At this year’s TechCrunch Sessions: Climate 2022, Bill Gates joined me on stage in a far-ranging conversation that included an updated assessment of our progress on mitigating climate change since the publication of his 2021 book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." I drew an analogy between our global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of climate change, but Gates indicated that in fact, the changes required to avert climate disaster are actually much larger in scale and scope than the steps needed to address an imminent pandemic with urgency.

In terms of why he remains optimistic about the ability for global social action to address climate issues, he pointed to countries outside the U.S. who stood as exemplars of how to minimize the health impacts of COVID, despite in every case having fewer resources to do so. He also cited the ample progress we’ve made since 2015, the end of the last green tech boom, in particular in terms of an “IQ shift” that has seen talent and skill move toward developing real solutions in the lab, rather than going into things like maximizing returns in the banking sector, for instance.

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Gates also said that economic conditions are currently “changing probably as rapidly as I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” and that introduces a lot of uncertainty around how and where capital can be deployed to make the kind of drastic, unprecedented changes necessary in key industries including manufacturing that need not only early investment but also fuel for rapid scale.