Bill Gates on How to Avoid A Climate Disaster
How we can get from 51 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions to… zero.
Every year, the world emits on average 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Bill Gates, in his 2021 book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, confronts this fact. At this rate, we are headed right into a devastating climate disaster. 😨
On one hand, we need to address this urgent issue by doing everything we can to encourage countries and companies to reduce their emissions. And on the other hand, we have another question we must consider: how can we help the world’s poorest, who have the most to lose but did the least to cause the problem? (pg. 158)
Now, there are two possible paths. We can either work to reduce our emissions, to cut our emissions entirely. Gates stresses the fact that we must work towards emitting zero emissions because this seemingly minute difference makes a huge impact on our approach.
There are three things Gates wants you to know:
- To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero.
- We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter.
- And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.
This book segments each issue that contributes to climate change, making the problem seem more manageable. Not only that, but Gates brings in all sorts of potential solutions in each of these categories.
My goal is to lay out the main insights I’ve gained from this book. I love how Gates has broken down the areas where we need the most amount of technological innovation, as it gives us immediate next steps on where to invest our resources.
0️⃣ Why Zero?
Unless we start removing more carbon than we emit, we will not be able to inhibit the growth of global temperatures.
This is because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere linger for a very long time. For example, 20% of the carbon dioxide emitted today will still remain in 10,000 years.
And the truth is, this goal is very, very, lofty. This is because our society is so reliant on materials that cannot exist without greenhouse gas emissions, such as fossil fuels, plastics, fertilizer, and meat. In addition, our laws and regulations are outdated. Since this problem is always looming, it doesn’t make the news as often as it should. And finally, there isn’t as much climate consensus as one might imagine.
Five questions to ask in every climate conversation
Gates provides a mental framework for how to assess various climate solutions by asking these 5 questions.
- How much of the 51 billion tons are we talking about?
Measure impact in proportion to this number. If we are saving 17 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, this is equivalent to saying we are cutting 0.03% of annual global emissions.
2. What’s your plan for cement?
Basically, to reach zero, we need to zero out all these categories (I will examine these in more depth later).
3. How much power are we talking about?
Think “kilowatt” = house. “gigawatt” = city. “hundred or more gigawatts” = big country.
4. How much space do you need?
So if someone says some energy source can supply energy for the whole world, calculate how much space will be required to produce that energy.
5. How much is this going to cost?
Fossil fuel prices are really cheap, but they don’t take into account the environmental damage they inflict.
Gates coins the term “Green Premiums” to describe the price difference between the convention and the green alternative. For example, if a gallon of jet fuel is $2.22 and a gallon of advanced biofuels is $5.35, the green premium is their difference, $3.13, which is a 140% increase in price for the greener alternative.
This metric is illuminating because it can help us understand:
- Which zero-carbon alternatives we should be deploying now → those with low green premiums
- Where we need to focus our research and development spending and investors → wherever green premiums are too high and preventing us from decarbonizing
- Also measures how hard it will be for us to get to zero-carbon, and whether a green alternative is cheap enough for a middle-income country to afford.
Next, let’s examine the various categories that contribute to global warming.
💡 How we plug in: Electricity
27% of 51 billion tons per year
This is the foundation for many parts of the physical economy. Thus, if Gates had to choose a breakthrough in one activity that drives climate change, he would choose this electricity because of the huge role it would play in decarbonizing the rest of the economy.
Ways of creating electricity:
- Fossil fuels. Easy to move, ubiquitous, and the government has historically made an effort to encourage production and keep prices low.
- Hydropower. Electricity from moving water. Relatively cheap, but making reservoirs displaces local communities and wildlife. Covering carbon-filled land with water releases the carbon into the atmosphere, making it potentially a worse emitter than coal for 50–100 yrs before it makes up for the carbon it’s responsible for.
- Sun and wind. Intermittent sources since seasons, weather, and times of day affect when you have electricity. Need to store excess electricity in batteries (which are too expensive right now), or need to add other sources that run when needed. As we scale, intermittency becomes a larger and larger problem. What if a storm hits? What if we don’t have enough battery power to generate backup power before wind turbines can be turned back on?
- Nuclear fission. The only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, anywhere on earth, and proven to work on a large scale. The US gets 20% of its energy from this, and France, 70%. Efficient with materials when looking at electricity generated per unit of material. The downside is — waste is hard to store, it’s expensive to build, and human error can cause accidents. But kills far fewer people than cars do.
- Nuclear fusion. Instead of splitting atoms apart, we fuse them together. Relies on the same principles that power the sun. Make gas super hot, 50 million degrees C, then turn into plasma, so that particles fuse together, releasing a lot of energy. Holds promise but is still in the experimental phase. Very hard to do in practice.
- Offshore wind. Very hard to put up turbines, although theoretically can generate enough energy to meet our current needs.
