How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

by Bill Gates

  The next turning point in this story will be grimly familiar to everyone reading this book.

  Launching Mission Innovation with world leaders at the 2015 UN climate conference in Paris. (See this page for the names of those photographed.)

  In 2020, disaster struck when a novel coronavirus spread around the world. To anyone who knows the history of pandemics, the devastation caused by COVID-19 was not a surprise. I had been studying disease outbreaks for years as part of my interest in global health, and I had become deeply concerned that the world wasn’t ready to handle a pandemic like the 1918 flu, which killed tens of millions of people. In 2015, I had given a TED talk and several interviews in which I made the case that we needed to create a system for detecting and responding to big disease outbreaks. Other people, including former U.S. president George W. Bush, had made similar arguments.

  Unfortunately, the world did little to prepare, and when the novel coronavirus struck, it caused massive loss of life and economic pain such as we had not seen since the Great Depression. Although I kept up much of my work on climate change, Melinda and I made COVID-19 the top priority for the Gates Foundation and the main focus of our own work. Every day, I would talk to scientists at universities and small companies, CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, or heads of government to see how the foundation could help accelerate the work on tests, treatments, and vaccines. By November 2020, we had committed more than $445 million in grants to fighting the disease, and hundreds of millions more via various financial investments to get vaccines, tests, and other critical products to lower-income countries faster.

  Because economic activity has slowed down so much, the world will emit fewer greenhouse gases this year than last year. As I mentioned earlier, the reduction will probably be around 5 percent. In real terms, that means we will release the equivalent of 48 or 49 billion tons of carbon, instead of 51 billion.

  That’s a meaningful reduction, and we would be in great shape if we could continue that rate of decrease every year. Unfortunately, we can’t.

  Consider what it took to achieve this 5 percent reduction. A million people died, and tens of millions were put out of work. To put it mildly, this was not a situation that anyone would want to continue or repeat. And yet the world’s greenhouse gas emissions probably dropped just 5 percent, and possibly less than that. What’s remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

  This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less. Just as we needed new tests, treatments, and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, we need new tools for fighting climate change: zero-carbon ways to produce electricity, make things, grow food, keep our buildings cool and warm, and move people and goods around the world. And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people—many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a warmer climate.

  Of course, there are other hurdles too, and they don’t have anything to do with science or funding. In the United States especially, the conversation about climate change has been sidetracked by politics. Some days, it can seem as if we have little hope of getting anything done.

  I think more like an engineer than a political scientist, and I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change. Instead, what I hope to do is focus the conversation on what getting to zero requires: We need to channel the world’s passion and its scientific IQ into deploying the clean energy solutions we have now, and inventing new ones, so we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

  * * *

  —

  I am aware that I’m an imperfect messenger on climate change. The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think technology can fix any problem. And I own big houses and fly in private planes—in fact, I took one to Paris for the climate conference—so who am I to lecture anyone on the environment?

  I plead guilty to all three charges.

  I can’t deny being a rich guy with an opinion. I do believe, though, that it is an informed opinion, and I am always trying to learn more.

  I’m also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I’ll look for technology to fix it. When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary.

  Finally, it’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high. For a long time I have felt guilty about this. I’ve been aware of how high my emissions are, but working on this book has made me even more conscious of my responsibility to reduce them. Shrinking my carbon footprint is the least that can be expected of someone in my position who’s worried about climate change and publicly calling for action.

  In 2020, I started buying sustainable jet fuel and will fully offset my family’s aviation emissions in 2021. For our non-aviation emissions, I’m buying offsets through a company that runs a facility that removes carbon dioxide from the air (for more on this technology, which is called direct air capture, see chapter 4, “How We Plug In”). I’m also supporting a nonprofit that installs clean energy upgrades in affordable housing units in Chicago. And I’ll keep looking for other ways to reduce my personal footprint.

  I’m also investing in zero-carbon technologies. I like to think of these as another kind of offset for my emissions. I’ve put more than $1 billion into approaches that I hope will help the world get to zero, including affordable and reliable clean energy and low-emissions cement, steel, meat, and more. And I’m not aware of anyone who’s investing more in direct air capture technologies.

  Of course, investing in companies doesn’t make my carbon footprint smaller. But if I’ve picked any winners at all, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I or my family is responsible for. Besides, the goal isn’t simply for any one person to make up for his or her emissions; it’s to avoid a climate disaster. So I’m supporting early-stage clean energy research, investing in promising clean energy companies, advocating for policies that will trigger breakthroughs throughout the world, and encouraging other people who have the resources to do the same.

