How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“Eventually it sank in. 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.”

This excerpt clearly expresses Gates’s belief that people worldwide—especially poor people in developing countries—need more, not less, access to energy because it can improve their lives and help them out of poverty. This may seem counterintuitive in a book on fighting climate change, but the end of the quotation is the key. Gate argues that increasing energy use is fine—if it’s clean energy.

“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.”

Gates refers to the 2020 reduction in emissions due to the pandemic, when the world virtually shut down for much of the year. The pandemic offered an unprecedented glimpse into what happens when people stop traveling. Gates notes that this huge disruption resulted in only a 5% drop in greenhouse gas emissions. This only confirms the need for innovative solutions—that is, substitutes for what we do and use today.

“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.”

This passage sums up the problem of climate change in lay terms. Greenhouse gases are causing the planet to heat up and, simply put, will continue to do so until we stop emitting them. Gates writes that he didn’t understand the need to reach absolute zero emissions until he talked to scientists who explained and underscored that point, so here he works to convince others of what he’s learned. Even when we stop emitting greenhouse gases, some uncertainty exists about what will happen because of how long these gases stay in the atmosphere. It’s a point that Gates makes at the beginning of the book and repeats throughout it, supporting his theme about the urgency of climate change.

“Globally, there’s a wide range of possibilities for how climate change could affect the amount of food we get from each acre of crops. In some northerly regions, yields could go up, but in most places they’ll drop, by anywhere from a few percentage points to as much as 50 percent. Climate change could cut southern Europe’s production of wheat and corn in half by mid-century. In sub-Saharan Africa, farmers could see the growing season shrink by 20 percent and millions of acres of land become substantially drier. In poor communities, where many people already spend more than half of their incomes on food, food prices could rise by 20 percent or more. Extreme droughts in China—whose agricultural system provides wheat, rice, and corn for a fifth of the world’s population—could trigger a regional or even global food crisis.”

Gates gives an example of how climate change may affect one vital necessity: the global food supply. Like most climate change effects, we don’t know what the exact consequences may be. Gates shares information that scientists have presented using mathematical modeling. While none of the possibilities is good, considering specific scenarios of what might happen drives home the point in a way that general descriptions wouldn’t, thereby illustrating the situation’s severity.

“In other words, fossil fuels are everywhere. Take oil as just one example: The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.

What’s more, there’s a very good reason why fossil fuels are everywhere: They’re so inexpensive. As in, oil is cheaper than a soft drink. I could hardly believe this the first time I heard it, but it’s true. Here’s the math: A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons; the average price in the second half of 2020 was around $42 per barrel, so that comes to about $1 per gallon. Meanwhile, Costco sells 8 liters of soda for $6, a price that amounts to $2.85 a gallon.”

Gates illustrates just how cheap fossil fuels are. By comparing the cost of oil to that of an everyday consumer item like soda, he shows the scale of what we’re dealing with. The low cost of oil, however, is not the result of natural market forces: Elsewhere he writes that governments worldwide subsidize fossil fuels by about $400 billion each year (see Quotation 11). What he’s emphasizing here is that when something works so well and is so cheap to use, it takes significant effort to switch to something else. That’s one reason why adopting clean energy will be so difficult.

“The bottom line is that our current energy policies will have only a negligible impact on future emissions. You can measure their effect by adding up the extent to which emissions will go down by the year 2030 as a result of all the federal and state policies now on the books. All told, it comes to about 300 million tons, or about 5 percent of projected US emissions in 2030. That’s nothing to scoff at, but it’s not going to be enough to get us near zero.”

This excerpt is part of the evidence Gates gives for why the existing plans to reduce emissions are inadequate. Like some others, he once thought that just cutting back would be enough to mitigate the effects of climate change, but the science tells us that only getting to zero will do the job. It’s obvious here how little our current policies will help in reaching the goal; clearly, we need to do much more.

“To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar. To do it, we need lots of breakthroughs in science and engineering. We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise. We need the energy system to stop doing all the things we don’t like and keep doing all the things we do like—in other words, to change completely and also stay the same.

But don’t despair. We can do this. There are lots of ideas out there for how to do it, some of them more promising than others.”

