While the statement is nonsensical and innumerate, I think that Bill Gates was making a different point. There are trillions of dollars invested somewhere othe

While the statement is nonsensical and innumerate, I think that Bill Gates was making a different point. There are trillions of dollars invested somewhere other than in oil and gas extraction, because the investors believe they are getting a better return, or they simply don't have a signal that somewhere else has better potential. When a dollar leaves fossil fuels and the sticker price of ownership decreases, those investors receive a signal about higher potential yields. The issue is that even Bill and Melinda and the Gates Foundation have a limited pile of cash compared to the effectively infinite money already in oil and gas exploration and extraction and the effectively infinite money haphazardly seeking returns elsewhere regardless of impacts on the planet. That is, the supply of money for those industries is too elastic at the scale of only $100B. I think that Bill Gates is saying that given their limited pile of cash, they have the most impact creating competitors to current energy intensive industries that demand energy and competitors to fossil fuels as alternative suppliers of energy. I don't know why the title and the leade repudiate divestiture. Maybe it is an attempt to sound clever, or maybe it is a bias toward hopelessness. I imagine some readers will simply ape the statement in cocktail party situations, which will miss the opportunity of advocating the proactive solutions Gates was talking about, and counterproductively reinforce the fatalistic idea that no one can do anything.