Интервью (стр. 5 )

Giving in China isn't particularly well established, is it?

Well, India's further along. China is just asking itself, "When you have billionaires, what are they expected to do?" In India, a lot of the tech billionaires are incredibly generous and are giving away the vast majority of what they've done. ... But we're very excited about what we learned at those dinners. We are smarter because of them.

The Gates Foundation has invested in solutions to big problems like infectious diseases in poor countries. Providing clean energy for the nine billion people the planet will hold in 2050 is a problem that's equally civilizational in scale. What can philanthropy contribute to energy research?

Well, basically not much. The energy market is an absolutely gigantic market, and the price of energy is a key determinant in improving lifestyles, whether for the rich, the middle-income, or the poorest. It seems slightly more intense for the poor: things like fertilizer and transport, or health care, are very expensive for them. You know, things like basic lighting are very expensive. But it's a big enough market that if you come up with cheap ways of making electricity, then that should be done with typical big-firm risk taking, small-firm risk taking. On the other hand, the way capitalism works is that it systematically underfunds innovation, because the innovators can't reap the full benefits. But there's actually a net benefit to society being more R&D-oriented. And that's why in health research, governments do fund R&D.

You are a member of the American Energy Innovation Council, the AEIC, which calls for a national energy policy that would increase U. S. investment in energy research every year from $5 billion to $16 billion.

Right.

I was stunned that the U. S. government invests so little.

Yeah, particularly when you look at the DOE budget, and it looks so big--but the biggest part of that by far is dealing with the legacy of nuclear weapons production at various sites around the country. I was stunned myself. You know, the National Institutes of Health invest a bit more than $30 billion.

The Gates Foundation is in that health area, and when we pick a disease to work on, we pick a disease where for some reason the market is not working. Like malaria: rich people don't need a malaria vaccine. They are rarely in malarial areas, and when they are, they can take prophylactic drugs and not worry about it. And yet for the people who live there, over a million a year, mostly kids in Africa, die. When we did our first $50 million grant for malaria, about a decade ago, we more than doubled the amount of money going into malaria research at the time. It's a horrific disease, but there's not a market reward for coming up with a malaria vaccine.

So you made a market.

Yes, you can create a market where there's no natural market. The biggest project, the one that's furthest along, is where GlaxoSmithKline is doing a vaccine called RTS, S, which is now in phase 3 [trials]. It's not a perfect vaccine. It reduces mortality a bit more than 50 percent. And then we're funding a lot of other things that aren't as far along that--either by themselves or in combination--would get us a perfect vaccine. There are some very novel ideas in the early stages.

But to go back to your question, the reason we're involved is because there's not a market. And so our investment is mind-blowing compared to anything else. And you do have that in diseases of the poor world. You know, in the rich world, the percentage of people with AIDS is fairly small, and so the cost of treating people with drugs for a lifetime is affordable. It's not perfect for those people, it's not perfect financially, but the difficulties of coming up with a vaccine are such that there's not a market incentive for it. So an AIDS vaccine is another one that is being funded by a combination of government budgets and philanthropy. The two biggest funders by far are our foundation and the U. S., the part of the NIH involved.

So why couldn't huge, regular, dependable investments from your foundation make a difference?

In energy, we might have some involvement where it's connected to things that wouldn't happen for poor people otherwise. There may be some particular biomass approaches for getting local energy out where there's no roads and infrastructure-there might not be a market signal for that type of innovation. You know, the poor people are the ones who are going to suffer the most from climate change. It's unfortunately the poor people of the world who live in tropical zones, and there's a variety of reasons for that. But that's where agricultural productivity is already barely good enough for survival. Think of people in places like Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan. There, climate change will clearly reduce productivity without some big innovation in the seeds and the approaches.

But I've put money into Vinod Khosla's venture fund. I've put money into Nathan Myhrvold [and his Intellectual Ventures Fund]. Nathan has this thing that invents ideas broadly, many of which are energy-related. And some of those energy-related things will result in startups. One has so far: this amazing, wild nuclear [reactor design company], TerraPower.