Following from the previous passage, this one sums up why the task ahead will be so challenging. Not only do we need to implement innovative technology, much of it still in development, but time is of the essence—and not everyone is behind the idea. Thus, more public support is essential. Despite these steep barriers, however, the second paragraph shows the strong optimism that Gates exudes throughout the book.

“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.

How much? In some cases, we can price the difference directly. If we have a dirty source and a clean source of essentially the same thing, then we can just compare the price. […] These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums.”

Gates introduces an important idea: Green Premiums. It’s a tool he relies on to show the gap between where we are now and where we need to be to reach the goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions. A Green Premium is simply the difference between the cost of using a fossil fuel and the cost of using a clean energy solution. In each of the five categories he examines—and for each main emerging technology he describes in those categories—he calculates the Green Premium to illustrate how close we are to adopting the technology. Those with a high premium require more work to drive down the price through a mix of technological advances and government policy.

“Besides, figuring out how to get all the benefits of cheap, reliable electricity without emitting greenhouse gases is the single most important thing we must do to avoid a climate disaster. That’s partly because producing electricity is a major contributor to climate change, and also because, if we get zero-carbon electricity, we can use it to help decarbonize lots of other activities, like how we get around and how we make things. The energy we give up by not using coal, natural gas, and oil has to come from somewhere, and mostly it will come from clean electricity. This is why I’m covering electricity first, even though manufacturing is responsible for more emissions.”

Gates explains why he presents electricity first in reviewing the goods and processes that we must replace with clean energy. Although he mostly presents them in order by how much they contribute to greenhouse gases—starting with the greatest amount—he prioritizes electricity. It gets extra attention because we need clean electricity not only to power our lights, gadgets, and so on but also to replace processes we now complete using fossil fuels. This is electrification, and it will significantly increase the future demand for electricity. For example, we make steel by heating a type of coal together with iron ore. One alternative is to introduce electricity into a liquid mixture of iron oxide and other ingredients to get the same result.

“Most countries take various steps to keep fossil fuels cheap—the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that government subsidies for the consumption of fossil fuels amounted to $400 billion in 2018—which helps explain why they’re such a steady part of our electricity supply. 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.”

Gates emphasizes that converting to clean electricity is challenging because fossil fuels currently drive such a large share of power production. Again, the reason for this is that they’re effective and—partly due to government subsidies—cheap. This passage highlights his theme about the role of governments, since the policies they set for subsidies and future costs must change if we’re to shift toward clean electricity. Gates notes elsewhere that the true price of fossil fuels would reflect their damage to the environment.

“It’s no secret that nuclear power has its problems. It’s very expensive to build today. Human error can cause accidents. Uranium, the fuel it uses, can be converted for use in weapons. The waste is dangerous and hard to store.

High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former USSR, 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.

Imagine if everyone had gotten together one day and said, ‘Hey, cars are killing people. They’re dangerous. Let’s stop driving and give up these automobiles.’ That would’ve been ridiculous, of course. We did just the opposite: We used innovation to make cars safer. To keep people from flying through the windshield, we invented seat belts and air bags. To protect passengers during an accident, we created safer materials and better designs. To protect pedestrians in parking lots, we started installing rear-view cameras.”

As this passage reveals, Gates is clear that he supports nuclear power. He doesn’t deny its very real risks, but he also emphasizes its many benefits. This is where his belief in technology comes in. He advocates for innovating our way out of the problems of nuclear power, just as we did with problems related to electric cars. His dismay at the fact that we’ve all but given up on nuclear power comes through here. He writes that nuclear fusion—bringing atoms together rather than separating them, as fission does—would be safer and cleaner if only we could advance the technology. As always, he’s confident that we can with enough effort.

“This story is being repeated all over the world [...] To repeat a theme that comes up repeatedly in this book: This progress is a good thing. The rapid growth you see in these two photos means that people’s lives are improving in countless ways. They are earning more money, are getting a better education, and are less likely to die young. Anyone who cares about fighting poverty should see it as good news.

But, to repeat another theme that comes up a lot in this book: This silver cloud has a dark lining. Making all these materials emits lots of greenhouse gases. In fact, they’re responsible for about a third of all emissions worldwide. And in some cases, notably concrete, we don’t have a practical way to make them without producing carbon.”

