How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes

“Fusion relies on the same basic process that powers the sun. You start with a gas—most research focuses on certain types of hydrogen—and get it extraordinarily hot, well over 50 million degrees Celsius, while it’s in an electrically charged state known as plasma. At these temperatures, the particles are moving so fast that they hit each other and fuse together, just as the hydrogen atoms in the sun do. When the hydrogen particles fuse, they turn into helium, and in the process they release a great deal of energy, which can be used to generate electricity. (Scientists have various ways of containing the plasma; the most common methods use either powerful magnets or lasers.)”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“How much stuff does it take to build and run a power plant? That depends on the type of plant. Nuclear is the most efficient, using much less material per unit of electricity generated than other sources do.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“And it’s hard to foresee a future where we decarbonize our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power. In 2018, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed nearly 1,000 scenarios for getting to zero in the United States; all the cheapest paths involved using a power source that’s clean and always available—that is, one like nuclear power.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“For example, it’s natural to think of America’s electric grid as one single connected network, but in reality it’s nothing of the sort. There isn’t one power grid; there are many, and they’re a patchwork mess that makes it essentially impossible to send electricity beyond the region where it’s made. Arizona can sell spare solar power to its neighbors, but not to a state on the other side of the country.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“With all the additional electricity we’ll be using, and assuming that wind and solar play a significant role, completely decarbonizing America’s power grid by 2050 will require adding around 75 gigawatts of capacity every year for the next 30 years.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The share of global power that comes from burning coal (roughly 40 percent) hasn’t changed in 30 years. Oil and natural gas together have been hovering around 26 percent for three decades. All told, fossil fuels provide two-thirds of the world’s electricity. Solar and wind, meanwhile, account for 7 percent.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

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

“Tip: Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they’re low enough for middle-income countries to pay.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“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.) DAC is an expensive and largely unproven technology, but if it can work at a large scale, it would allow us to capture carbon dioxide no matter when or where it was produced. The one DAC facility now in operation, which is based in Switzerland, is absorbing gas that might have been spewed out by a coal-fired plant in Texas 10 years ago.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“We already know the emissions number; it’s 51 billion tons each year. As for the cost of removing a ton of carbon from the air, that figure hasn’t been firmly established, but it’s at least $200 per ton. With some innovation, I think we can realistically expect it to get down to $100 per ton, so that’s the number I’ll use. That gives us the following equation: 51 billion tons per year x $100 per ton = $5.1 trillion per year”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Where do we need to focus our research and development spending, our early investors, and our best inventors? Answer: wherever we decide Green Premiums are too high. That’s where the extra cost of going green will keep us from decarbonizing and where there’s an opening for new technologies, companies, and products that make it affordable. Countries that excel at research and development can create new products, make them more affordable, and export them to the places that can’t pay the current premiums. Then no one will have to argue about whether every nation is doing its fair share to avoid a climate disaster; instead, countries and companies will be racing to create and market the affordable innovations that help the world get to zero.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Which zero-carbon options should we be deploying now? Answer: the ones with a low Green Premium, or no premium at all. If we’re not deploying these solutions already, it’s a sign that cost isn’t the barrier. Something else—like outdated public policies or lack of awareness—is stopping us from getting them out there in a big way.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions. They help us put our time, attention, and money to their best use. Looking at all the different premiums, we can decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren’t cheap enough. They help us answer questions like these:”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The average retail price for a gallon of jet fuel in the United States over the past few years is $2.22. Advanced biofuels for jets, to the extent they’re available, cost on average $5.35 per gallon. The Green Premium for zero-carbon fuel, then, is the difference between these two prices, which is $3.13.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“* The power density of solar could theoretically reach 100 watts per square meter, though no one has accomplished this yet.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Power density is the relevant number here. It tells you how much power you can get from different sources for a given amount of land (or water, if you’re putting wind turbines in the ocean). It’s measured in watts per square meter. Below”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“There’s another challenge to building a climate consensus: Global cooperation is notoriously difficult. It’s hard to get every country in the world to agree on anything—especially when you’re asking them to incur some new cost, like the expense of curbing carbon emissions. No single country wants to pay to mitigate its emissions unless everyone else will too. That’s why the Paris Agreement, in which more than 190 countries signed up to eventually limit their emissions, was such an achievement. Not because the current commitments will make a huge dent in emissions—if everyone meets them, they’ll reduce annual emissions by 3 billion to 6 billion tons in 2030, less than 12 percent of total emissions today—but because it was a starting point that proved global cooperation is possible. The U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement—a step that President-elect Joe Biden promised to reverse—only illustrates that it’s as hard to maintain global compacts as it is to create them in the first place.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase “government policy” doesn’t exactly set people’s hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won’t get to zero unless we get this right, and we’re a long way from doing that. (I’m talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Society also tolerates very little risk in the energy business, understandably so. We demand reliable electricity; the lights had better come on every time a customer flips a switch. We also worry about disasters. In fact, safety concerns have nearly killed off new construction of nuclear plants in the United States. Since the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, America has broken ground on just two nuclear plants, even though more people die from coal pollution in a single year than have died in all nuclear accidents combined.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“First, you have huge capital costs that never go away. If you spend $1 billion building a coal plant, the next plant you build will not be any cheaper. And your investors put up that money with the expectation that the plant will run for 30 years or more. If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you to.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

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

“You’ll sometimes hear Moore’s Law invoked as a reason to think we can make the same kind of exponential progress on energy. If computer chips can improve so much so quickly, can’t cars and solar panels? Unfortunately, no. Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there’s no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas. Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three. 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.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Why do energy transitions take so long, anyway? Because… Coal plants are not like computer chips.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world’s energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“And consider how long it took for oil to become a big part of our energy supply. We started producing it commercially in the 1860s. Half a century later, it represented just 10 percent of the world’s energy supply. It took 30 years more to reach 25 percent.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Using data from the Spanish flu of 1918 and the COVID-19 pandemic and averaging it out over the course of a century, we can estimate the amount by which a global pandemic increases the global mortality rate. It’s about 14 deaths per 100,000 people each year. How does that compare to climate change? By mid-century, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount—14 deaths per 100,000. By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 75 extra deaths per 100,000 people. 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

“Why don’t all gases act this way? Because molecules with two copies of the same atom—for example, nitrogen or oxygen molecules—let radiation pass straight through them. Only molecules made up of different atoms, the way carbon dioxide and methane are, have the right structure to absorb radiation and start heating up.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need