I'd like to know who he thinks the "we" is in this article. Several countries are already using ~100% carbon-neutral electricity and the USA and Europe are progressing rapidly. The main culprits are developing nations and China, so it's "them" who should be doing something urgently and "they" have a whole slew of other problems not covered by Gates' US-centric perspective.
Reasonable approaches would be to bring manufacturing back to countries that use mostly clean energy (oh, and modern approaches to labor and human rights) and to tax imports from developing countries with poor CO2 record heavily until they fix their issues.
Reasonable approaches would be to bring manufacturing back to countries that use mostly clean energy (oh, and modern approaches to labor and human rights) and to tax imports from developing countries with poor CO2 record heavily until they fix their issues.