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

by Bill Gates

Here’s an analogy that’s especially helpful: The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor.

Another effect of the extra heat is that sea levels will go up. This is partly because polar ice is melting, and partly because seawater expands when it gets warmer. (Metal does the same thing, which is why you can loosen a ring that’s stuck on your finger by running it under hot water.)

Doubtful. Gold and other typical ring-materials expand about 15ppm per degree centigrade. On your finger they'll be like 25C as it is, and you couldn't warm them much more than say 50C before you'd burn your finger. An expansion of 25*15 = 375ppm won't noticeably help with taking of a ring. If the ring was 16mm diameter before, it'll now be 16.006mm This doesn't really matter for the point of the book -- but it's symptomatic for Gates somewhat superficial knowledge about the topics and care in getting things *right* -- someone with a better foundation in physics would likely have a ball-park feeling than this can't be right and then go do the math. (like I just did!)

Nor have solar panels become a million times better. When crystalline silicon solar cells were introduced in the 1970s, they converted about 15 percent of the sunlight that hit them into electricity. Today they convert around 25 percent. That’s good progress, but it’s hardly in line with Moore’s Law.

Fraction of sunlight converted to electricity is the wrong measure though. The relevant one for solar displacing other energy-sources is dollars per watt of power, it's fallen from $80 to $0.30 over the last 45 years, which means 15% of progress in price/performance per year. It's a factor of 300 improvement, not less than a doubling like Gates (irrelevant) number would indicate. At this rate solar already is, or will become cheaper than all other alternatives within the decade. (this is one of the reasons I disagree with Gates about nuclear vs solar)

more people die from coal pollution in a single year than have died in all nuclear accidents combined.

In other words, using the DAC approach to solve the climate problem would cost at least $5.1 trillion per year, every year, as long as we produce emissions. That’s around 6 percent of the world’s economy.

This is key. People often talk as if climate change is IMPOSSIBLY large, but 6% of the worlds economy means on the order of 5 years growth, so solving climate change might set us back by half a decade. (or more realistically, might mean that over the next 30 years, we have "only" the same progress we'd otherwise have in 25 years economically)

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.

Literally: In the United States, leaving a 40-watt lightbulb turned on for an hour costs you about half of one cent.

And a 4 watt LED that gives the same amount of light, can be left on for 24 hours, and still cost approximately 1 cent.

Changing America’s entire electricity system to zero-carbon sources would raise average retail rates by between 1.3 and 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly 15 percent more than what most people pay now.

Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11 percent in 2019 alone.

He knows this. He just "forgets" in certain chapters.

If load shifting is going to have a significant impact, we’ll need some changes in policy as well as some technological advances. Utility companies will have to update the price of electricity throughout the day to account for shifts in supply and demand, for instance, and your water heater and electric car will have to be smart enough to take advantage of this price information and respond accordingly.

It's interesting that in an American context this is listed as something that'll need to happen. In my (Norwegian) context this is stuff that happened on the order of a decade ago.

The rapid growth you see in these two photos means that people’s lives are improving in countless ways. They are earning more money, are getting a better education, and are less likely to die young. Anyone who cares about fighting poverty should see it as good news.

He forgets about inequality though. The book isn't about that, but the assumption that growth benefits the average human being pervades the entire book with zero mention of the fact that this isn't universally true.

We manufacture an enormous amount of materials, resulting in copious amounts of greenhouse gases, nearly a third of the 51 billion tons per year.

when you’re looking for temperatures in the thousands of degrees, electricity isn’t an economical option—at least not with today’s technology.

Why? What did Ehrlich and other doomsayers miss? They didn’t factor in the power of innovation. They didn’t account for people like Norman Borlaug, the brilliant plant scientist who sparked a revolution in agriculture that led to the gains in India and elsewhere.

The agricultural revolution I mentioned—often called the Green Revolution—largely bypassed Africa, where the typical farmer gets just one-fifth as much food per acre of land as an American farmer gets. That’s because in poor countries most farmers don’t have good enough credit to buy fertilizer, and it’s more expensive than in rich countries because it has to be shipped into rural areas over poorly built roads.