Gates emphasizes his theme about the benefits of energy use. It enables progress and pulls people out of poverty. Thus, he’s not advocating for reducing energy use but simply for substituting clean energy sources for dirty ones. He reiterates this point throughout the book. That said, the substitution part is an enormous challenge. We don’t yet have practical, cost-effective ways (without using dirty energy sources, or fossil fuels) to make many of the materials he discusses in Chapter 5, and therefore we still have much work to do to improve the technologies and lower the Green Premiums.

“But this isn’t primarily a technological problem. It’s a political and economic problem. People cut down trees not because people are evil; they do it when the incentives to cut down trees are stronger than the incentives to leave them alone. So we need political and economic solutions, including paying countries to maintain their forests, enforcing rules designed to protect certain areas, and making sure rural communities have different economic opportunities so they don’t have to extract natural resources just to survive.”

This passage exemplifies Gates’s even-tempered, objective tone throughout the book. He’s referring to the problem of deforestation in places like Brazil, Africa, and Indonesia. He sees the problem dispassionately: Rather than pointing fingers, he’s looking for causes and solutions—a helpful strategy in dealing with a complex issue that people view from various perspectives. In this example, he considers people’s behavior to be simply a response to their situation: If their circumstances changed, they’d behave differently, so governmental leaders need to create the right incentives.

“Taking all these factors into account, the math suggests you’d need somewhere around 50 acres’ worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime. Multiply that by the population of the United States, and you get more than 16 billion acres, or 25 million square miles, roughly half the landmass of the world. Those trees would have to be maintained forever. And that’s just for the United States—we haven’t accounted for any other country’s emissions.”

Gates examines the well-known idea of planting trees, which many pose as a solution to the problem of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The thinking is that since plants absorb CO2, if we plant enough of them, they can compensate for much of the excess CO2 that contributes to global warming. Again, Gates takes a clear-eyed look at the issue, noting that when you do the math, it’s just not practical. He writes that we have many good reasons to plant trees, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought they could change the equation.

“Gas contains an amazing amount of energy—you’d need to bundle 130 sticks of dynamite together to get as much energy as a single gallon of gas contains. Of course, dynamite releases all its energy at once, while gasoline burns more slowly—which is just one reason we fill up our cars with gas and not sticks of explosives.

In the United States, gasoline is also remarkably cheap, even though it may not always seem that way when it’s time to stop at the gas station. In addition to milk and OJ, here are some things that it’s less expensive than, gallon for gallon: Dasani bottled water, yogurt, honey, laundry detergent, maple syrup, hand sanitizer, latte from Starbucks, Red Bull energy drink, olive oil, and the famously low-cost Charles Shaw wine you can buy at Trader Joe’s grocery stores. That’s right—gallon for gallon, gasoline is cheaper than Two Buck Chuck.”

Gates makes two powerful points here about our reliance on gasoline and why finding substitutes is so hard. The first point concerns its amount of energy per unit, which is greater than that of most alternatives. Substituting another source of energy requires that it at least come close to matching the power in gas. The second point is about how ridiculously cheap gas is, and Gates offers an extensive list of commonly used goods to drive the point home. This follows on his earlier observation that a gallon of gas costs less than a gallon of soda. The combination of gasoline’s power and affordability make it difficult to replace.

“You may be surprised that I’m bringing it up so late in this book and that 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.

The confusion is understandable: 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.”

As with the case of trees (see Quotation 15), Gates deflates a myth here about transportation. Many think that transportation accounts for a large share of greenhouse gas emissions; the reality is that it accounts for less than a fifth of emissions worldwide, although the percentage is largest in the US. This passage exemplifies how Gates focuses on the data and putting it into context. He notes the importance of this approach in Chapter 3 and emphasizes it in succeeding chapters as well.

“That means we’ll be adding many more units as the population grows and gets richer and as heat waves become more severe and more frequent. China added 350 million units between 2007 and 2017 and is now the largest market in the world for air conditioners. Worldwide, sales rose 15 percent in 2018 alone, with much of the growth coming from four countries where temperatures get especially high: Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Mexico. By 2050, there will be more than 5 billion A/C units in operation around the world.

Ironically, the very thing we’ll be doing to survive in a warmer climate—running air conditioners—could make climate change worse. After all, air conditioners run on electricity, so as we install more of them, we’ll need more electricity to run them. In fact, the International Energy Agency projects that worldwide electricity demand for cooling will triple by 2050. At that point, air conditioners will consume as much electricity as all of China and India do now.”

