How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

by Bill Gates

There is nothing wrong with using more energy as long as it’s carbon-free.

Miami is already seeing seawater bubble up through storm drains, even when it isn’t raining—that’s called dry-weather flooding—and the situation will not get better.

If the air can’t absorb your sweat, then it can’t cool you off, no matter how much you perspire. There’s simply nowhere for your perspiration to go.

David Foster Wallace. (I’m preparing for his mammoth novel Infinite Jest by slowly making my way through everything else he ever wrote.)

“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.”

Fossil fuels did not represent even half of the world’s energy consumption until the late 1890s. In China, they didn’t take over until the 1960s.

Moore’s Law, the prediction made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that microprocessors would double in power every two years. Gordon turned out to be right, of course, and Moore’s Law is one of the main reasons the computing and software industries took off the way they did.

Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase “government policy” doesn’t exactly set people’s hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won’t get to zero unless we get this right, and we’re a long way from doing that. (I’m talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)

There’s nothing inherently wrong with changing priorities—it happens throughout the government with every new administration—but it takes a toll on researchers who depend on the government for grant money and entrepreneurs who rely on tax incentives. It’s hard to make real progress if every few years you have to stop work on one project and start from scratch on something else.

Africa and Asia are in the toughest position. Over the past few decades, China has accomplished one of the greatest feats in history—lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—and did it in part by building coal-fired electric plants very cheaply. Chinese firms drove down the cost of a coal plant by a remarkable 75 percent.

The United States gets around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants; France has the highest share in the world, getting 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear.

A plant will keep growing as long as it can get nitrogen, and it’ll stop once the nitrogen is all used up. That’s why adding it boosts growth.