  Here’s the key point: Although heavy emitters like me should use less energy, the world overall should be using more of the goods and services that energy provides. There is nothing wrong with using more energy as long as it’s carbon-free. The key to addressing climate change is to make clean energy just as cheap and reliable as what we get from fossil fuels. I’m putting a lot of effort into what I think will get us to that point and make a meaningful difference in going from 51 billion tons a year to zero.

  * * *

  —

  This book suggests a way forward, a series of steps we can take to give ourselves the best chance to avoid a climate disaster. It breaks down into five parts:

  Why zero? In chapter 1, I’ll explain more about why we need to get to zero, including what we know (and what we don’t) about how rising temperatures will affect people around the world.

  The bad news: Getting to zero will be really hard. Because every plan to achieve anything starts with a realistic assessment of the barriers that stand in your way, in chapter 2 we’ll take a moment to consider the challenges we’re up against.

  How to have an informed conversation about climate change. In chapter 3, I’ll cut through some of the confusing statistics you might have heard and share the handful of questions I keep in mind in every conversation I have about climate change. They have kept me from going wrong more times than I can count, and I hope they will do the same for you.

  The good news: We can do it. In chapters 4 through 9, I’ll break down the areas where today’s technology can help and where we need breakthroughs. This will be the longest part of the book, because there’s so much to cover. We have some solutions we need to deploy in a big way now, and we also need a lot of innovations to be developed and spread around the world in the next few decades
.

  Although I’ll introduce you to some of the technologies that I am especially excited about, I’m not going to name many specific companies. Partly that’s because I’m investing in some of them, and I don’t want to look as if I’m favoring companies that I have a financial interest in. But more important, I want the focus to be on the ideas and innovations, not on particular businesses. Some companies may go under in the coming years; that comes with the territory when you’re doing cutting-edge work, though it’s not necessarily a sign of failure. The key thing is to learn from the failure and incorporate the lessons into the next venture, just as we did at Microsoft and just as every other innovator I know does.

  Steps we can take now. I wrote this book because I see not just the problem of climate change; I also see an opportunity to solve it. That’s not pie-in-the-sky optimism. We already have two of the three things you need to accomplish any major undertaking. First, we have ambition, thanks to the passion of a growing global movement led by young people who are deeply concerned about climate change. Second, we have big goals for solving the problem as more national and local leaders around the world commit to doing their part.

  Now we need the third component: a concrete plan to achieve our goals.

  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. So in the final chapters of this book, I’ll propose a plan based on guidance I’ve gotten from experts in all these disciplines. In chapters 10 and 11, I’ll focus on policies that governments can adopt; in chapter 12, I’ll suggest steps that each of us can take to help the world get to zero. Whether you’re a government leader, an entrepreneur, or a voter with a busy life and too little free time (or all of the above), there are things you can do to help avoid a climate disaster.

  That’s it. Let’s get started.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Fifty-one billion tons is based on the latest available data. Global emissions dropped a bit in 2020—probably by around 5 percent—because the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the economy so dramatically. But because we don’t know the exact figure for 2020, I will use 51 billion tons as the total. We’ll return to the subject of COVID-19 periodically throughout this book.

  *2 Hydropower—electricity created by water pouring through a dam—is another renewable source, in fact the biggest source of renewable energy in the United States. But we’ve already tapped most of the available hydropower. There’s not a lot of room to grow there. Most of the additional clean energy we want will have to come from another source.

  CHAPTER 1

  WHY ZERO?

  The reason we need to get to zero is simple. Greenhouse gases trap heat, causing the average surface temperature of the earth to go up. The more gases there are, the more the temperature rises. And once greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, they stay there for a very long time; something like one-fifth of the carbon dioxide emitted today will still be there in 10,000 years.

  There’s no scenario in which we keep adding carbon to the atmosphere and the world stops getting hotter, and the hotter it gets, the harder it will be for humans to survive, much less thrive. We don’t know exactly how much harm will be caused by a given rise in the temperature, but we have every reason to worry. And, because greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for so long, the planet will stay warm for a long time even after we get to zero.

  Admittedly, I’m using “zero” imprecisely, and I should be clear about what I mean. In preindustrial times—before the mid-18th century or so—the earth’s carbon cycle was probably roughly in balance; that is, plants and other things absorbed about as much carbon dioxide as was emitted.

  But then we started burning fossil fuels. These fuels are made of carbon that’s stored underground, thanks to plants that died eons ago and got compressed over millions of years into oil, coal, or natural gas. When we dig up those fuels and burn them, we emit extra carbon and add to the total amount in the atmosphere.

