Episode 076 - Is this not good enough evidence for you?
Added 2022-11-12 15:44:37 +0000 UTCDisclosing evidence of conflicting interests and preferential treatment
Comments
It wasn't just for you but it was largely inspired by your input. Others have made valuable contributions as well. The conflict of interests is financial - donating to for-profit business where you hold investments means you are giving your investments tax-deductible contributions. It's also a philanthropic conflict, because investments are contributing to the problems donations attempt to address. If you don't see this a conflict, there is nothing that could change your mind. A quick look at their portfolio doesn't give you perspective on Gates' major positions. You don't anything about the actual size of these positions. I am not criticizing just one company. I am criticizing the whole concept - relying on future innovations while downplaying existing ones. Gates has a major position on nuclear, but not the current one. Same for the other BEV and BEC investments. They are not investing into current technologies. They are supporting startups that haven't proven commercial viability. There are plenty of renewable companies out there building solar farms, wind and hydro power, it just isn't a major interest of the BE billionaires. What is Gates' exact position on trees? Because in his books and public appearances, I have seen lambaste them in favor of soil based carbon capture and direct air capture. What you are missing with your nuclear water argument is pretty much everything - there is a limited supply of water, cooling of water will take either tremendous energy or colossal space for storage that you'd have to build before releasing it into the ecosystem; heatwaves and droughts could deprive nuclear plants (and all other plants) of the necessary water for energy production. This is already a very real bottleneck of energy generation in south-west USA. The withdrawals are excessive and threaten supply for other key industries (mainly agriculture). People think they have infinite water supply and any issue can be fixed with a simple arm chair engineering in a comment on a social media website. If it was that easy, the seven Colorado River states would have done something about that before they brought Lake Mead's levels to record lows and not afterwards. You don't seem to realize that engineering is confined by ecology. I don't think I am gonna be able to change your mind. You can't engineer your way out of every problem. Or let's have billionaires run this experiment for us and see how it goes. It's not like this is the only planet that can support life in the whole universe or anything.
The Hated One
2022-11-20 16:01:16 +0000 UTCI’ve never had a podcast episode made just for me before. Thanks for that! I know I’m a little slow at this, but I suppose I should put down my thoughts. Early on you remark that Gates’ investment in a paper mill in Niger is a conflict of interest with the Gates Foundation’s disease eradication efforts there. I don’t see why. A conflict of interest means that the interests of one party directly opposes the interests of the other party. So I don’t see why fighting disease is bad for the paper mill. Presumably it would be good, since the paper mill wouldn’t have as many sick workers. On Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV): you only talk about one of their investments, but they have many investments (their declared portfolio: https://breakthroughenergy.org/our-work/breakthrough-energy-ventures/bev-portfolio/). The idea of VC is that they invest in a lot of startups knowing that many of them will fail in the hopes that a few will be huge successes. They just don’t know which will be the successful ones. So criticizing one company in a large portfolio isn’t very convincing. And BEV isn’t only invested in nuclear energy. A quick look through their portfolio page shows: 1. Two companies involved in solar (https://arnergy.com/, https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/04/bill-gates-breakthrough-energy-terabase-robot-solar-farms/) 2. Fish-friendly hydropower (https://www.natelenergy.com/) 3. Carbon neutral milk (https://www.eatneutral.com/) 4. Tree-based carbon offsets (https://pachama.com/) Would it also be a conflict of interest for Kurgzeagt to bring up solar or planting trees to offset carbon? One last comment on nuclear: the problem you put forward as fundamental is the reliance on cooling water. I’ll grant this this is a problem for the currently operating nuclear reactors in France. But I don’t think “give the water extra time to cool down before putting it back into the river” is an impossible engineering challenge. Maybe I’m missing something there.
David Love
2022-11-15 12:33:35 +0000 UTC
