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

by Bill Gates

If you live in a typical American home, your air conditioner is the biggest consumer of electricity you own—more than your lights, refrigerator, and computer combined.*

That means we’ll be adding many more units as the population grows and gets richer and as heat waves become more severe and more frequent. China added 350 million units between 2007 and 2017

Today, when businesses make products or consumers buy things, they don’t bear any extra cost for the carbon involved, even though that carbon imposes a very real cost on society.

In the United States, states whose economies rely heavily on drilling for fossil fuels—Texas and North Dakota, for example—will need to add jobs that pay as well as the ones they lose, and they’ll need to replace tax revenue

Science tells us that in order to avoid a climate catastrophe, rich countries should reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

things we’d do to get small reductions by 2030 are radically different from the things we’d do to get to zero by 2050.

engaging in the political process is the most important single step that people from every walk of life can take to help avoid a climate disaster.