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

by Bill Gates

Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.

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.

I watched Earth’s Changing Climate, a series of fantastic video lectures by Professor Richard Wolfson available through the Great Courses series. I read Weather for Dummies, still one of the best books on weather that I’ve found.

Besides, making electricity accounts for only 27 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 73 percent. Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things: 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.

Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it.

The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.

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.

Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary.

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.

Rising sea levels will be even worse for the poorest people in the world. Bangladesh, a poor country that’s making good progress on the path out of poverty, is a prime example. It has always been beset by severe weather; it has hundreds of miles of coastline on the Bay of Bengal; most of the country sits in low-lying, flood-prone river deltas; and it gets heavy rainfall every year. But the changing climate is making life there even harder. Thanks to cyclones, storm surges, and river floods, it is now common for 20 to 30 percent of Bangladesh to be underwater, wiping out crops and homes and killing people throughout the country.

there’s a very good reason why fossil fuels are everywhere: They’re so inexpensive. As in, oil is cheaper than a soft drink.

prices don’t reflect the damage they cause—the ways they contribute to climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation when they’re extracted and burned.

Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can’t change as quickly as the computer industry. There’s also size. The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.

some people argue, Yes, climate change is happening, but it’s not worth spending much to try to stop it or adapt to it. Instead, we should prioritize other things that have a bigger impact on human welfare, like health and education.

bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.

A nuclear plant runs 24 hours a day and is shut down only for maintenance and refueling. But the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine,

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

Most of these zero-carbon solutions are more expensive than their fossil-fuel counterparts. In part, that’s because the prices of fossil fuels don’t reflect the environmental damage they inflict, so they seem cheaper than the alternative. (I’ll return to this challenge of pricing carbon in chapter 10.) These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums.*2

???!!!mmm

Once you’ve figured Green Premiums for all the big zero-carbon options, you can start having serious conversations about trade-offs. How much are we willing to pay to go green? Will we buy advanced biofuels that are twice as expensive as jet fuel? Will we buy green cement that costs twice as much as the conventional stuff?

It's always like this. When you say climate change is real, we must reduce and stop polluting our environment. Everyone is like, year go green. When you say "green/eco-friendly" replacement comes with a cost. All of us like, why we have to pay money. :3

“How much would it cost to just suck the carbon out of the atmosphere directly?” That idea has a name; it’s called direct air capture. (In short, with DAC you blow air over a device that absorbs carbon dioxide, and then you store the gas for safekeeping.)

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.

might need while writing a review

plastics take so long to degrade, all the carbon atoms that go into them are atoms that won’t go into the atmosphere and drive up the temperature—at least not for a very long time.

We emit greenhouse gases (1) when we use fossil fuels to generate the electricity that factories need to run their operations; (2) when we use them to generate heat needed for different manufacturing processes, like melting iron ore to make steel; and (3) when we actually make these materials, like the way cement manufacturing inevitably creates carbon dioxide.

😒

According to the World Bank, the world has lost more than half a million square miles of forest cover since 1990.

this isn’t primarily a technological problem. It’s a political and economic problem. People cut down trees not because people are evil; they do it when the incentives to cut down trees are stronger than the incentives to leave them alone. So we need political and economic solutions,

I was surprised when I learned a while back that there is actually one nice thing you can say about malaria: It helped give us air-conditioning.

the first known machine to produce cold air was created in the 1840s by John Gorrie, a physician in Florida who thought cooler temperatures would help his patients recover from malaria.

five major sources of greenhouse gas emissions: how we plug in, make things, grow things, get around, and keep cool and warm.