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Fifty-two billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.
Virtually every activity in modern life—growing things, making things, getting around from place to place—involves releasing greenhouse gases,
I came to focus on climate change in an indirect way—through the problem of energy poverty.
I thought about our foundation’s motto—“Everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life”—and how it’s hard to stay healthy if your local medical clinic can’t keep vaccines cold because the refrigerators don’t work. It’s hard to be productive if you don’t have lights to read by. And it’s impossible to build an economy where everyone has job opportunities if you don’t have massive amounts of reliable, affordable electricity for offices, factories, and call centers.
it’s impossible to build an economy where everyone has job opportunities if you don’t have massive amounts of reliable, affordable electricity for offices, factories, and call centers.
when it comes to climate change, the poor have the most to lose.
The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases.
Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.
One thing that became clear to me was that our current sources of renewable energy—wind and solar, mostly—could make a big dent in the problem, but we weren’t doing enough to deploy them.
making electricity accounts for only 26 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we had a huge breakthrough in batteries, we would still need to get rid of the other 74 percent.
To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.
I didn’t think it was fair for anyone to tell Indians that their children couldn’t have lights to study by, or that thousands of Indians should die in heat waves because installing air conditioners is bad for the environment. The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.
It was one thing to divest from companies to fight apartheid, a political institution that would (and did) respond to economic pressure. It’s another thing to transform the world’s energy system—an industry worth roughly $5 trillion a year and the basis for the modern economy—just by selling the stocks of fossil-fuel companies.
Getting to zero requires a much broader approach: driving wholesale change using all the tools at our disposal, including government policies, current technology, new inventions, and the ability of private markets to deliver products to huge numbers of people.
Although some countries were modestly expanding their research efforts, the levels were still very low.
by 2015, private funding was drying up. Many of the venture capital firms that had invested in green tech were pulling out of the industry because the returns were so low. They were used to investing in biotechnology and information technology, where success often comes quickly and there are fewer government regulations to deal with. Clean energy was a whole other ball game, and they were getting out.
By the time the Paris conference kicked off two months later, 26 more had joined, and we had named it the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. Today, the organization now known as Breakthrough Energy includes philanthropic programs, advocacy efforts, and private funds that have invested in more than 85 companies with promising ideas. The governments came through too. Twenty heads of state got together in Paris and committed to doubling their funding for research.
Today Mission Innovation includes 24 countries and the European Commission and has unlocked $4.6 billion a year in new money for clean energy research, an increase of more than 50 percent in just a handful of years. The next turning point in this story will be grimly familiar to everyone reading this book.
This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less. Just as we needed new tests, treatments, and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, we need new tools for fighting climate change: zero-carbon ways to produce electricity, make things, grow food, keep our buildings cool and warm, and move people and goods around the world. And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people—many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a warmer climate.
We need to channel the world’s passion and its scientific IQ into deploying the clean energy solutions we have now, and inventing new ones, so we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary.
one-fifth of the carbon dioxide emitted today will still be there in 10,000 years.
There’s no scenario in which we keep adding carbon to the atmosphere and the world stops getting hotter, and the hotter it gets, the harder it will be for humans to survive, much less thrive.
A 50 percent drop in emissions wouldn’t stop the rise in temperature; it would only slow things down, somewhat postponing but not preventing a climate catastrophe.
And suppose we reach a 99 percent reduction. Which countries and sectors of the economy would get to use the remaining 1 percent? How would we even decide something like that?
Ultimately, what really matters isn’t the amount of greenhouse gas emissions; what matters is the higher temperatures and their impact
How do greenhouse gases cause warming? The short answer: They absorb heat and trap it in the atmosphere. They work the same way a greenhouse works—hence the name.
So that’s the first part of the answer to the question “Why do we have to get to zero?”—because every bit of carbon we put into the atmosphere adds to the greenhouse effect. There’s no getting around physics.
We’ve already raised the temperature at least 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, and if we don’t reduce emissions, we’ll probably have between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by mid-century, and between 4 and 8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
One study estimated that Hurricane Maria in 2017 set Puerto Rico’s infrastructure back more than two decades. How long before the next storm comes along and sets it back again? We don’t know.
Hotter air can hold more moisture, and as the air gets warmer, it gets thirstier, drinking up more water from the soil.
A hotter climate means there will be more frequent and destructive wildfires. Warm air absorbs moisture from plants and soil, leaving everything more prone to burning.
According to research cited by the IPCC, a rise of 2 degrees Celsius would cut the geographic range of vertebrates by 8 percent, plants by 16 percent, and insects by 18 percent.
In many ways, a 2-degree rise wouldn’t simply be 33 percent worse than 1.5; it could be 100 percent worse.
This problem is only going to get worse. One study that looked at the relationship between weather shocks and asylum applications to the European Union found that even with moderate warming, asylum applications could go up by 28 percent, to nearly 450,000 a year, by the end of the century. The same study estimated that by 2080 lower crop yields would cause between 2 percent and 10 percent of adults in Mexico to try to cross the border into the United States.
In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.
In the next decade or two, the economic damage caused by climate change will likely be as bad as having a COVID-sized pandemic every 10 years. And by the end of the 21st century, it will be much worse if the world remains on its current emissions path.
as the temperature goes up, all these problems will happen more often, more severely, and to more people.
Because climate change will have the worst impact on the world’s poorest people, and most of the world’s poorest people are farmers, adaptation is a major focus for the agriculture team at the Gates Foundation.
To have any hope of staving off disaster, the world’s biggest emitters—the richest countries—have to get to net-zero emissions by 2050.
The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.
Whoever makes big energy breakthroughs and shows they can work on a global scale, and be affordable, will find many willing customers in emerging economies.
Wallace explained, “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”
If the vehicle you took to work or school today was powered by electricity, great—though that electricity was probably generated using a fossil fuel.
In other words, fossil fuels are everywhere. Take oil as just one example: The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.
There is rising demand for cars, roads, buildings, refrigerators, computers, and air conditioners and the energy to power them all. As a result, the amount of energy used per person will go up, and so will the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per person.
Where the emissions are. Emissions from advanced economies like the United States and Europe have stayed pretty flat or even dropped, but many developing countries are growing fast. That’s partly because richer countries have outsourced emissions-heavy manufacturing to poorer ones. (UN Population Division; Rhodium Group)
nearly 40 percent of the world’s emissions are produced by the richest 16 percent of the population. (And that’s not counting the emissions from products that are made someplace else but consumed in rich countries.)
We need to get to zero—producing even more energy than we do today, but without adding any carbon to the atmosphere—as soon as possible.
Many farmers still have to use ancient techniques, which is one of the reasons they’re trapped in poverty. They deserve modern equipment and approaches, but right now using those tools means producing more greenhouse gases.
