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Hi Bill, thank you again for doing the New Economy Forum. We'll begin, I think on greenery, and I've just read your new State of the Transition report, and in that you start with a bold claim that basically the climate business in twenty twenty four reminds you, or seems at the same inflection point that medicine was back in twenty
twenty when you began the whole vaccines drive. And your argument is that we now have most of the technologies we need to fight climate change or to deal with climate And I wonder perhaps you just give us a couple of examples. I know that you talk about a lot of technologies like clean hydrogen, aviation fuel and so on, but just give us a couple of examples of why you think that, because it's a very big claim.
Well, my key theory of change on climate is that if the clean approach, the green approach, is more expensive, that we won't get global adoption. Perhaps rich countries will subsidize clean approaches, but as you get into the middle income countries like Brazil, India and others, you know, they would say, hey, we have we're not responsible for the historic emissions and so slowing down are providing basic capabilities to our population. You know that we shouldn't be impeded.
And so the way to square this is to innovate in all the areas of emissions so that the new approach that's clean costs less. That's either a zero green premium or literally a negative green premium, and that's what Breakthrough Energy was founded to do.
We have one hundred and thirty companies.
A good example is one that's working on the way that steel is made. You know. They're called Boston Metals. They're actually working with partners in Brazil to build a plant there that looks like it'll be able to make very competitive steel, but in a very very clean way. You know. We have geothermal company called Fervo. We have people who make windows called lux Wall that means you don't have to heat or cool your building as much.
You know. So these one hundred and thirty companies are driving forward this innovative approach, and we still have a lot of work to do to take things that some which are just at the lab, some of which are still quite expensive, but volume is needed to bring the cost down, like we saw with solar panels and batteries. But we're on our way. You've got the IQ that we're in every one of the areas of mission. I see a path to zero, which means we can get adoption where we need it.
Quite interested, and you've backed quite a lot of green startups or a lot of people in this audience who are involved in that industry. You know, some of them get to scale, some of them don't. Have you reached any conclusion about what is the fact of the success?
Well, everything is is very domain dependent. You know, I have to learn a lot about the history of steelmaking or you know, different approaches for making cement, you know, to understand, okay, why has that stayed the same for so long? And now that we're getting lots of new people looking at that, what are these these new techniques? You know, teaming up with large companies working in multiple geographies. It's very you know, it's very science based. It's you know,
fund to meet those innovators. It's more capital intensive than say the digital revolution, and you know, we can't underestimate that means that the scale is tough. You know, we can run into geopolitical barrier sometimes, but on the whole you know, even though we won't meet the the highest goals, we will start to get emissions down and will avoid this being the primary thing that's slowing slowing down human development.
About nuclear you've been a big backer of nuclear through things. I looked up kind of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, as you know, they're all they're all beginning to invest money in nuclear things. Do you think the wind is changing? I suppose that's a bad metaphor, but do you do you do you think that there is a change in the way people are looking at this.
Well, there's certainly a number of countries, including the United States, where both the public attitudes and the level investment in nuclear fission are quite positive. You know, at the COP twenty eight a lot of countries came together and talked about tripling nuclear over the future. So that's very different than going into decline. There's a big challenge though, which is those third generation plants. You know, they have a
lot of pressure, they're very expensive, they're very complex. So as a question, can we get to this fourth generation? And so you have a number of companies trying to usher in much simpler designs, including the one I'm involvement called terror Power. There's several companies doing that. But yes, the fact that the tech companies want to be customers for green energy, and at least for a period of time they're willing to pay a bit of a premium, and it's the volume of reactors go up then that
premium goes away. That is extremely helpful to reboot the nuclear industry around these fourth generation plants.
There is an issue, isn't there A lot of the attention has been on small, modular reactors or kind of reviving old ones rather than building big new ones.
Is that a problem? It looks at it from the outside, but I don't know.
Well, if you get small, you can do a lot of your labor off site, which is advantageous, but it also means your efficiency is a lot less. And so the approach terror Powers using is to have a medium sized reactor three hundred and forty five megawatt electric in our roadmap. If utilities do want big ones, those are somewhat more efficient, but you know, first we want to build dozens of our medium size reactor, and we've been able to move some of the labor off site, although
we still have some on site. But size it's very tricky to get the efficiency as you get small, because it's the kind of the volume of the reactor is your value in the areas are costs. So it you know, different people are taking different approaches, and of course we have digital design and simulation that is letting us build far far simpler plants than ever before.
What about fusion, I know it's a question. I think I'd probably ask you once every five years. Do you think that is it always seems to be five years away?
Or at least that is it? Is it now getting closer? It's old.
I mean one or two people recently suddenly saying that's possibilities.
