Ohne Innovation werden wir den Klimawandel nicht lösen | Dr. Klaus Reichert Smart Innovation Coach

„Ohne Innovation werden wir den Klimawandel nicht lösen. Wir werden es nicht einmal annähernd schaffen.“ Als Innovationscoach freut mich diese Aussage von Bill Gates. Seiner Meinung nach werden wir auch den Klimawandel mit Innovation so lösen, dass eine für Menschen lebenswerte Erde bleibt. Ich selbst denke, dass es etwas mehr brauchen wird, aber wenn man den Begriff „Innovation“ weitläufiger fasst, dann gehören auch Visionen und Veränderungen in der Gesellschaft dazu. Nicht freut es mich, dass wir überhaupt in einer Situation sind, die unsere menschliche Lebenswelt so massiv verändert.

Bill Gates und #klimaretten

Das neue Buch „How to avoid a Climate Desaster“ (Deutsch „Wie wir die Klimakatastrophe verhindern: Welche Lösungen es gibt und welche Fortschritte nötig sind“) von Bill Gates hat mich sehr erinnert an das Buch „#klimaretten“ meines früheren Öko-Institut Kollegen Prof. Dr. Rainer Grießhammer, welches, aufbauend auf Vorgängerbücher sehr hilfreich für alle die ist, die etwas gegen den Klimawandel persönlich tun wollen.

Fun Fact: Rainer Grießhammer hat das erste Buch zum Thema bereits 1984 mit dem „Öko-Knigge“ geschrieben. 2007 folgte dann der „Klima-Knigge“. „#klimaretten“ erschien 2019.

Globale Auswirkung

Nicht zu unterschätzen ist natürlich die Auswirkung, die Gates mit seiner globalen Plattform hat. Das treibt die Diskussion voran, liefert Zahlen und fördert konstruktive Gespräche, auch auf Regierungsebene. Man kennt Bill Gates einfach. Ein Mensch, der eine erstaunliche Transformation selbst in seinem Leben gemacht hat. Eine Entwicklung, die sicher auch auf seine Frau Melinda Gates zurückgeht. Über die vielen Interviews und vor allem die Netflix Doku „Inside Bill’s Brain“ verstehen wir mittlerweile besser, wer Bill Gates heute ist. Und was ihn motiviert.

Energie als wichtigstes Ziel für Klimaschutzmaßnahmen

Es ist nicht verwunderlich, dass gerade Energie im Zentrum von Gates Beobachtungen steht. Ist doch „Energie“ eines dieser Themen, die so vielfältig, so faszinierend, so polarisierend sind, dass man sich stundenlang darüber unterhalten kann. Und die wenigsten Menschen es tatsächlich machen. Denn eine weit verbreitete Form der Energie, der elektrische Strom, kommt einfach aus der Steckdose und macht uns, umgewandelt über häufig sehr attraktive Produkte, das Leben einfacher und komfortabler. Zum Glück. Und doch machen wir uns keine Vorstellung von der Komplexität der Förderung der Rohstoffe, der Erzeugung und Transport des Stromes zu uns. In Deutschland beträgt der Anteil von fossilen Energieträgern am Primärenergieverbrauch immer noch ca. 80% laut Umweltbundesamt. Das ist zwar ein Riesenfortschritt (1990 lag der Anteil der Regenerativen bei 1%). Doch es reicht nicht. Weltweit werden so, laut Gates Buch, 51 Mrd. Tonnen Treibhausgase pro Jahr in die Atmosphäre entlassen. Und diese Zahl müsse 2050 „0“ sein. Das ist jetzt ein Bild, mit dem man sich Dimensionen besser vorstellen kann. Ein weiteres Bild: Jedes Jahr kommen mehrere Tausende Menschen beim Abbau von Kohle ums Leben. Zusätzlich könnten es noch 500.000 Menschen sein, die durch die Auswirkungen der Energieerzeugung pro Jahr ums leben kommen. Zahlen über die man sicher diskutieren kann, die dem Thema Energie ein Gesicht geben.

