify as fast as it . An or should they electrify Greenhouse Gas emission. They will admit as much co2 per person as we have. Is this your biggest passion . Is the long lead time thing that requires so much coordination science and politics come together. And very fascinated by it. I still have polio eradication and our Health Stocks as the things were i feel like were on track and know what to do. This ones in the category of great importance and if you wait 20 years to get started, then the time that it takes to invest and change the system, you are really going to miss the window. It has a funny urgency even though the damage is not that dramatic. You believe that you can get to zero by the beginning of the next century . I believe there are so many paths, over a dozen different paths and we only need one to work to give us this cheap and Reliable Energy that yes, then you have to deploy that and get. O these wildly Ambitious Goals you talk about a energy miraclhat would that be . Anything that is half the price of todays energy, cheaper than coal and totally reliable does not depend on the wind blowing or the sun shining. Energy miracle. So if you could take sunlight and directly make gasoline from sunlight, thats called solar fuels energy miracle. There are scientists who can do that. Theyre about hundred times less efficient than it needs to be to make any sense. The site even ready for a Startup Company the story to be in the Government LabGetting Research funding. Then with luck it would get to the point where companies will get started in high risk return investors will come along. You looking for a miracle. What you want to do is enlist both private funding which you time yound at the same want to make sure the government has a role . Thats right. Basic research, there unique role is basic research. The universities and national labs, in auckland to get right investors to fund the level of research because thats just the very beginning, material science stronger magnets, pencil ,trength tensile strength those are things that will be critical. In the medical sector there is a great pharmaceutical industry, but the u. S. Government spends 30 billion per year on basic health research. It has been fantastic for the country and the world. In energy, we are down at less than 6 billion, and that is the number that i am hoping the commitment was made in paris by 20 governments including the u. S. To double their energy over a fiveyear period. That will raise the supply of innovations and make it right for these amazing groups of investors. Charlie this foundation letter, who is it addressed to, i had the impression you were addressing it to High School Students . The two things i elaborate on, melinda talks about time and how women have to spend a lot of extra time, more than men in the household. A kid in a High School Newspaper in kentucky in appalachia asked us about superpowers and she said time, i said energy. It, it wasd about pointed out to us that those are such basic things about the experience of war people of poor people. Even in the u. S. People understand how Important Energy is and there is still a time and balance. These are not problems that there is a 10year solution to. Voicednger generation their willingness to look at things in new ways. Todays teenagers will be in and a lot of the thinking that drives innovation comes from that group. Charlie which of the three has potential . I mentioned this idea of the sun being used generate fuels. That is unique because unlike generating electricity where batteries that store electricity are expensive and do not last long, storing gasoline in a gasoline tank, you make it bigger and a consider for as long as you want and when you want the energy just learned. It is 10 times more dense and energy content than the best batteries that we have today. That would really be special. Taking Nuclear Energy and overcoming a number of problems, the cost of the plans, the safety of the plans were people worry if you have another fukushima or chernobyl accident. That is another path that we could go down. We could take the wind way up in the jet stream and capture that. Are requires materials that ultra strong which would be valuable for many things. You could ill bridges that would we are reallynd on the verge of that type of understanding. There are two approaches that people think about. One is that you could just take solar and wind and make them cheap and that is not too hard but then you could have a battery that is 10 to 20 times better than any battery we have today. The problem is chemistry. The number of charges you can put into an area there is not a semiconductor thing that lets us jim those things in. What happens is your going between a liquid phase and a solid phase and as you do that, the solid tens to degrade. If batteries could last instead of 400 cycles if they could last for a thousand that really changed the economics. There are ideas along those lines, i have money and Many Battery Companies and there are a bunch that i do not that i would say that all of them are having a tough time because proving that something does not degrade in some physical way over 4000 cycles is not something you can test overnight, its very right manic so batteries in the last 100 years have not improved as much as we would need them to to make this the path that we go down. That is a very possible path, we should invest in the research and companies along that path but that is the one that most people think will come and it is not as easy as they think. Charlie 50 years . You cannot put a time on it. Paths there take 12 is a total of about 12, including taking and burning capturing thend carbon from the flu or the chimney stack. If you have five companies on and they get the basic Research Backing them up and the risk capital, even if individually they are only 20 likely, if you pursue those 60 different things, and the chance of a success is very high and that is what i think we should do. Charlie quick questions before we turn to health, number one, have climate deniers gained strength or where would you put that component of our population . The problem with climate denial is not a huge problem outside the United States. Charlie why is that . Thats a good question. Many issues like agricultural crops call jim os europe is more skeptical of the science on that in the u. S. Is. On Climate Change we are uniquely skeptical particularly in terms of telling policy makers. There is another group which is a little bit of a problem which is that people believe the climate is a problem but think its easy to solve and think ok, as soon as that utility guys dont stand in the way of ,ooftops, this thing is solved not just for the power sector but for the transporting industry, everything that we need. That notion that there are Simple Solutions trolley boy is that inhibiting forward progress . Until that twice 15 november talks, the idea of improving the amount of innovation, increasing r d was not discussed and im still amazed at that. Their,tries did commit including china and all the big ones that you would want, even india made the doubling commitment. Weve always put a lot of money into the demand side for clean energy. We have tax credits and renewable portfolio standards