This anecdote was part of the new Rolling Stone interview with Bill Gates:
Bill Gates: The Rolling Stone Interview The richest man in the world explains how to save the planet
Jeff Goodell: We're heading for big trouble, right?
Bill Gates: Absolutely. That's why I happen to think we should explore geo-engineering. But one of the complaints people have against that is that if it looks like an easy out, it'll reduce the political will to cut emissions. If that's the case, then, hey, we should take away heart surgery so that people know not to overeat. I happened to be having dinner with Charles Koch last Saturday, and we talked a little bit about climate change.
Jeff Goodell: And what was the conversation like?
Bill Gates: He's a very nice person, and he has this incredible business track record. He was pointing out that the U.S. alone can't solve the problem, and that's factually correct. But you have to view the U.S. doing something as a catalyst for getting China and others to do things. The atmosphere is the ultimate commons. We all benefit from it, and we're all polluting it. It's amazing how few problems there are in terms of the atmosphere. . . . There's just this one crazy thing that CO2 hangs around for a long, long time, and the oceans absorb it, which acidifies them, which is itself a huge problem we should do something about.
Jeff Goodell: Like cut carbon emissions fast.
Bill Gates: Yes, but people need energy. It's a gigantic business. The main thing that's missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
Gates goes on to talk about a new generation of nuclear power technologies, something he has invested in.
Jeff Goodell: Given the scale of problems like climate change and the slow economic recovery and political gridlock and rising health care costs, it's easy for people to feel pessimistic about the way the world is going.
Bill Gates:Really? That's too bad. I think that's overly focusing on the negatives. I think it's a pretty bright picture, myself. But that doesn't mean I think, because we've always gotten through problems in the past, "just chill out, relax, someone else will worry about it." I don't see it that way.
Jeff Goodell: When you look on the horizon over the next 50 years, what is your biggest fear?
Bill Gates:I think we will get our act together on climate change. That's very important. I hope we get our act together on large-scale terrorism and avoid that being a huge setback for the world. On health equity, we can reduce the number of poor children who die from more than 6 million down to 2 million, eventually 1 million. Will the U.S. political system right itself in terms of how it focuses on complex problems? Will the medical costs overwhelm the sense of what people expect government to do?
So basically Bill Gates and Charles Koch agreed to disagree on Climate Change during their dinner. No doubt Gates touched on the same points he mentions in the interview during their discussion over dinner. Gates doesn't go into Charles Koch's counter argument except the point they agree on that the US can't solve the problem on our own.
Gates sees high tech solutions like nuclear and geo-engineering as the best ways to deal with Climate Change.
Personally I put less faith in a high tech solutions that lets us go on squandering energy relying on new technologies coming on line to undo the damage we continue to inflict on our natural environment.
Climate Change presents us with a set of daunting problems, that from another perspective over a longer period is a galaxy of opportunities disguised as problems.