Viral Video: Bill Gates's TED Talk on Innovating to Zero Emissions

February 24, 2010 at 5:15 am PT

One of the more remarked-upon talks at the recent TED conference was by Microsoft co-founder and mega-philanthropist Bill Gates.

Rather than talk about his work around AIDS and other global medical issues like malaria (last year he released a box full of mosquitoes at the conference to make a point), or education reform, he focused, surprisingly, on the future of energy and the need to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In fact, the Microsoft (MSFT) leader said that if he had one planetary wish, this would be it. Well, also someday beating Google (GOOG) in search, but Gates managed to keep that to himself.

All kidding aside, it was a very interesting talk, and here is the video of the speech by Gates:

[Photo Credit: James Duncan Davidson for TED]

Tagged with: AIDS, Bill Gates, BoomTown, carbon emissions, conference, digital, education, energy, global, Google, innovation, Internet, Kara Swisher, medical, Microsoft, mosquitoes, philanthropist, reform, search, speech, Talk, TED, video, zero

comments so far. Add yours.

res08hao

Oddly enough, I have one wish too: Bill Gates goes away and is never heard from again.
http://www.fiftybyfifty.com/lifeoffarhan/ farhanlalji

Like the fact that Gates is attacking some seriously big problems in his post MSFT career, good for Bill.
http://blog.macb.net macbeach

He made some excellent points in there that are usually missed by the zealots. Not since the rumors of a breakthrough in cold fusion has the media fantasized about the possibility of near free energy. Such a development transforms formerly unsolvable problems into solvable ones, and hard to solve problems into easy to solve ones (think food production, desalination, etc.)

What about all the pollution from storage batteries that are the foundation of all current intermediate solutions? Near free energy gets us all the way to burning hydrogen, an no killing seagulls with propellers all over the place.

They should have never decoupled CO2 from other forms of pollution. And they should never have de-emphasized the value of low cost energy in favor of what may turn out to be a science fiction.

It's a shame he felt compelled to quote Al Gore and the IPCC.
JohnDoey

Second.
JohnDoey

> It's a shame he felt compelled to quote Al Gore

It's a shame for Al Gore.