Dot Earth, launched eight years and 2,700 posts ago, explores efforts to balance human ambitions with the planet’s limits. Follow Andrew Revkin on Facebook or Twitter at @revkin.

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After Bill Gates explained his strategy for boosting energy access while limiting climate change in a videotaped interview we published on Tuesday, readers were invited to submit questions for the Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist and investor.

Below are his answers to a few of the hundreds of questions he received on The Times and on Facebook, covering everything from artificial meat to Americans’ gas guzzling driving preferences (with some light editing of his dictated responses):

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How do we get the public to stop buying gas guzzlers when fuel is so cheap? I am vested in the fight for our planet but so many are complacent or living for the short term …. Even when they can financially afford alternatives.

— Cathy Charles

Bill Gates: Fuel-efficiency standards have been very effective at driving engineering and innovation. Unfortunately, the average car size has offset somewhat those mile-per-gallon improvements. And so, having it be more acceptable to get a more modest sized car helps. For a while, light trucks were exempted from the fuel efficiency, and there was a big market shift towards those trucks. They have now fixed that. We’ve now got more comprehensive regulation, which has helped us import less oil and drive more engineering. It’s a very good thing. We also have electric cars that, if those batteries can be made two to three times better, will start to move into the mainstream.

For the full solution to the climate problem, we need such a dramatic reduction in emissions that only getting fuel from biofuels or by converting to electricity and then having the power grid generate no CO2 is the full solution. In the meantime, the less gasoline we’re burning the better off we are.

Why does Gates ignore market-ready solutions that are at hand and ready to deploy? In so doing, he ignores hundreds of studies and scientists. While we need more research, Gates does a disservice by diminishing the potential for today’s solutions. —Andy Olsen

Gates: The rich countries have provided incentives and subsidies for solar and wind, and that’s had the beneficial effect of not only getting the installed capacity reducing CO2, but also getting the volume learning curve for those technologies to move costs down. Solar electric in particular has come down a lot. So, in some places, up to a certain percentage, it’s an economic part of the system.

People shouldn’t ignore the fact, though, that the demand is still somewhat driven by the tax credits and portfolio standards. So we still have quite a ways to go, particularly when you’re trying to get from 20 percent of the energy sources up to the eventual 100 percent we need, where then you run into the big challenge of intermittency [dips and peaks in power as wind and solar sources vary] and the cost of adding storage that would deal with that. This makes the economics dramatically tougher because batteries haven’t improved that much. Now I and many other people are investing in companies that are going to try and see what we can do with batteries. But it’s not guaranteed that their price will come down a lot. So solar and wind are great, but as they exist today, for countries like India, either in terms of cost or reliability, they aren’t going to get used substantially without innovations in cost and storage or alternative approaches.

I have a question for Mr. Gates. I live and work in Saudi Arabia. Currently historical low oil costs are sending tremors through economies here. We have no idea how this economic downturn will affect stability here. My question: Has your fund reached out to the oil-rich countries so that their economic security and progress can be assured? Ironically, they should have an interest in investing their carbon-centered profits into the energy of the future. If these sources of energy are replaced, this process will affect many people. How do we assure that the progress towards carbon neutral energy does not destabilize world economies? — David Brady

Gates: The Breakthrough Energy Coalition does include individuals like Prince Al-Waleed of Saudi Arabia or Aliko Dangote, from Nigeria. As we add institutional investors, we will be talking to energy companies and sovereign wealth funds, and be establishing the specifics of the fundby the end of the year And you know, there are some areas, like geothermal or carbon capture and sequestration, that relate to the kind of skills — seismic understanding, drilling holes in a safe way — there are some things that you’d expect the existing energy industry to really explore and try to make those as economic as possible, so that they will be important participants.

I know that you’ve invested in Beyond Meat and have personally discussed animal agriculture as a key source of climate change. But I wonder why you don’t put more resources into it. I don’t see it anywhere in your interview with Andrew for example. —Bruce Friedrich [Here’s some background on Beyond Meat from Nick Kristof.]

Gates: There’s still a lot to be done there. Artificial meat, if it can become economic, would be a very positive thing. So I’ve invested in several companies. There are also others working on that. I’m hopeful that our meat production is a completely different path than how that’s been done traditionally. But it’s all at a pretty early.

Given the political environment of the United States and around the globe, can even your substantial investment overcome the multi billion dollar establishment of traditional fossil fuel companies and infrastructure? Also, how can concerned citizens support these initiatives on a daily basis when the vast majority of infrastructure already supports these traditional means? —Mike Wenzel

Gates: The infrastructure for distributing gasoline is very impressive. So, if you could create liquid hydrocarbons that are compatible with gasoline cars, then the adoption cycle would be a lot easier than switching over to electric or hydrogen or some other type of fuel for cars. But we can’t be sure that we’ll get that, so we have to explore different solutions. We want to make sure that the new ideas get customers — like city fleets or buses – because it’s easier to change over the infrastructure because they go back to a hub on a regular cycle. You use that as the bootstrap to say, okay, does some alternative to gasoline really work well, something that’s completely economic. So you know, I do think that people are open-minded, I don’t think that the incumbents have a complete block on the experimentation we need.

Many countries are looking to food-based biofuels as a way to reduce emissions from transportation. But biofuels such as corn ethanol are incredibly resource intensive and probably don’t reduce carbon emissions. See the National Academy of Sciences. And also recent studies have found that biofuels may be threatening global food security. How do we make sure renewable energies actually reduce emissions, and don’t do so by hurting the world’s poor? —Emily Cassidy

Gates: It is certainly eye-opening to understand the full-cycle costs of ethanol, from making the fertilizer and the transport to the energy use for distillation. The next generation of biofuel types move away from the high costs of edible crops and use either grasses or trees. There are also studies of cellulose conversion processes that aren’t as energy intensive.

Being aware of those different costs, we know which things really bring dramatic greenhouse gas reductions, particularly given the goals, reflected in the Paris climate agreement, of getting close to zero emissions. Things that only cut you down even 50 percent, like switching to natural gas, don’t achieve the 2050 goal. And so the Coalition will be scrutinizing biofuels to ask if they can be a big part of the solution. I’m impressed that people are now looking at the issue comprehensively. There are a lot of smart people looking at those conversion processes.

What role should centralized and decentralized technologies play in powering emerging economies, especially in sub-Saharan African countries? —Alex Trembath

Gates: The lowest cost of power when you have density of usage, comes with a large grid. But that requires the utility to have the capital and to get people to pay. And so even though that’s the end goal for urban areas, you want to be able to start out house by house, then create micro-grids and mini-grids and as they grow have technical standards that can coalesce them and lead to that most efficient solution. It’s been great seeing in Kenya, for example, how solar energy at the household and micro-grid level really is coming in for modest energy needs like cell phone recharging, charging lights at night. And there are interesting technologies for micro-geothermal, micro-hydro type solutions that don’t have some of the complexities of large-scale hydro. Creating micro-grids, which are then integrated, will be part of the process of getting Africa electrified.

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You can sift the full range of reader queries and views on Facebook, the Opinion article and my previous Dot Earth post.