„Hey, when you’re going to zero, you don’t get to skip anything.“

Klimawandel – eine Riesenaufgabe für Innovation

Innovation mit all ihren Bereichen wie Forschung, Entwicklung, Produktmanagement, Design, Innovationsmanagement bekommt durch die Ausrichtung auf den Klimawandel eine neue, spannende Dimension. Ganzheitliche Sichtweisen sind zwar anstrengend, doch liefern sie genau den Blick, die Daten, Ableitungen und Ideen, die wir als kreative Menschen doch so gerne als Ansporn haben. Doof wäre nur, wenn wir es verk….

Meine Empfehlung

Meine Empfehlung ist die Beschäftigung mit beiden genannten Büchern: Gates „Wie wir die Klimakatastrophe verhindern“ und Grießhammers #klimaretten. Natürlich gibt es viele weitere Ressourcen zum Thema. Aber die beiden ergänzen sich gut. Wäre spannend, wie ein Gespräch der beiden Autoren ablaufen würde. Denn in einem Punkt sind sie vollkommen entgegen gesetzt: die Atomenergie. Diese erscheint so lange eine spannende Lösung zu sein, bis man an das Thema „Endlagerung“ und die dafür notwendigen langen Zeiträume mit den damit verbundenen Strahlungen denkt. Da werden wir sicher noch spannende Gespräche erleben.

Videos erleichtern den Einstieg

Wer sein Lesevergnügen multimedial bereichern möchte, kann auch schauen. Es gibt eine Reihe von Videos von beiden Autoren, hier eine Auswahl:

Am Ende dieses Artikels habe ich ein Transkript zum Nachlesen einkopiert.

Der CO2-Rechner des Umweltbundesamtes, mit dem jede/r den persönlichen ökologischen Fussabdruck einfach selbst ausrechnen kann.

Bücher bestellen

„Wie wir die Klimakatastrophe verhindern: Welche Lösungen es gibt und welche Fortschritte nötig sind“
bei Ravensbuch in Ravensburg / Amazon Kindle* / Tolino / Mehr erfahren

#klimaretten
bei Ravensbuch in Ravensburg / Amazon Kindle* / Tolino / Mehr erfahren

„Mein grundlegender Optimismus in Bezug auf den Klimawandel beruht auf meinem Glauben an Innovation. Die Bedingungen für die Unterstützung von Energiedurchbrüchen waren noch nie so klar. Es ist unsere Kraft zu erfinden, die mich hoffnungsvoll macht.“Bill Gates

Transkript des Bill Gates 60 Minutes 2021 Interview mit Anderson Cooper

Dieses Transkript wurde automatisch erzeugt und enthält Fehler.

Anderson Cooper: Bill Gates helped usher in the digital revolution at Microsoft and has spent the decade since exploring and investing in innovative solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems. Global poverty, disease and the coronavirus pandemic, which he has spent nearly $2 billion on. Now he’s focusing on climate change green with the overwhelming majority of scientists who warn of a looming climate disaster. The good news is, Gates believes it’s possible to prevent a catastrophic rise in temperatures. The bad news, he says, in the next 30 years. We need scientific breakthroughs, technological innovations and global cooperation on a scale the world has never seen. The story will continue in a moment. You believe this is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced.

Bill Gates: Absolutely the amount of change, uh, new ideas. It’s way greater than the pandemic, and it needs a level of cooperation that will be unprecedented. That doesn’t sound. No, it’s not easy. Uh, but it sounds like poverty years. We have more educated people. Whenever we have a generation that speaking out on this topic, you know, I got to participate in the miracle of the personal computer and theInternet. So yes, I have a bias to believe innovation could do these things.

Anderson Cooper: He’s talking about innovations in every aspect of modern life manufacturing, agriculture, transportation. Because nearly everything we now do releases earth warming greenhouse gasses, mainly carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He took us to his favorite burger joint in Seattle to explain You’re talking about changing everything in the economy, every aspect.

Bill Gates: Yeah.

Anderson Cooper: What can we see right now of us sitting around here, what specifically would be impacted?

Bill Gates: Well, this cement, uh, would be made in a different way. The steel in the building would be different. You know, the meat in the burger is a big deal. These, you know, all this plastic and paper potatoes with potatoes.

Anderson Cooper: You’re talking about fertilizer, the irrigation system that’s used all the tractors, the transport trucks that bring them to this restaurant. All that pastor chance.

Bill Gates: Hey, when you’re going to zero, you don’t get to skip anything.

Anderson Cooper: Gates says going to zero means eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions. Or else if they wait 100 years to do this, t’s way too late.