- Geothermal. Pump water at high pressure down into hot underground rocks, which absorb heat and go out another hole, which turns turbines or generate electricity some other way. Energy density is low, hard to know when digging wells if it will produce the heat necessary (40% dug turn out to be duds). But more tech can make this a better option.
Ways of storing electricity:
- Batteries. Gates has lost more money on start-up battery companies than he ever imagined. Hard to improve on lithium-ion batteries that power our laptops and phones. At best, we can improve 3x, but not 50x. Perhaps flow batteries?
- Pumped hydro. When electricity is cheap, pump water up a hill into a reservoir, when demand goes up, let water flow back down the hill. Difficult in practice without a hill and reservoir, but alternatives include pebbles, pumping underground under pressure, etc.
- Thermal storage. When electricity is cheap, heat up some material that stays hot long without losing much energy. Perhaps molten salt?
- Cheap hydrogen. The innovation here can make all other ideas obsolete! Hydrogen is a key ingredient in fuel cells, which only has a by-product of water 😯. Fuel cells can be stored for years and turned back into electricity at a moment’s notice. Problem — expensive to produce hydrogen without emitting carbon. Since it’s so light, hard to store as it seeps through storage metals. Also, electrolyzers needed to make hydrogen are expensive.
Additional Innovations:
- Carbon capture. Direct air capture (DAC) is more flexible than point capture because you can do it anywhere. But difficult because carbon dioxide concentration is low in the air. Pick one molecule at random out of the atmosphere, and CO2 is only 1 in 2500.
- Load shifting. A water heater might be able to switch on at 4pm instead of 7pm when energy is in more demand. Turn it on when electricity is cheap, turn it off when it’s expensive. Use IoT!
🏗 How we make things: Concrete
31% of 51 billion tons per year
A really heavy, rust-resistant, rot-proof, nonflammable material that can also FLOAT??
Concrete is used in all aspects of our infrastructure — for bridges, roads, and buildings. And we make an astounding amount of it.
For each person in the USA, we make 600 pounds of concrete. And we’re not even the biggest producers — China makes almost 6x more concrete than we do! 🤯
We also produce a similar amount of steel, which is strong, cheap, durable, and infinitely recyclable. We use it in cars, ships, trains, refrigerators, factory machines, canned foods, and computers. Pair it with concrete as steel rods inside concrete blocks and create stronger, reinforced buildings 🏢 and bridges 🌉!
Other materials that play a role as essential as electricity include:
- Plastics. 👚 Clothes, toys, furniture, phones, and cars (they enable the lightness of fuel-efficient cars).
- Glass. 🪟 Windows, jars, insulation, cars, fiber-optic cables (for high-speed internet).
- Aluminum. 🚆 Soda cans, foil, power lines, trains, planes.
- Fertilizer. 🌱 Feeds the world.
Growth is a GOOD thing. But as Gates puts it, this silver cloud has a dark lining. Producing these materials contributes to almost a third of greenhouse gas emissions, yet we have no practical way of producing these without carbon — especially concrete.
🌱 How we grow things: Agriculture
19% of 51 billion tons per year
Raising animals emits methane
This comes from the manure, burps, and farts of animals, especially cattle. 🐄
Methane is especially dangerous because it is 28x more warming per molecule than carbon dioxide.
Not to mention the vast amounts of land raising animals take up.
Potential solutions in the meat industry include:
- Artificial meats. These include the plant-based alternatives you may have seen on the grocery shelves, such as Impossible or Beyond meats. Gates predicted that ultimately, the success of these alternatives will rest on the quality of the taste.
- Cell-based meats. This is real meat but produced in a lab from the stem cells of real animals. The main challenges with these are social and legislative because there is still a question of if this can be labeled as “meat” on the grocery shelves.
- Reducing food waste. In the US, 40% of food is wasted. 😟
Deforestation
By 2100, we are projected to have 10 billion people on this planet, so we will need lots of feed to feed them. At our current state, this will be very unsustainable, especially because food demand does not grow linearly with the population. As people’s quality of life improves, so does the number of calories they intake.
Growing more food and raising more cattle to feed 10 billion people will need LOTS of land, causing more deforestation. And if we try generating lots of energy from plants (like advanced biofuels), we’ll have even LESS land.
So, how can we possibly save forests, in addition to changing the way we make food?
- Pay countries to maintain forests.
- Enforcing laws to protect certain areas.
- Give rural communities different economic opportunities besides extracting from natural resources.
Side note: the impact of planting a single tree is often overblown. 50 acres of trees are needed to absorb emissions from ONE average American over their lifetime.
Fertilizer
On one hand, we need to bring fertilizer to rural farmers in poor countries to increase their yields and profits to improve their quality of life, especially as climate change is already taking a toll on them.