Yeah, so break through Energy we're almost all my climate work is we know, I'm the largest investor in be funded for different fusion companies. The one that's furthest along is pretty fantastic called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. That's spin off essentially from MIT, and they're hard at work building their
prototype facility outside of Boston. And so it's you know, you could say it's about six to ten years behind the force generation fission, but it has a lot of advantages and over time it could be even less expensive. And so we're backing these companies and you know, they're even using very advanced software to simulate how that works. In the long run, fission infusion will be a substantial part of power generation, complementing the renewables that are are being built at high speed.
Can I just contrast, because it's you've sort of alluded to it a couple of times, the kind of gap between all the kind of business optimism, the scientific possibilities that are now opening up with the political realities which seem to be going in the in the opposite direction. Just to give you an example, you know, you played quite a big role in getting the Inflation Reduction Act through in America. You personally went and persuaded Joe Mansion. You know, it was a big deal, and there was
there was kind of green within that. As we both know, a good portion of that could well get dumped if if Trump comes in, what do you think is the most endangered technology out of the stuff that managed to get through under that bill.
It'll be interesting because you know, what the Congress will see is that that bill is causing a lot of projects to be built in red states, and so ideally we'll get some bar by partisan defense of what's being done there. I do think nuclear is particularly bipartisan because it has to do with energy security as well as climate. But you could have some things like the electric vehicle tax credit or the green electricity tax credits. You could have them come under attack. You know, I think I
think they're a good thing. I think they're ushering in new industries. You know, they're general idea that taxpayers are going to pay a lot of extra money for products because they want to reduce emissions. That has been pushed hard enough that there really is a backlash. We see that in Europe, we see that the US. And that's why this theory of UH innovation is the only way you squared the imperative to get rid of the emissions, but without having people say, hey, I'm not going to
pay for it. And actually, you know that can even influence elections if you push too hard.
Do you think that thing? Though?
On the demand side, in a strange way, the demand kick is being given. Now these technologies are un the way. It wouldn't be terrible if they wouldn't help if they went away, but it would if those kind of reliefs were taken away.
Well, you have you have different levels of maturity and so you know, I'd say the electric vehicles even without the subsidies over I'm they are going even to the people park on the street at the low end, they will get to a zero green premium. You have things, particularly industrial emissions like steel cement that we're just building the pilot plants now, and so without governmental policy and support, the transition of the industrial emissions would slow down a lot.
And you know that's that's very unfortunate if that takes place. Likewise, in transportation, airlines are you know, the toughest part of all of the emissions, and and they're you know, without support, that will get pushed back.
So I ask you one kind of strangely capitalism related question. I mean, you have arguably been one of the worlds will definitely been one of the world's most successful capitalists of the post twenty five thirty forty years. Last week I saw on the stage with Donald Trump and he said that he wanted to use tariffs ten twenty percent on everywhere, and his argument was this was very good for American business and your experience, Does that make sense?
No, it's certainly not the case. And the difficulty of convincing voters that pre trade is overwhelmingly to their benefit. It's unfortunate how difficult it is to make that case. And so you know, I understand the politician who chooses to take advantage of that, but you know, we we
will suffer. Overall, welfare will improve less as not only will if US puts tariff on, of course, other people will put tariff on as well, and the economic dynamism and speed of innovation will be significant, significantly slow.
Just to push you on that dynam point, you know, it's very easy to make the argument that this means higher prices for consumers. But this issue of dynamism, the sort of you've been involved in entrepreneurship, these things.
Most of your life.
If you have less foreign competition, less foreign goods, that must have an impact on it. I know it's back to a creed you've believed in. But in practice that is that argument possible to make?
Devoters Well, we should find articulate politicians who can make the case. If you take most of the industries I think about, like you know, inventing a new drug or writing a new piece of software, or birthing a new climate technology, you have these gigantic fixed costs and the fact that you can do that work and then sell it on a global basis means that everybody's getting you know,
faster innovation and lower prices. And if you start to fragrant markets because of either tariffs or regulatory barriers to that trade, it absolutely takes away the lower prices in high speed innovation.
You mentioned health. It struck me maybe this is unfair, but health is kind of the opposite to climate. Is that at least there were incredible health gains in the early two thousands.
It seems to have stalled a bit.
What's needed to create another global health boom?
