Microsoft founder Bill Gates reacts during a visit with Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the Imperial College University, in London, Britain, February 15, 2023.
Justin Tallis | Pool | Reuters
Climate change is an urgent issue, but it won’t be solved by asking everyone to become vegetarians, Bill Gates said at a recent event in India.
“Will all Indians become vegetarians? Will all Americans become vegetarians? I wouldn’t want to count on it. Anybody wants to evangelize that they’re welcome to,” Gates said, speaking with Anant Goenka, the executive director of the Indian Express Group, an Indian media company.
Meat has a notoriously high climate footprint. Food systems in the world are responsible for about 35 percent of total global anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature Food, and of that, 57 percent correlates to animal-based food and 29 percent to plant-based foods.
“In climate movements, you can get this, ‘Hey, we’ve been consuming too much,’ and ‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t travel anymore,'” Gates said, speaking at the 5th Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture delivered on March 1.
These de-growth arguments have limited applicability, though. While Americans could use less energy than they currently do, Gates said, it would be “completely unjust” to ask people living in India to continue using the same amount of energy.
“I don’t think we can count on people living an impoverished lifestyle as a solution to climate,” Gates said.
In fact, “most of the demand for more energy, more cement, more steel is coming in from middle-income countries like India,” Gates said.
Recognizing that it is a fool’s errand to ask consumers to restrict their demand for energy significantly, or to eliminate their consumption of meat, does not mean that Gates is encouraging frivolous and excessive use of energy.
But, climate change is creating more need for energy used in air conditioning, he said, and that’s only going to keep increasing. “As…
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