Let me ask the question more generally, then. If energy research is underfunded by at least $11 billion according to the AEIC, what is a better approach to funding new energy technologies? Or is this one of these problems that will require a variety of approaches--traditional, academic, agency, VC, corporate--because it's so big a problem that it requires the cooperation of everyone involved?

Well, yeah. I mean, you need cooperation, you need independent inventors, you need everything. It's not a problem that lends itself to a Manhattan Project-type approach. It has to be low cost and usable in different circumstances. You can't just get a bunch of smart people together and know which path you should go off and pursue. It's amazing that that worked for the Manhattan Project.

It worked because it had a very specific end: they wanted to build the biggest bomb in the world and end the war.

They knew what they wanted to do. I guess in a vague sense we can say that we want energy that costs, say, a quarter of what coal or electricity does and emits zero CO2. We can write that down. But there's many paths to get there, each of which a realist would look at and say, "Wow, there's a lot of difficult things along that path." So I think it's very important, both to give poor people cheap energy and to avoid hugely negative climate change, that the U. S. government and other governments fund basic research. But unfortunately, when the U. S. doesn't step up on basic research, the world at large doesn't tend to step up and fill the gap. I wish they would, but they don't.

The irony is that if you actually look at the amount of money that's been spent on feed-in tariffs and you properly account for it--tax credits, feed-in credits in Spain, solar photovoltaic stuff in Germany--the world has spent a massive amount of money which, in terms of creating both jobs and knowledge, would have been far better spent on energy research. But it kind of shows up as "Okay, I'm paying a little more for electricity," which is a very complex, opaque thing. Where you're mixing in low-cost hydro sources or things that have been fully depreciated with new things that are very expensive, it's very complicated; when people are actually subsidizing some deployment, they don't see it as much. Whereas if you say "Okay, we need to raise a tax to fund the R&D," that's more explicit.

I was stunned, when I did the work with the AEIC, to see that if you wanted the U. S. energy industry as a whole to fund this R&D, you'd only have to tax energy 1 percent. That is, the amount of tax you'd need to fund the R&D is an order of magnitude less than the amount you'd need to increase the price of energy in order to start to have a strong price signal in terms of efficiency and tradeoffs in new power plants. The tradeoffs in new power plants you can do through regulation--just say, "Hey, you have to retire CO2-intensive plants at various dates, and you have to replace them with ones that meet various CO2 standards." So that actually creates a market, in the sense that people have to buy those things. But it'd take a very small tax to fund even a significant level of R&D increase. And that's using the term "R&D" very broadly, because in that $16 billion total that the AEIC called for, we had several things that are about pilot-plant deployment and financing. About one-third of it was not in traditional R&D. In energy we need to do the basic research. It's materials science, it's modeling, it's storage, there's a lot of things.

It is disappointing that some people have painted this problem as easy to solve. There are actually two articles in Scientific American where they allowed the author to say, "Oh, this is easy. Just go do a bunch of compressed air and sun," or "Just go do a mix of things and it's easy." It's not easy, and it's bad for society if we think it is easy, because then funding for R&D doesn't happen. If it was going to be easy, then that money really wouldn't be necessary. But in my view it's very necessary, and that's despite the fact that if you take the innovation economy in the U. S., broadly defined, now versus 10 years ago, there's a lot more energy activity. There's many examples of that. You've got Silicon Valley, with people like [venture capital firm] Perkins. Vinod Khosla [of Khosla Ventures] was into it early and he's got an amazing portfolio, but now there are many others doing it.

You've talked about the need for "energy miracles." But we've been waiting for such breakthroughs for decades. TerraPower is a traveling-wave reactor, a design that dates back to the 1950s. We've been working on energy miracles--and we've seen nothing. Wouldn't we be better off making the energy technologies we have more efficient?

Well, no, we haven't been working on those things. The nuclear industry was effectively shut down in the late '70s. And so evolutionary improvements on those so-called Gen 3 designs really didn't happen. And more radical designs that were measured according to their economics didn't happen. There's a lot of paper designs under the heading Gen 4, but most of those are going to be very, very expensive. They're kind of cool science, but they're very, very expensive.