[ANSOL-geral] Bill Gates: The private sector is completely inept

[André Isidoro Fernandes Esteves]

Uma pessoa farta-se de aturar camafeus e lambe-botas...

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Bill Gates: The private sector is completely inept

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/29/bill_gates_the_private_sector_is_completely_inept_partner/

Bill Gates, still the world’s richest man after all these years, does 
not have a lot of faith in his fellow billionaires or even capitalism 
when it comes to doing the right thing. It turns out he thinks the 
private sector is too selfish and inept to tackle the dire climate 
change situation, and relying on it would be courting disaster. Better 
to take a quasi socialist approach and remove the profit motive 
altogether from this important work.

In a wide-ranging interview withThe Atlantic 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/>recently, 
Gates tacked pretty hard to the left. “There’s no fortune to be made,� 
he said, when it comes to developing clean energy sources and mitigating 
climate change. Besides, he pointed out, “the private sector is in 
general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that 
go poorly? By far most of them.�

The tech magnate, who has pledged $2 billion of his own money for R&D 
(which seems like a lot until you consider that he is worth $79.2 
billion, according to Forbes), said he was pleasantly surprised when he 
dug into the history of government research into big scientific questions.

“Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the 
art in almost every area,� Gates told the Atlantic. “When I first got 
into this I thought, ‘How well does the Department of Energy spend its 
R&D budget?’ And I was worried: ‘Gosh, if I’m going to be saying it 
should double its budget, if it turns out it’s not very well spent, how 
am I going to feel about that? But as I’ve really dug into it, the DARPA 
money is very well spent, and the basic-science money is very well 
spent. The government has these ‘Centers of Excellence.’ They should 
have twice as many of those things, and those things should get about 
four times as much money as they do.�

Gates is doing a solo world tour to convince the world’s richest nations 
to commit to innovating their way out of catastrophic climate change, a 
tall order. Germany and China are already pointing the way to green 
energy with some of their socialist policies. Germany has generated as 
much as 78 percent of its electricity through renewable sources, and 
regularly generates about 30 percent, twice what the U.S. does. China’s 
$80 billion green energy investment 
<http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurechinas-energy-revolution-4643231/> dwarfs 
that of both the U.S. and Europe.

“I would love to see a tripling, to $18 billion a year from the U.S. 
government to fund basic research alone,� Gates said. “Now, as a 
percentage of the government budget, that’s not gigantic… This is not an 
unachievable amount of money.�

Still, given the current make-up of the U.S. Congress, and its funding 
from the climate-change denying Koch brothers, Gates will likely face 
his hardest fight right here at home.


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