How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes

“The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“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. That’s the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“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.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“But I hope you’ll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you’re in favor of than opposing whatever you’re against.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Whatever other resources you may have, you can always use your voice and your vote to effect change.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“There’s one last way we can cut down on emissions from the food we eat: by wasting less of it. In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent. That’s bad for people who don’t have enough to eat, bad for the economy, and bad for the climate. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“It may sound old-fashioned, but letters and phone calls to your elected officials can have a real impact.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“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.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and then imagine spreading the pain out over a much longer period of time.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“times with follow-up questions. Eventually it sank in. 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. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“And—this is a really important point—lowering the Green Premiums that the world pays is not charity. Countries like the United States shouldn’t see investing in clean energy R&D as just a favor to the rest of the world. They should also see it as an opportunity to make scientific breakthroughs that will give birth to new industries composed of major new companies, creating jobs and reducing emissions at the same time.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“In essence, governments can say to each other, “If you want to do business with us, you’ll have to take climate change seriously.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Earlier, I mentioned a related technology called direct air capture. It involves exactly what the name implies: capturing carbon directly from the air. DAC is more flexible than point capture, because you can do it anywhere. And in all likelihood, it’ll be a crucial part of getting to zero; one study by the National Academy of Sciences found that we’ll need to be removing about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by mid-century and about 20 billion by the end of the century.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“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.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“my full-time job is working with my wife, Melinda,”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“But giving people more information can help them make better choices.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“the problem of overgeneration in the summer and undergeneration in the winter.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“But we can’t solve a problem like climate change without an honest accounting of how much we need to do and what obstacles we need to overcome.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“How many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus by climate change?”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“divested all my direct holdings in oil and gas companies, as did the trust that manages the Gates Foundation’s endowment. (I hadn’t had money in coal companies in several years.)”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“As people get richer, they eat more calories, and in particular they eat more meat and dairy. And producing meat and dairy will require us to grow even more food. A chicken, for example, has to eat two calories’ worth of grain to give us one calorie of poultry—that is, you have to feed a chicken twice as many calories as you’ll get from the chicken when you eat it. A pig eats three times as many calories as we get when we eat it. For cows, the ratio is highest of all: six calories of feed for every calorie of beef. In other words, the more calories we get from these meat sources, the more plants we need to grow for the meat.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“In the coming years, as electricity becomes an even bigger part of our overall energy diet, we’ll need models like these for grids around the world. They’ll help us answer questions like: Which mix of clean energy sources will be the most efficient in a given place? Where should transmission lines go? Which regulations stand in the way, and what incentives do we need to create? I hope to see a lot more projects like this one.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“What they found is that there’s simply no way for the states to do it without enhancing the power grid. The model also showed that regional and national approaches to transmission—rather than leaving each state to its own devices—would allow every state to meet the emission-reduction goals with 30 percent fewer renewables than they would need otherwise. In other words, we’ll save money by building renewables in the best locations, building a unified national grid, and shipping zero-emissions electrons wherever they’re needed.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need