title:  Bill Gates Has Sent A Letter To High Schoolers That Could Change The World And P*ss Off The GOP
text: Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates has written a letter directly to America s high school children that could change the world   and it is going to truly p*ss off Republicans.Every year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation releases its annual letter. But never before has it been directly addressed to high school students. This year s letter was all about energy, how we consume it, how we create it, and how climate change should be the number one issue for us all. Now that the Republican Party has tied itself to the oil industry-funded climate change denial, they could have alienated themselves from a generation who can save humanity from itself. The GOP has become, literally, the only political party in the developed world to endorse the scientifically-bogus denial of climate change.As Business Insider reports:The basic premise of the letter is that many people around the world still don t have access to electricity. Those people   about 18% of the world s population   deserve access to cheap, clean energy. And that  clean  part is very important: We need to get carbon dioxide emissions, which drive climate change, down to zero by the end of the century, in order to avoid dramatic, long-term changes to the world s climate.While achieving this goal will require an energy miracle, Gates calls on Highschoolers to get involved in making that miracle happen   because it is these lofty aspirations that distinguish human beings from their fellow animals. He writes:When I say  miracle,  I don t mean something that s impossible. I ve seen miracles happen before. The personal computer. The Internet. The polio vaccine. None of them happened by chance. They are the result of research and development and the human capacity to innovate.In this case, however, time is not on our side. Every day we are releasing more and more CO2 into our atmosphere and making our climate change problem even worse. We need a massive amount of research into thousands of new ideas even ones that might sound a little crazy if we want to get to zero emissions by the end of this century.This is the message and the attitude that speaks to the Manifest Destiny of America. This is the reason that Republicans will rail against this message with every tool in their arsenal. Because the only thing that ever beats of Project Fear, is Project Hope. At it s core, America is a hopeful nation of dreamers and doers. By sending this message to High Schoolers, Bill and Melinda Gates might just help change the world. They may trigger that hope and ambition in a new generation, and make it immune to the nay-saying and anti-intellectualism of the American Right. In doing so, they won t just save America from itself, but humanity too.Featured image via Flickr Creative Commons