How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Bill Gates

March 27, 2021

few companies will make a bet on inventing zero-emissions technology if their competitors can undersell them with fossil-fuel products.

March 27, 2021

few companies will make a bet on inventing zero-emissions technology if their competitors can undersell them with fossil-fuel products. That’s why markets,

March 27, 2021

incentive for power companies to install it. And few companies will make a bet on inventing zero-emissions technology if their competitors can undersell

March 24, 2021

You may be wondering how much all this would cost. There’s no way to put a price tag on everything the world needs to do to adapt to climate change. But the commission I’m involved with priced out spending in five key areas (creating early-warning systems, building climate-resilient infrastructure, raising crop yields, managing water, and protecting mangroves) and found that investing $1.8 trillion between 2020 and 2030 would return more than $7 trillion in benefits.

March 24, 2021

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.

March 22, 2021

The path to zero carbon for heating actually looks a lot like the path for passenger cars: (1) electrify what we can, getting rid of natural gas water heaters and furnaces, and (2) develop clean fuels to do everything else.

March 21, 2021

It’s rare that you can boil the solution for such a complex subject down into a single sentence. But with transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest.

March 21, 2021

passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs, motorcycles, and such) are responsible for almost half the emissions. Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles—everything from garbage trucks to 18-wheelers—account for another 30 percent. Airplanes add in a tenth of all emissions, as do container ships and other marine vessels, with trains accounting for the last bit.

March 21, 2021

transportation contributes only 16 percent of global emissions, ranking fourth behind how we make things, plug in, and grow things. I was surprised too when I learned it, and I suspect that most people are in the same boat. If you stopped some random strangers on the sidewalk and asked them what activities contribute the most to climate change, they’d probably say burning coal for electricity, driving cars, and flying planes.

March 20, 2021

In Indonesia, on the other hand, forests are being cut down to make way for palm trees, which provide the palm oil you’ll find in everything from movie-theater popcorn to shampoo. It’s one of the main reasons why the country is the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. I

March 20, 2021

But in other parts of the world, deforestation isn’t about turning out more burgers and steaks. In Africa, for example, it’s a matter of clearing land to grow food and fuel for the continent’s growing population. Nigeria, which has had one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, has lost more than 60 percent of its forest cover since 1990, and it’s one of the world’s biggest exporters of charcoal, which is created by charring wood.

March 20, 2021

For millennia, humans fed their crops extra nitrogen by applying natural fertilizers like manure and bat guano. The big breakthrough came in 1908, when two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen in a factory. It’s hard to overstate how momentous their invention was. What’s now known as the Haber-Bosch process made it possible to create synthetic fertilizer, greatly expanding both the amount of food that could be grown and the range of geographies where it could be grown.

March 20, 2021

What did Ehrlich and other doomsayers miss? They didn’t factor in the power of innovation. They didn’t account for people like Norman Borlaug, the brilliant plant scientist who sparked a revolution in agriculture that led to the gains in India and elsewhere. Borlaug did it by developing varieties of wheat with bigger grains and other characteristics that allowed them to provide much more food per acre of land—what farmers call raising the yield. (Borlaug found that as he made the grains bigger, the wheat couldn’t stand up under their weight, so he made the wheat stalks shorter, which is why his varieties are known as semi-dwarf wheat.)

March 20, 2021

Borlaug did it by developing varieties of wheat with bigger grains and other characteristics that allowed them to provide much more food per acre of land—what farmers call raising the yield. (Borlaug found that as he made the grains bigger, the wheat couldn’t stand up under their weight, so he made

March 19, 2021

We manufacture an enormous amount of materials, resulting in copious amounts of greenhouse gases, nearly a third of the 51 billion tons per year. We need to get those emissions down to zero, but it’s not an option to simply stop making things. In

March 19, 2021

Today there are more than two dozen types of plastics, and they range from the kind of thing you might expect—the polypropylene in yogurt containers, for example—to more surprising uses like the acrylic in paint, floor polish, and laundry detergent, or the microplastics in soap and shampoo, or the nylon in your waterproof jacket,

March 19, 2021

Make a ton of cement, and you’ll get a ton of carbon dioxide.

March 19, 2021

5 billion tons of carbon dioxide released every year by mid-century, just from making steel, unless we find a new, climate-friendly way to do it. As challenging as that may sound, concrete is even harder. (Sorry—no pun intended.) To make it, you mix together gravel, sand, water, and cement. The first three of these are relatively easy; it’s the cement that is a problem for the climate. To make cement, you need calcium. To get calcium, you start with limestone—which contains calcium plus carbon and oxygen—and burn it in a furnace along with some other materials. Given the presence of carbon and oxygen, you can probably see where this is going. After burning the limestone, you end up with the thing you want—calcium for your cement—plus something you don’t want: carbon dioxide.

March 19, 2021

To make cement, you need calcium. To get calcium, you start with limestone—which contains calcium plus carbon and oxygen—and burn it in a furnace along with some other materials. Given the presence of carbon and oxygen, you can probably see where this is going. After burning the limestone, you end up with the thing you want—calcium for your cement—plus something you don’t want: carbon dioxide.

March 19, 2021

5 billion tons of carbon dioxide released every year by mid-century, just from making steel, unless we find a new, climate-friendly way to do it.

March 19, 2021

We like steel because it’s both strong and easy to shape when it’s hot. To make steel, you need pure iron and carbon; on its own, iron isn’t very strong, but add just the right amount of carbon—less than 1 percent, depending on the kind of steel you want—and the carbon atoms nestle themselves in between the iron atoms, giving the resulting steel its most important properties.

March 13, 2021

A kilowatt is 1,000 watts, a megawatt is a million, and a gigawatt (pronounced with a hard g!) is a billion. You often see this shorthand in the news, so I’ll use it too. The following chart shows some rough comparisons that help me keep it all straight. How much power does it take? The world    5,000 gigawatts    The United States    1,000 gigawatts    Mid-size city    1 gigawatt

March 13, 2021

Remember that emissions come from five different activities, and we need solutions in all of them.

March 13, 2021

How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things    (cement, steel, plastic) 31%

March 13, 2021

Making things    (cement, steel, plastic) 31%

March 13, 2021

How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things    (cement, steel, plastic) 31%

March 13, 2021

How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things    (cement, steel, plastic) 31%

March 13, 2021

Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents).

March 12, 2021

    Hurricane Maria set Puerto Rico’s power grid and other infrastructure back some two decades, according to one study.

March 11, 2021

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.