But on the other hand, fertilizer is very harmful.
Most of the nitrogen it contains is never actually absorbed. So the excess nitrogen runs into the ground, into the water, or into the air, causing pollution. Note that nitrogen is released into the air as nitrous oxide, which has 265x the global warming potential compared to carbon dioxide.
The problem is that we don’t currently have a zero-carbon alternative to fertilizer.
Some potential solutions that have been explored are:
- Additives to help plants take up more nitrogen. However, this technology is still inconsistent and is not invested in enough.
- Genetic engineering to create new varieties of crops that can recruit bacteria to fix nitrogen for them instead of fertilizer.
🚗 How we get around: Transportation
16% of 51 billion tons a year
Americans drive and fly a LOT. In the US, transportation is the #1 cause of emissions.
This is because we use gasoline, which contains fossil fuels. But it makes sense why we chose to use gasoline in the first place — it contains a lot of energy and is very cheap!
1 Gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the energy contained in 130 sticks of dynamite stuck together. And in the US, gasoline per gallon is cheaper than Dasani bottled water, hand sanitizer, laundry detergent, and even Two Buck Chuck!
So to replace gasoline, we need to find an alternative that is just as cheap and energy-dense.
As demand for transportation continues to grow, we must seek alternatives. These include:
- Fuel made from carbon already in the air rather than from the carbon in fossil fuels
- Some different form of energy altogether — such as electric vehicles
- Biofuels, although they require lots of land (Gates lost $50 million in a failed biofuel company 😢)
❄️ How we keep cool and stay warm: HVAC
7% of 51 billion tons a year
As climate change warms the globe, we’ll use more AC, which fuels more climate change, perpetuating a dangerous positive feedback loop.
This is an area where we need much more investment and research. The one solution that is brought up is a smart window system that uses smart glass that can automatically turn darker when the room needs to cool and lighten when it needs to warm.
Adaptation
“If women had the same access to resources as men, they could grow 20–30% more food on their farms and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12–17%.”
There are steps we need to take to adapt to climate change.
Firstly, cities need to change the way they grow, as we need to be able to support a growing population while also limiting our carbon footprint.
We also need to address the fact that climate change is exacerbating the inequality in cities with poverty, homelessness, healthcare, education, etc.
For example, with gender inequality on farms, women have more difficulty securing land rights, accessing water and financing to buy fertilizer, and even the ability to get the weather forecast, which affects their ability to produce food.
Potential solutions include:
- Mangroves. These are short trees that grow along coastlines that have adapted to life in salty water. They reduce storm surges, prevent coastal flooding, protect fish habitats, and can ultimately help the world save $80B a year from flood losses with lower costs than breakwaters.
- Geoengineering. This is a cutting-edge technology that will temporarily make changes to the earth’s oceans or atmospheres to lower the temperature. This includes distributing fine particles in the upper layers of the atmosphere to scatter sunlight and cause cooling, similar to after a volcano erupts. Or, brightening clouds using salt spray causing them to scatter more light. *BUT THIS IS IN EMERGENCY ONLY!! At this scale, it is extremely risky and hard to test.
Policy
Not only do specific technologies play a role in the climate change mitigation process, policy is equally as important.
When it comes to massive undertakings, it is critical to involve the government from the beginning of the process (which Gates learned through building Microsoft and his massive undertaking to get computers into every household).
We need to focus on BOTH technology and policy to spark new companies, innovation, and get new products onto the market faster.
Conclusion
A few years ago with pandemics is where we are today with climate change. We know it’s coming, there are warning signs, but we actually need to do something to prepare.
We must expand the SUPPLY of innovations and new ideas that get tested and the DEMAND for innovations.
We need more investment into research and development. Governments especially, because they can take chances on ideas that may fail or take longer to pay off because the private sector will not pursue bets that are too risky. Governments are also huge consumers of fuel, cement, steel, electricity, which means they can help bring new technologies to scale!
Most importantly, government and industry need to WORK TOGETHER to overcome barriers and speed up innovation cycle.
And finally, to eliminate green premiums: we MUST put a price on carbon.
The reason why we need to get to zero emissions vs. just reducing emissions is the paths for each mindset produce totally different outcomes. This is probably the biggest takeaway I had from this book: when thinking about climate technology, I mustn’t be satisfied with merely a reduction in emissions, only a complete elimination of emissions and more.
Where we need innovation
This is the list of technological innovations that Gates identifies to effectively combat climate change:
- Fertilizer that is better at being absorbed
- 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-gen nuclear fission
- Nuclear fusion
- Carbon capture (direct air caputer and point capture)
- Underground electricity transmission
- Zero-carbon plastics
- Geothermal plastics
- Pumped hydro
- Thermal storage
- Drought and flood-tolerant food crops
- Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil
- Coolants that don’t contain F-gases