  There are no realistic paths to zero that involve abandoning these fuels completely or stopping all the other activities that also produce greenhouse gases (like making cement, using fertilizer, or letting methane leak out of natural gas power plants). Instead, in all likelihood, in a zero-carbon future we will still be producing some emissions, but we’ll have ways to remove the carbon they emit.

  In other words, “getting to zero” doesn’t actually mean “zero.” It means “near net zero.” It’s not a pass-fail exam where everything’s great if we get a 100 percent reduction and everything’s a disaster if we get only a 99 percent reduction. But the bigger the reduction, the bigger the benefit.

  A 50 percent drop in emissions wouldn’t stop the rise in temperature; it would only slow things down, somewhat postponing but not preventing a climate catastrophe.

  And suppose we reach a 99 percent reduction. Which countries and sectors of the economy would get to use the remaining 1 percent? How would we even decide something like that?

  In fact, to avoid the worst climate scenarios, at some point we’ll not only need to stop adding more gases but actually need to start removing some of the gases we have already emitted. You may see this step referred to as “net-negative emissions.” It just means that eventually, we’ll need to take more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than we put in so that we can limit the temperature increase. To return to the bathtub analogy from the introduction: We won’t just shut off the flow of water into the tub. We’ll open up the drain and let water flow out too.

  I suspect that this chapter will not be the first place you’ll have read about the risks of failing to get to zero. After all, climate change is in the news just about every day, as it should be: It’s an urgent problem, and it deserves every headline it gets. But the coverage can be confusing and even contradictory.

  In this book, I’ll try to cut through the noise. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to learn from some of the world’s top climate and energy scientists. It’s a never-ending conversation, because researchers’ understanding of the climate is always advancing as they incorporate new data and improve the computer models they use to forecast different scenarios. But I’ve found it enormously helpful in sorting out what’s likely from what’s possible but not probable, and it has convinced me that the only way to avoid disastrous outcomes is to get to zero. In this chapter I want to share some of what I’ve learned.

  A Little Is a Lot

  I was surprised when I learned that what sounded like a small increase in the global temperature—just 1 or 2 degrees Celsius, which is 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—could actually cause a lot of trouble.*1 But it’s true: In climate terms, a change of just a few degrees is a big deal. 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.

  It’s also important to remember that these average numbers can obscure a pretty big range of temperatures. Even though the global mean has gone up just 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, some places have already started experiencing temperature increases of more than 2 degrees Celsius. These regions are home to between 20 percent and 40 percent of the world’s population.

  Three lines you should know. These lines show you how much the temperature might go up in the future if emissions grow a lot (that’s the high line), if they grow less (lower), and if we start removing more carbon than we emit (negative). (KNMI Climate Explorer)

  Why are some places heating up more than others? In the interior of some continents, the soil is drier, which means the land can’t cool off as much as it did in the past. Basically, continents aren’t sweating as much as they used to.

  So what does a warming planet have to do with greenhouse gas emissions? Let’s start with the basi
cs. Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas, but there are a handful of others, such as nitrous oxide and methane. You might have enjoyed nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office—it’s also known as laughing gas—and methane is the main ingredient in the natural gas that you might use to run your stove or water heater. Molecule for molecule, many of these other gases cause more warming than carbon dioxide does—in the case of methane, 120 times more warming the moment it reaches the atmosphere. But methane doesn’t stay around as long as carbon dioxide.

  To keep things simple, most people combine all the different greenhouse gases into a single measure known as “carbon dioxide equivalents.” (You might see the term abbreviated as CO2e.) We use carbon dioxide equivalents to account for the fact that some gases trap more heat than carbon dioxide but don’t stay around as long. Unfortunately, carbon dioxide equivalents are an imperfect measure: Ultimately, what really matters isn’t the amount of greenhouse gas emissions; what matters is the higher temperatures and their impact on humans. And on that front, a gas like methane is much worse than carbon dioxide. It drives the temperature up immediately, and by quite a bit. When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren’t fully accounting for this important short-term effect.

  Nevertheless, they’re the best method we have for counting emissions, and they come up often in discussions about climate change, so I’ll use them in this book. The 51 billion tons I keep mentioning is the world’s annual emissions in carbon dioxide equivalents. You may see numbers like 37 billion elsewhere—that’s just carbon dioxide, without the other greenhouse gases—or 10 billion, which is just the carbon itself. For the sake of variety, and because reading “greenhouse gas” a hundred times will make your eyes glaze over, I’ll sometimes use “carbon” as a synonym for carbon dioxide and the other gases.