Is it realistic to ask people to stop eating meat or travel to combat climate change?

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and billionaire philanthropist, thinks the answer may be no.

“In climate movements, you can get this: ‘Hey, we consumed too much’ and ‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t travel anymore,'” he said at a lecture commemorating the founder of the Indian Express Group on March 1.

“Will all Indians become vegetarians? Will all Americans become vegetarians? I wouldn’t count on it. Everyone wants to evangelize that they are welcome,” Gates added.

Gates, through things like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has focused on philanthropy and global issues ever since. to leave his day job at Microsoft in 2008. The non-profit organization works to fight disease and help with other global issues, including gender inequality. In May 2022, he published “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic”.

The foundation Also supports climate change initiatives, as does its venture capital fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Gates was talking to Anant Goenka, executive director of the Indian Express Group, a media company founded by Ramnath Goenka in 1936. The lecture was the 5th Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture, and the first since the pandemic hit. by Indian Express.

Gates touched on a number of climate-related issues, from his support for nuclear energy to his disagreement that solving climate change can happen by asking people to live an “impoverished lifestyle”.

Researcher and climate activist Richard Heede has shown that nearly two-thirds of carbon emissions come from or are supplied by 90 companies and government-led business sectors. However, meat is a pretty significant carbon producer, CNBC noted. An investigation published in the journal Nature Food found that plant-based foods had about half the climate footprint of products that come from animals.

Gates reflected on the challenge of changing the way the world produces energy during the event, as well as its disproportionate impact on equatorial countries that are generally not major emitters of carbon.

Climate change is “one of the hardest things to solve because modern economies around the world are based on energy intensity, and more than 80% of that energy comes from burning hydrocarbons,” he said at the event.

The largest carbon channels include China, USA and India. In December, Gates also discussed his views on climate change.

“I can sum up the solution to climate change in two sentences: we must have eliminated global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” Gates wrote in a December 2022 blog post, per CNBC.

“Extreme weather is already causing more suffering, and if we don’t reach net-zero emissions, our grandchildren will grow up in a world that is dramatically worse off,” he added.