where utilities required to buy a certain percentage of their energy from these renewable sources so if you take the effective payments, the increased price of electricity and tax forgiveness, weve put a lot into that demand side and so. As germany, japan and others we need to have a balance where we are also driving the supply of innovation as well. Charlie everybody is talking about the zika virus. You looked hard at ebola, tell me where you see this and what is necessary and what did we learn . Ebola, thease of orchestration of resources, the private sectors ability to make diagnostics, antibodies and vaccines was pulled together very slowly. Where, what roadmap is our liability . What is the regulatory path . If there are three to four companies, which ones go twice as fast and which dropout . That was chaotic. Only now do we have these good ebola tools. If that had spread faster, we would have felt terrible about that. Zika is different. It is spread by mosquitoes and not human contact. There is still a lot of is are some narrow part of your pregnancy we can be affected, is it require that you had to have dengue at some point, but it was a bad situation and its great that the emergency was declared. We can all figure out the private sector innovations that could come in, including in this case killing mosquitoes because this particular mosquito lives in urban areas, mostly around the equator. Heroes saidhe great we should wipe out this particular mosquito and he came very close to it. Now you wish, maybe that wouldve been a good thing. Dinky, zika,ies nguyaen glia chicke and yellow fever. You have said that mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal on earth. Thats right. The mostof what kills humans . Do human kill the most humans, do lions and sharks . The humans killing humans is a strong number, too, that unless 600,000 pluseme kids who die of malaria which is a askewcaused death, that is the animal that generates the most mortality. Charlie and malaria . It is all malaria am a there are a few others but it is 95 . Charlie what should we do about the mosquito . There are a couple of ideas for changing the mosquito that we have been funding in order to work on dengue and malaria. One idea is that you put a anderia into the mosquito then it does not carry the parasite at all. We have done field trials on that and it appears it works for dengue and zika. That may get ruled out more quickly. An even more powerful to her that tool that spreads faster is to take our new technology that people call crisper and have male and female mosquitoes pass along either something that prevents them from carrying the virus or some thing that kills use gene editing and create a thing called jean drive which means that all of your children male and female inherit something even if only one of your parents have it that is dominant into that generation to not survive or not carry the bad virus. Have been asked this question before, coming out of high school today, knowing what you know about genomics and gene editing and at the same time technology, which field would you enter . It is a hard choice now. Of digital stuff, in terms vision and robotics continues to be very exciting. Not without challenges but mostly positive enablement, that is a wonderful field and will generate tons of jobs that people should want. Biology and medical work is also an incredible thing. Understanding how these work and in some cases you have to use the Digital Tools to track the genes and understand them. There are Companies Working on robotic assisted surgery that could raise the quality and lower the cost. Charlie coming together with genomic technology. Exactly. Stem cells and genetics the field of biology is so amazing and if a kid has interest, the chance they could lead huge breakthroughs are gigantic. But i also want to say energy because we need bright minds to drive it there as well. Jon because in not having energy they will not have a full development . Charlie because in not having energy they will not have full development . Yes. Countries like china will also contribute. Charlie the idea is clean energy, not just energy but . Lean energy thats right. Greenhouse gases constrained, it would be nice if it was a 20 reduction but it is eliminating from Country Energy systems, that is daunting but its necessary and that is why all of this parallel work is needed. On the digital side you mentioned Artificial Intelligence. Part of that is finding out what does that mean in terms of jobs and population. About howse questions we spend leisure time and the rest of it. There are also things that concern you and other people. Just you, what is your concern about Artificial Intelligence . In the long run, the scale of the intelligence is unbounded. It will get a lot smarter than us. [laughter] so smart that we will have to ask it, how smart are you . That isterm problem predictably in the 20 year timeframe is labor substitution, not super intelligence. Of anthat is kind embarrassment where you should free up people to help every kid in school, every handicapped kid him every elderly person, you should be able to reallocate that if you are not needed to work in that warehouse, get out there and do other things. Dovetails into what melinda said about time. It will free up time, doing the drudgery. All of that about spending time with kids and being more connected socially we should be able to do more about. She tells a wonderful story in her part of the letter where a family in africa the goingpent all of her time to get water and bringing it back and finally she is about ready to leave the marriage. He comes home in the bags are packed and he says what can i do . And she says i am doing everything. All of the stuff at home and you need to help and he agrees. He starts taking the water himself and the split that. All of a sudden he gets involved in that and they determined there are smarter ways to do that. The point is, freeing up people to have time to participate in all of the issues, jointly. That was interesting because when he first helped out he was ridiculed by the other men and he said i will keep doing this and what they told belinda was that set an example for that village what they told thatda is, when they set example, they set an example for the village. We drive our children to school quite a bit and otherwise, i dont know for sure, use that to encourage their husbands to say they could not say they were too much more busy than i was at that particular time. Charlie what is the timeframe on Artificial Intelligence . For labor substitution, it will be substantial in the five to 20 year period. And computers used to not be able to see, and we are really good at physical manipulation. Making a bed and clearing up a room. Taking a patient upstairs. The amount of adjustment and ability is quite incredible, but 1 once Software Achieves those things it is unbounded. Sorting parts and a warehouse or picking things out of a bin, computers are just now getting to human level will stop the pot problem is 10 years from now they will be at three or four times the human level and humans are not on that same type of improvement curve. Its like farming. Saying tractors will destroy the world. Because that took generations, people did adju