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.

On balance, trees in snowy areas cause more warming than cooling, because they’re darker than the snow and ice beneath them and dark things absorb more heat than light things do.

On average, after a car rolls off the assembly line, it runs for more than 13 years before reaching its final resting place in the junkyard. This long life cycle means that if we wanted to have every passenger car in America running on electricity by 2050, EVs would need to be nearly 100 percent of auto sales within the next 15 years.

Yes. And that's not ambitious in the slightest. Norway is at over 80% EVs among new cars sold *today* -- so getting there in 15 years should be extremely doable. But it'll take actually doing something, of course.

It is true that as higher-mileage cars and EVs replace today’s vehicles, the revenue from gas taxes will go down, which could reduce the funding that’s available for building and maintaining roads. States can replace the lost revenue by charging EV owners an extra fee when they renew their license plates—19 states are doing this as I write this chapter—though it means it’ll take a year or two longer for EVs to be as cheap as gas-fueled cars.

This is an example of what NOT to do. EVs having advantages (such as no gas taxes paid since they use no gas) is an example of a mechanism we need to get more people to change to EVs.

with transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest.

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.

The path to zero carbon for heating actually looks a lot like the path for passenger cars: (1) electrify what we can, getting rid of natural gas water heaters and furnaces, and (2) develop clean fuels to do everything else. The good news is that step 1 can actually carry a negative Green Premium. Unlike electric cars, which are more expensive to own than their gas-powered counterparts, all-electric heating and cooling lets you save money. And that’s true whether you’re building new construction from scratch or retrofitting an older home. In most locations, your overall costs will go down if you get rid of an electric air conditioner and gas (or oil) furnace and replace both with an electric heat pump.

these negative Green Premiums raise an obvious question: If heat pumps are such a great deal, why are they in only 11 percent of American homes?

Companies in the energy business spend an average of just 0.3 percent of their revenue on energy R&D. The electronics and pharmaceutical industries, by contrast, spend nearly 10 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

But we can also raise the cost of fossil fuels by incorporating the damage they cause into the prices we pay for them.

The idea isn’t to punish people for their greenhouse gases; it’s to create an incentive for inventors to create competitive carbon-free alternatives. By progressively increasing the price of carbon to reflect its true cost, governments can nudge producers and consumers toward more efficient decisions and encourage innovation that reduces Green Premiums.

Thanks to all this innovation, the price of solar-generated electricity has dropped 90 percent since 2009.

the Danes did something unusual. They paired their R&D support with a feed-in tariff and, later, a carbon tax.

The point is that when we focus on all three things at once—technology, policies, and markets—we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast.

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 energy Pumped hydro Thermal storage Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil Coolants that don’t contain F-gases

government funding for clean energy R&D amounts to about $22 billion per year, only around 0.02 percent of the global economy. Americans spend more than that on gasoline in a single month.

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

Put a price on carbon. Whether it’s a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system where companies can buy and sell the right to emit carbon, putting a price on emissions is one of the most important things we can do to eliminate Green Premiums.

Many economists argue that the money can be returned to consumers or businesses to cover the resulting increase in energy prices, though there’s also a strong argument that it should go to R&D and other incentives to help solve climate change.

First, make it a goal to get to zero—by 2050 for rich countries, and as soon after 2050 as possible for middle-income countries. Second, develop specific plans for meeting those goals. To get to zero by 2050, we’ll need to have the policy and market structures in place by 2030. And third, any country that’s in a position to fund research needs to make sure it’s on track to make clean energy so cheap—to reduce the Green Premiums so much—that middle-income countries will be able to get to zero.

When you ask yourself what you can do to limit climate change, it’s natural to think of things like driving an electric car or eating less meat. This sort of personal action is important for the signals it sends to the marketplace—see

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.

EVs have come a long way in terms of cost and performance. Although they might not be right for everyone (they’re not great for lots of long-distance road trips,

This was true 5 years ago. It's not true today. I've had road-trips longer than 1000 miles 4 times in the year I've owned mine, and it's the *shortest* range model-3 you can get.