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

by Bill Gates

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.

There’s another challenge to building a climate consensus: Global cooperation is notoriously difficult.

Tip: Whenever you hear “kilowatt,” think “house.” “Gigawatt,” think “city.” A hundred or more gigawatts, think “big country.”

You might think that a technology with a negative Green Premium would already have been adopted around the world. By and large that is the case, but there is usually a lag between the introduction of a new technology and its being deployed—particularly for something like home furnaces, which we don’t replace very often.

Here’s a summary of all five tips: Convert tons of emissions to a percentage of 51 billion. Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm. Kilowatt = house. Gigawatt = mid-size city. Hundreds of gigawatts = big, rich country. Consider how much space you’re going to need. Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they’re low enough for middle-income countries to pay.

Imagine if everyone had gotten together one day and said, “Hey, cars are killing people. They’re dangerous. Let’s stop driving and give up these automobiles.” That would’ve been ridiculous, of course. We did just the opposite: We used innovation to make cars safer. To keep people from flying through the windshield, we invented seat belts and air bags. To protect passengers during an accident, we created safer materials and better designs. To protect pedestrians in parking lots, we started installing rear-view cameras. Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.

Health experts were telling us that a massive outbreak was virtually inevitable. Despite their warnings, the world didn’t do enough to prepare—and then suddenly had to scramble to make up for lost time. We should not make the same mistake with climate change.

We need to be adopting electric vehicles as fast as we bought clothes dryers and color TVs when those became available.

My hope is that we can shift the conversation by sharing the facts with the people in our lives—our family members, friends, and leaders. And not just the facts that tell us why we need to act, but also those that show us the actions that will do the most good. One of my goals in writing this book is to spark more of these conversations.