The strange sustainability of Bill Gates

You can’t fault Bill Gates for being stingy with his money or not caring about building a better future for society. But you can say this: he embodies the old saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

As the consummate techie, Gates views the solution to our sustainability problems through the lenses of technology. That view says there’s a techno-fix for every challenge, and other strategies — efficiency, conservation, localization, or anything else low-tech — need not apply.

There are two problems with this approach. One, it runs counter to what some very smart people say is needed to build a secure tomorrow in terms of climate and energy. Using energy more efficiently is a no-brainer, esteemed efficiency expert Arthur Rosenfeld has proven. And Princeton researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert H. Socolow demonstrated pretty compellingly in their “Stabilization Wedge Game” that multiple strategies — technological and otherwise — are needed to bring down global carbon dioxide levels.

The second problem, though, is more disconcerting: a selective view of the facts. For example, Gates’ push for more genetically modified crops as one way to increase yields and relieve hunger. The objection there is not, as he has pointed out to critics, that no one’s asking poor farmers if they “mind that it was created in a laboratory.” (Although, even there, he might not hear the answer he was expecting.) It’s that genetic engineering has, so far, failed to significantly increase crop yields as promised, notes the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It’s one thing, as Gates has done, to push technological solutions that are backed by enough facts to prove they’re workable: large-scale solar energy, for example, or even — love it or hate it — nuclear power. It’s quite another, though, to insist before the facts are in that strategies like geoengineering and massive GM crop programs are “the way to go.”