Bill Gates: Uh, then the natural ecosystems will have failed the instability. Uh, you know, the migration. You know those things will get really, really bad well before three end of the century.

Anderson Cooper: When you talk about migration, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people trying to move from North Africa to Europe every year.

Bill Gates: Exactly. The Syrian war was 1/20 of what climate migration will look like. So the deaths per year our way, 10 times greater than what we’ve experienced in the pandemic.

Anderson Cooper: In a new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Gates outlines all the solutions he believes we need. He says the U. S has to lead the world getting to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. He supports President Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, but is asking the administration to massively increase the budget for climate and clean energy research to $35 billion a year. You’ve said that governments need to do the hard stuff but not just go after the low hanging fruit. What’s low hanging fruit?

Bill Gates: passenger cars, part of the electric generation with renewables? The things everybody knows about that’s getting almost all the money, not the hard parts, which is three industrial peace, including the steel and cement those pieces we’ve hardly started to work on.

Anderson Cooper: No one thinks much about cement and steel, but making it accounts for 16% of all carbon dioxide emissions, and the demand is only growing. The world will add an estimated 2.5 trillion square feet of buildings by 2060. That’s the equivalent to putting up another New York city every month for the next 40years. So one innovative company Gates has been pouring money into is carbon cure. They inject captured carbon dioxide into concrete.

Bill Gates: What they do is they stick CO two in here and the cement, and they mixed them up. And so you’re able to actually get rid of some CO two by sticking it in the cement. Right now, they get rid of about 5% but they have, ah, next generation. They get to 30%.

Anderson Cooper: The carbon has been just injected into this, so it’s captured it, so it’s not gonna be released into the atmosphere. That’s right. Gates has already invested $2 billion of his own money on new Green Technologies and plans to spend several billion mawr in 2000 and 16. He also recruited Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg and nearly two dozen other wealthy investors to back a billion dollar fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures, making long term, often risky investments in promising technologies.

Bill Gates: It kind of blows my mind, you know, what’s the cost of making that stuff?

Anderson Cooper: Gates regularly consults with the funds team of top scientists and entrepreneurs who’ve so far invested in 50 companies with cutting edge ideas to reduce carbon emissions. What’s like the most far flung idea you back?

Bill Gates: There’s one that’s so crazy it’s even hard to describe. Uh, it’s so crazy. It’s hard to describe. How do you pitch that to investors? They find geological formations and they just pump water down into them. The energy they have used to pump it in. Then they could draw that energy back out. So it’s it’s water pressure storage thing, which you know, when I first thought, I thought that can’t work. But when you gave money to it, yeah, lots of money.

Anderson Cooper: Because cows account for around 4% of all greenhouse gasses, Gates has invested in two companies making plant based meat substitutes impossible foods and beyond meat. But farming the vegetables used to make many meat alternatives amidst gas is as well. So Gates is also backing a company that’s created an entirely new food source.

Bill Gates: This company, Nature’s find, is using fungi, and then they turn them into sausage and yogurt.

Anderson Cooper: Pretty amazing when you say fun guy, Do you mean like mushroom ordered microbe?

Bill Gates: It’s a microbe.

Anderson Cooper: The microbe was discovered in the ground in a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Without soil or fertilizer, it could be grown to produce this nutritional protein that can then be turned into a variety of foods with a small carbon footprint. This is New Yorker. Oh, that’s good. Wow, I’ve had, like, cashew yogurt or yogurt. Its’s sort of along those lines.

Bill Gates: Yeah, with the burgers, they’re, like, beyond impossible. They’re getting close through things. You could still tell these. I’m not sure I could tell. No, I’m I’m more of a burger expert than I am a yogurt. Excellent.

Anderson Cooper: Gates never planned to focus on climate change, but while working in Africa with the foundation he started with his wife, Melinda, in 2000, he came to see just how vulnerable those in developing countries are to the effects of rising temperatures. So 15 years ago, Gates started educating himself on climate change, bringing scientists and engineers to his office in Seattle for what he calls learning sessions. He also reads voraciously books and binders full of scientific research.

Bill Gates: Yeah, so this is the most recent one, which is about clean hydrogen.

Anderson Cooper: So you’re reading thousands of pages every few days on topics.

