How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes

“High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R., and Fukushima in Japan put a spotlight on all these risks. There are real problems that led to those disasters, but instead of getting to work on solving those problems, we just stopped trying to advance the field.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The United States gets around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants; France has the highest share in the world, getting 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear. Remember that by comparison solar and wind together provide about 7 percent worldwide.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Nuclear fission. Here’s the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It’s the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The reason the world emits so much greenhouse gas is that—as long as you ignore the long-term damage they do—our current energy technologies are by and large the cheapest ones available. So moving our immense energy economy from “dirty,” carbon-emitting technologies to ones with zero emissions will cost something.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“2. What’s Your Plan for Cement? If you’re talking about a comprehensive plan for tackling climate change, you need to consider everything that humans do to cause greenhouse gas emissions.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The largest power station in the world, the Three Gorges Dam in China, can produce 22 billion watts. (Remember that the definition of a watt already includes “per second,” so there’s no such thing as watts per second, or watts per hour. It’s just watts.)”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Passenger cars represent less than half of all the emissions from transportation, which in turn is 16 percent of all emissions worldwide.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About? Whenever I read something that mentions some amount of greenhouse gases, I do some quick math, converting it into a percentage of the annual total of 51 billion tons. To me, this makes more sense than the other comparisons you often see, like “this many tons is equivalent to taking one car off the road.” Who knows how many cars are on the road to begin with? Or how many cars we would have to take off the road to deal with climate change?”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“For example, 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. Here’s my reply to that argument: 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. Even if climate change doesn’t rank as an existential threat to humanity, it will make most people worse off, and it will make the poorest even poorer. It will keep getting worse until we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and it deserves to be as much of a priority as health and education.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“But California is a dramatic example of what’s going on. Wildfires now occur there five times more often than in the 1970s, largely because the fire season is getting longer and the forests there now contain much more dry wood that’s likely to burn. According to the U.S. government, half of this increase is due to climate change, and by mid-century America could experience more than twice as much destruction from wildfires as it does today. This should be worrisome for anyone who remembers America’s devastating wildfire season of 2020.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Although we can predict the course of broad trends, like “there will be more hot days” and “sea levels will go up,” we can’t with certainty blame climate change for any particular event. For example, when there’s a heat wave, we can’t say whether it was caused by climate change alone. What we can do, though, is say how much climate change increased the odds of that heat wave happening.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The earth is warming, it’s warming because of human activity, and the impact is bad and will get much worse. We have every reason to believe that at some point the impact will be catastrophic. Will that point come in 30 years? Fifty years? We don’t know precisely. But given how hard the problem will be to solve, even if the worst case is 50 years away, we need to act now.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren’t fully accounting for this important short-term effect.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“What’s remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“It was one thing to divest from companies to fight apartheid, a political institution that would (and did) respond to economic pressure. 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.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“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

“I've heard people object to the idea that rich countries should go first: "Why should we bear the brunt of this?" It's not simply because we've caused most of the problem (although that's true). It's also because this is a huge economic opportunity: The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, The New Climate War, The Rare Metals War 3 Books Collection Set

“With the price of today’s batteries, EV owners save money only if gas costs more than around $3 per gallon.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“If the vehicle you took to work or school today was powered by electricity, great—though that electricity was probably generated using a fossil fuel.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Although transportation isn’t the biggest cause of emissions worldwide, it is number one in the United States, and it has been for a few years now, just ahead of making electricity. We Americans drive and fly a lot.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“For the most part, you can get trees to grow only in places where they’ve already grown, so planting them could help undo the damage caused by deforestation. But there’s no practical way to plant enough of them to deal with the problems caused by burning fossil fuels. The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“In what part of the world will you plant the tree? 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 the other hand, trees in tropical forests cause more cooling than warming, because they release a lot of moisture, which becomes clouds, which reflect sunlight. Trees in the midlatitudes—between the tropics and the polar circles—are more or less a wash.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“All told, fertilizers were responsible for roughly 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, and the number will probably rise to 1.7 billion tons by mid-century”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“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

“Artificial meats come with hefty Green Premiums, however. On average, a ground-beef substitute costs 86 percent more than the real thing.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“If we can spread the improved breeds and best practices more broadly—especially crossbreeding African cows to be more productive and making higher-quality feed available and affordable—it’ll reduce emissions and help poor farmers earn more money.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“About half of poop-related emissions come from pig manure, and the rest from cow manure. There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Around the world, there are roughly a billion cattle raised for beef and dairy. The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4 percent of all global emissions.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“To sum up: Rich and middle-income people are causing the vast majority of climate change. The poorest people are doing less than anyone else to cause the problem, but they stand to suffer the most from it. They deserve the world’s help, and they need more of it than they’re getting.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need