Bill Gates: COVID proves that US ‘needs to do a better job preparing for global threats’
Dec 4, 2020, 1:27 PM | Updated: 1:34 pm
Microsoft founder Bill Gates. (Getty Images)
(Getty Images)
Microsoft founder Bill Gates published a blog Thursday, saying that the United States needs “to do a better job preparing for global threats.”
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Gates — who has been issuing warnings for years about the threat of a global pandemic — pointed to the COVID crisis as a prime example of the lack of readiness the U.S. has had when it comes to large-scale disasters. As for the next big disaster, he believes the U.S. needs to be step up in the fight against climate change.
In a separate blog published in August, Gates likened the potential damage of climate change to what we’ve seen with the pandemic, except spread out “over a much longer period of time.” In order to avoid that future, he’s now pushing for crucial global economic and scientific overhaul efforts led by the United States.
“We need to revolutionize the world’s physical economy — and that will take, among other things, a dramatic infusion of ingenuity, funding, and focus from the federal government,” he wrote. “No one else has the resources to drive the research we need.”
To that end, he suggests a “fivefold increase” in federal funding to reduce greenhouse gases and spearhead clean energy research, and putting that money on “equal footing” with health spending. According to Gates, the federal government spends roughly $7 billion annually on clean energy research, a fraction of the $35 billion the nation spends every year on medical research.
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With that funding increase, he predicts that the U.S. could create upwards of 370,000 new jobs, “while advancing a clean-energy agenda.”
He also recommends the federal government stand up a brand new National Institute of Energy Innovation, labeling it “the most important thing the U.S. can do” in becoming a world leader on solving climate change.
Such an organization would be modeled off of the National Institutes of Health, which leads the country’s biomedical and public health research efforts, and is headed up by what Gates describes as a group of “apolitical leaders who let independent researchers follow the science, rather than political staff who change priorities every few years.”