Bill Gates: Yeah, my reading is key and then asking questions when it doesn’t make sense

Anderson Cooper: Gates isn’t just looking to cut future carbon emissions. He’s also investing in direct air capture, an experimental process to remove existing CO two from the atmosphere. Some companies are now using these giant fans to capture CO. Two directly out of the air. Gates has become one of the world’s largest funders of this kind of technology. But of all his green investments, Gates has spent the most time and money pursuing a breakthrough in nuclear energy, arguing it’s key to a zero carbon future. He says he’s a big believer in wind and solar and thinks it can one day provide up to 80% of the country’s electricity. But Gates insists, unless we discover an effective way to store and ship wind and solar energy, nuclear power will likely have to do the rest. Energy from nuclear plants could be stored so it’s available when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Were you always a big proponent of nuclear? In 2000 and eight, he founded Terror Power, a company that has redesigned a nuclear reactor. This is your prototype.

Bill Gates: Exactly. Terror powers. Nature in reactor this’ll is a rendering. We haven’t built it yet, but here’s the nuclear island right here.

Anderson Cooper: This is the reactor. Exactly. Gates says terror powers reactor is less expensive to build, produces less waste and is fully automated, reducing the potential for human error. Gates and director of Engineering Lindsay Bowls showed us what they say is another key to its safety. What is it that we’re looking at here?So these individual fuel pins are actually where the uranium fuel is, and that’s what generates all the heat in our nature and reactor. This is what everybody is worried about.

Bill Gates: Yes, exactly in a normal reactor, its water that’s flowing past and heating up, and it’ll boil and generate a lot of high pressure that high heat and pressure can cause an explosion like in Chernobyl in 1986 when radioactive material was spread for thousands of miles.

Anderson Cooper: But Gates says the terror power reactor won’t use water to cool down the fuel rods.They plan to use liquid sodium.

Bill Gates: The liquid sodium can absorb a lot more heat, and so we don’t have any high pressure inside the reactor.

Anderson Cooper: In October, the Department of Energy awarded Terror Power $80million to build one of the first advanced nuclear reactors in the U. S.

Bill Gates: Nuclear power can be done in a way that none of those failures of the past would recur because just the physics of how it’s built, I admit convincing people of that will be almost just hard as actually building it. But since it may be necessary to avoid climate change, we shouldn’t give up.

Anderson Cooper: You’ve been criticized for being a technocrat, saying technology is the only solution for tackling climate change. There are other people say, Look, the solutions already there it just government policy is what really needs to be focused on.

Bill Gates: I wish that was true. I wish all this funding to these companies wasn’t, uh, necessary it all. Without innovation, we will not solve climate change. We won’teven come close.

Anderson Cooper: Gates credits young activists for keeping climate change in the headlines, but he knows some consider him an imperfect a ally. Are you the right messenger on this? Because you fly private planes. Ah, lot. And you’re creating a lot of greenhouse gasses yourself.

Bill Gates: Yeah, I probably have one of the highest greenhouse gas footprints of anyone on the planet. You know, my my kind of personal flying alone is gigantic.Now, I’m spending quite a bit, uh, by aviation fuel that was made with plants. I switched to an electric car. I’ve used solar panels. I’m paying a company that actually at a very high price come, pull a bit of carbon out of the air and stick it underground. And so I’m offsetting my personal emissions.

Anderson Cooper: Those are called carbon offset.

Bill Gates: Right. So, you know, it’s costing, like, $400 a ton.

Anderson Cooper: It’s like seven million dollars to your paying $7 million a year to offset your carbon footprint. He’s encouraging others who can afford it to buy carbon offsets and green products so that what he calls the green premium, he added, production costs for reducing carbon emissions will go down in quality of products up driving the innovations that may get us to zero. It just seems overwhelming. If every aspect of our daily life has to change, it could seem overwhelming. But you are optimistic.

Bill Gates: Yeah, there are days when it looks very hard. People think it’s easy. They’re wrong. People think it’s impossible. They’re wrong. It’s possible it’s possible. But it will be the most amazing thing mankind has ever done. That’s what it has to be. Yeah, it’s an all out effort, you know, like a world war. But it’s us against greenhouse gasses.

Dieses Transkript wurde automatisch erzeugt und enthält Fehler.

Nächste Schritte

Einfach mal mit Klaus zusammensetzen und überlegen, wie diese nächsten Schritte für das eigene Unternehmen aussehen.