Well, I'm actually quite optimistic. You know, both the diseases in lower income countries and the diseases and rig countries, we are seeing incredible advances, whether it's obesity drugs, long acting drugs. You know, gene editing is still super expensive, but the Gage Foundation is putting a lot of money into trying to get that from millions of dollars to hundreds of dollars. So we can take a disease like sickle salad's prominent napka and as we do that, it
will benefit all the world's health systems. And then of course, you know, AI will be applied in health in the upstreme discovery piece to speed up new drugs, but it will also be applied in the in the downstream delivery, sitting in the sessions, with doctors helping with follow up, helping with paperwork, and so I think the health sector will be an exemplar that AI can improve things quite dramatically.
There's one thing which is a little bit similar is that issue, and you did it in your Netflix series. This issue of trust is that there are these things that appear very logical to do with health, and yet people don't seem to believe it, COVID being the obvious example. How do we deal with this sort of deficit of trust when it comes to health. Is it just to do with a deficit of trust in governments or is it broader than that.
Well, certainly I never expected as the pandemic came along that, you know, many people had warned about the idea that that people would reach for over simplistic explanations, you know, like attacking either myself or Tony Fauci, or you know, attacking the idea of vaccines. I wouldn't have expected that, and certainly a lot of people, particularly older people who should have been vaccinated were not, So you know, those rumors,
you know, literally caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. I'm hopeful with that out of the way that we can go back to, you know, a more scientific way of looking at health innovation. You know, the when people see the effects of things like these obese drugs, you know, to remind them that, you know, we can improve health pretty dramatically.
I agree the obystis are the obesity drugs are a very.
Good example in one direction.
On the other hand, you have stuff about I don't know, hurricanes and things like that. You still see that basic trust that people used to have in quote unquote scientists and governments is it's it's amazingly small compared with what it was twenty thirty years ago.
Yeah, you know, they're like these latest hurricanes. Some people blame me for those two. You know, I'm very busy, you know it. Hopefully, you know, the basic decisions about what say and what's beneficial we maintain that, and you know, I think progress, positive progress will help get people back, you know, looking at what experts are are telling them.
The truth is One quick thing on health, the mosquito borne diseases seem to be a little bit back on the Rah Tanky and the West Nile stuff.
People, Are you worried about that?
I mean, it just seems to be a slight blip in an otherwise very positive picture.
Yeah. Of course. The biggest part of that, which is kind of invisible in middle income and rich countries, is the malaria burden, you know, which is killing about six hundred thousand kids a year. You know where you are in Brazil, Denghy's gone up somewhat. We do have new tools to reduce mosquito populations, one that's still in the lab called Jean Drive that the Gates Foundation funds and
should help us with all those mosquito born diseases. You know, what we see is when you get a lot of flooding, you know, we should get a bit more with climate change, mosquitoes really thrive, and so places like Pakistan where you have very little malaria then when they had the flooding. Now it's come back in a pretty big way. And
so you know that innovation pipeline is coming along. It should get even more money, but we will be able to get rid of those vector born diseases in countries that want to embrace these new tools.
I'll ask you one last question about Brazil. I mean, this is a place we've heard where, especially on the climate side, a very very high proportion, probably higher than eywhere else, certainly above ninety percent coming.
From renewable sources.
Do you see Brazil as the center of this climate It seems to be the center of both the pain and the Amazon, but also on the creative side. Is that something you've been following well?
Certainly. I at the UN General Assembly, the Keys Foundation had our Goalkeepers event and I gave them a word to a loop for the work they've done in reducing malnutrition. We've been talking with Brazil a lot about COP thirty that's coming up, and you know that will be a very important milestone both for climate mitigation and climate adaptation. You know, Brazil has done some good pioneering things on
mitigation the deforestation. It's important that that, you know, get under control, both for Brazil itself and for the world. So there's a lot being learned there, you know. As I said, one of our best breakthrough companies is building a steel plant with partners in Brazil. So Yes Agriculture Innovation with imbrapa. Brazil is very strong, So it's it's fantastic.
You know that the issue is is a very important issue and it you know, deals with kind of the equity things that Brazil has been a global leader on.
That's one last thing on that, particularly on Brazil, you now much more. It sounds like you're more optimistic about Brazil than maybe if you and I talked about it twenty thirty years ago.
It's a more positive story.
Well, you know, Brazil's got a lot of assets, and you know, it's it's kind of a mixed story because they've had, you know, challenges with governance and you know who knows.
They're like the US. They have a party that's sort of against all climate things and for Amazon destruction, and you have a party who's who cares about that. So you know, I'm not an expert on what the balance will end up being over time. You know, the whole world has this problem that we do need to invest in.
You know, Amazon force destruction. We're very good at measuring it now because of satellite systems, but the exact policies that will get us there, you know, still still somewhat challenging, particularly if you get different parties in Power Bill.
Thank you very much for talking to us again, covered many, many subjects.
Thank you very much, on behalf of everyone here. Thank you, thank you,