Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk fight the climate issue the Iron Man way

Climate change seems to be high on the agenda for tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but some are asking if they are focusing their efforts on the right areas.

Broadly speaking, the three richest tech billionaires – who are among the top five richest people on the planet – are all trying to develop new technologies that can reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Musk is largely focused on funding carbon capture technologies, Gates is particularly positive about nuclear energy, and Bezos has created a dedicated ‘Bezos Earth Fund’. Everyone believes that technology should play an important role in tackling climate change and they are doing their best to ensure that they push the boundaries when it comes to climate technology.

“They basically think the ‘Iron Man way’ is that we can build the technology to innovate ourselves out of it,” Christian Kroll, founder and CEO of search engine Ecosia, told CNBC in a video call said and added that they should focus more on planting trees.

“No technology will ever get there,” he said, referring to trees. And on top of that, you get so many things for free. You get fertile soil, you do something against the biodiversity crisis, and you help the water cycle so you have fewer droughts and fewer floods. “

Global carbon dioxide emissions have skyrocketed over the past 100 years, leading to unprecedented global warming and climate change.

It is well known that trees are one of the most efficient carbon capture machines on earth. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through a chemical reaction, known as photosynthesis, where they turn the gas into energy that they use to grow. Emperor trees, for example, can absorb about 103 tons of carbon per year per hectare.

Twelve of the top 20 climate solutions are related to agriculture or forests, according to the San Francisco-based climate-profitable Project Drawdown.

Last week, British Prince William underlined the importance of investing in nature to tackle climate change and protect our planet.

“We need to invest in nature through reforestation, sustainable agriculture and supporting healthy oceans, because it is one of the most cost-effective and most effective ways to tackle climate change,” he said.

“It removes carbon from the atmosphere, helps build more resilient communities, tackles the loss of biodiversity and protects the livelihoods of humans. It is crucial if our children and grandchildren are to live sustainably on our precious planet.”

Jack Kelly, the founder of Open Climate Fix and a former researcher at the Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind, told CNBC that a mix of approaches is needed. “I think we need a wide range of interventions, both technology and reforestation,” he said.

However, according to Kroll, trees and reforestation are relatively low on the technical billionaire agenda list.

While tech billionaires may not necessarily “solve” climate change by planting more trees, they could have a “massive impact” if they devote more of their capital to it, he says.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Amazon founder Bezos is worth $ 197 billion, Tesla founder Musk is worth $ 181 billion and Microsoft founder Gates is worth $ 145 billion.

Representatives of Musk and Gates did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment, while a representative of Bezos declined to comment.

There is no denying that technological billionaires are increasingly interested in climate change.

In January, Tesla CEO Musk promised to invest $ 100 million in new carbon capture technologies. Carbon capture is the process of capturing carbon dioxide waste, directly from the air, or just before it is released from factories and power plants.

His investment in new carbon capture technologies dwarfs the $ 1 million he spent on trees in 2019 when he made a donation to YouTuber Jimmy ‘MrBeast’ Donaldson to help him reach a $ 20 million tree planting target.

However, Musk’s views on climate change are complex. While running a relatively green company for electric vehicles, he has also been criticized for his love of bitcoin, which is now one of the world’s largest CO2 emitters.

Meanwhile, Gates thinks nuclear energy is the future and his TerraPower business, which he founded in 2008, aims to build a fully functional advanced nuclear reactor.

In his new book ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’, Gates does not seem convinced that trees are worth investing in.

“It’s obviously attractive to those of us who like trees, but it opens up a very complicated topic … its effect on climate change seems overwhelming,” he writes.

Gates argues that the most effective reforestation strategy is to stop cutting down so much of the trees we already have, saying, ‘You’ll need about 50 acres of trees planted in tropical areas to emit an average American. to absorb. in their lifetime. ‘

The Microsoft mogul explained his position on trees in a podcast interview with New York Times journalist Kara Swisher in February.

“If you’re going to replant 10,000 years, it’s a legal setback,” Gates said. ‘If you only plant one generation of trees, you will not get much. You know, I’m not saying it’s a mistake or something. But it will not make a significant dent in this problem. ‘

Gates, who is now the largest owner of agricultural land in the U.S., added: “The idea that there is a place to plant a trillion trees is just wrong.”

Elsewhere, last February, Bezos set up the $ 10 billion Bezos Earth Fund to provide financial support to scientists, NGOs, activists and the private sector.

To date, the Bezos Earth Fund has issued grants to various reforestation organizations, including Eden Reforestation Projects, The Nature Conservancy and The Natural Resources Defense Council.

However, Amazon has been criticized for increasing pollution with its planes and pickups, and for using excessive amounts of cardboard during the packaging of its products. Amazon says that the packaging is 100% renewable and that it does not use plastic shells and wire ties.

Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing industry, and Microsoft also operate energy-intensive data centers around the world.

But Kroll believes that technology billionaires are still relatively ‘obsessed’ with inventing new technologies to tackle the problem.

His company, Ecosia, made tree planting a big part of his identity.

Ecosia is headquartered in Berlin and donates 80% of its profits to charities focusing on reforestation. In essence, if a person goes searching on the Ecosia search engine, almost all the money the company earns from digital advertising will be used to plant trees.

The company has partnered with more than 60 tree planting organizations that have planted more than 123 million trees, Kroll said, adding that they are mostly in the tropics in developing countries.

“Through our tree planting, each search removes about 1 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere,” Kroll said. “I do dozens of searches every day, so thousands of searches every year. It removes a few tons of CO2 from the atmosphere just by searching.”

Kroll suggested that people should only be classified as billionaires if they emit a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

“All the others are just dollar billionaires,” he said. “It’s boring. We do not need it in a 21st century anymore.”