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

by Bill Gates

Norman Borlaug, the brilliant plant scientist who sparked a revolution in agriculture that led to the gains in India and elsewhere. Borlaug did it by developing varieties of wheat with bigger grains and other characteristics that allowed them to provide much more food per acre of land—what farmers call raising the yield. (Borlaug found that as he made the grains bigger, the wheat couldn’t stand up under their weight, so he made the wheat stalks shorter, which is why his varieties are known as semi-dwarf wheat.) As Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat spread around the world, and as other breeders did similar work on corn and rice, yields tripled in most areas. Starvation plummeted, and today Borlaug is widely credited with saving a billion lives. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and we’re still feeling the impact of his work: Virtually all the wheat grown on earth is descended from the plants he bred.

For millennia, humans fed their crops extra nitrogen by applying natural fertilizers like manure and bat guano. The big breakthrough came in 1908, when two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen in a factory. It’s hard to overstate how momentous their invention was. What’s now known as the Haber-Bosch process made it possible to create synthetic fertilizer, greatly expanding both the amount of food that could be grown and the range of geographies where it could be grown. It’s still the main method we use to make ammonia today.

One study by the World Resources Institute found that if you account for land-use changes, the American-style diet is responsible for almost as many emissions as all the energy Americans use in generating electricity, manufacturing, transportation, and buildings.

Extreme poverty has plummeted in the past quarter century, from 36 percent of the world’s population in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015—although COVID-19 was a huge setback that undid a great deal of progress. Climate change could erase even more of these gains, increasing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 13 percent.

Technologies needed Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season Electrofuels Advanced biofuels Zero-carbon cement Zero-carbon steel Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy Zero-carbon fertilizer Next-generation nuclear fission Nuclear fusion Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture) Underground electricity transmission Zero-carbon plastics Geothermal plastics Pumped hydro Thermal storage Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil Coolants that don’t contain F-gases