Bill Gates Explainer: A mind-blowing fact
Jul 4, 2025
Americans spend more on gas in a week than the government does on clean energy research in a year. Bill Gates does some back-of-the-envelope math to show how he arrived at that conclusion.
The U.S. government spends about $5 billion a year on energy research.
I decided that looking at what we spend on gasoline might be an interesting comparison
to see how serious we are about energy research. We take the number of cars on the road,
250 million cars. You probably fill up every 10 days or so. We've got 25 million fill-ups per day.
Now let's say your car holds 13 gallons. That's 325 million gallons every day. The price has
been going down, but still about $250 million. And so we get about $813 million per day on gasoline
multiplied by seven, and we get close to $6 billion. The actual number is about $6.4 billion.
So this is very close, but the result is pretty stunning. We spend more in a week
on gasoline here than we spend on the entire energy research budget.