The first paragraph of this passage reinforces what Gates says in several places about energy use increasing as economic progress moves people out of poverty: They eat more meat, drive more cars, and install more air conditioners. The second paragraph points out the paradox we face as this happens. Certain things like using air conditioning only worsen the effects of global warming, leading to a vicious cycle of needing to use more of something that both causes climate change and mitigates its effects.

“The world is undergoing a huge construction boom. To accommodate a growing urban population, we’ll add 2.5 trillion square feet of buildings by 2060—the equivalent, as I mentioned in chapter 2, of putting up another New York City every month for 40 years. It’s a fair bet that many of these buildings will not be designed to conserve energy and that they’ll be around, using energy inefficiently, for several decades.”

In keeping with the previous passage, this one focuses on home and office space construction later in this century. The statistic comparing the monthly need for more space to the area of New York City is telling. This passage follows Gates’s discussion about all the energy that goes into generating electricity and making materials like steel and cement. Consequently, he illustrates the colossal task ahead if we’re to use clean energy to create the materials—and power the heavy equipment—for all this construction.

“All cities will be affected by climate change, but coastal cities will have the worst problems. Hundreds of millions of people could be forced from their homes as sea levels rise and storm surges get worse. By the middle of this century, the cost of climate change to all coastal cities could exceed $1 trillion […] each year. To say that this will exacerbate the problems most cities are already struggling with—poverty, homelessness, health care, education—would be an understatement.”

Gates gives another example of the effects of climate change. He writes elsewhere that we can’t predict the exact effects but that scientists can supply good estimates. What we know for sure is that as ocean levels rise, coastal cities will feel the effects hardest and earliest. Given that urban areas already have serious challenges to deal with, climate change will only add misery to a tough situation. Whether the cost is $1 trillion or above or below an estimate by some measure doesn’t make much difference. This—and other evidence Gates presents—reflects his theme about the issue’s urgency.

“I admit that ‘policy’ is a vague, dull-sounding word. A big breakthrough like a new type of battery would be sexier than the policies that led some chemist to invent it. But the breakthrough wouldn’t even exist without a government spending tax dollars on research, policies designed to drive that research out of the lab and into the market, and regulations that created markets and made it easy to deploy at scale.

In this book, I’ve been emphasizing the inventions we need to get to zero—new ways of storing electricity, making steel, and so on—but innovation is not just a matter of developing new devices. It’s also a matter of developing new policies so we can demonstrate and deploy those inventions in the market as fast as possible.”

This passage is from the chapter in which Gates discusses the importance of government policy. His use of the word “innovation” in the book mostly refers to its usual sense in terms of technology. However, he emphasizes that we should think of innovation in terms of all areas—including policymaking. We need to marshal all the resources we can in fighting climate change, so novel approaches to problems and new ways of thinking are just as important as technological innovation. The role of government must be prominent, which is one of the book’s themes.

“In short, we can reduce Green Premiums by making carbon-free things cheaper (which involves technical innovation), by making carbon-emitting things more expensive (which involves policy innovation), or by doing some of both. The idea isn’t to punish people for their greenhouse gases; it’s to create an incentive for inventors to create competitive carbon-free alternatives. By progressively increasing the price of carbon to reflect its true cost, governments can nudge producers and consumers toward more efficient decisions and encourage innovation that reduces Green Premiums. You’re a lot more likely to try to invent a new kind of electrofuel if you know it won’t be undercut by artificially cheap gasoline.”

The point here is that we need government policy for just this sort of thing. Policy has long made gas and other fossil fuels extra cheap; now we need it to shift and incentivize clean energy. Once again, Gates is not pointing fingers or placing blame. The climate change debate often gets heated, but he keeps a neutral tone in his book. In the past, we saw fossil fuels as the best option for the benefits they provide, but now we must shift our perspective and support other energy sources. Innovative policy completes what innovative technology cannot—and both working together can change people’s behavior so that we stop emitting carbon.

“Finally, and in my view most important, we have to lower the Green Premiums. It’s the only way to make it easier for middle- and low-income countries to reduce their emissions and eventually get to zero, and it will happen only if rich countries—especially the United States, Japan, and European nations—take the lead. After all, that’s where much of the world’s innovation happens.

And—this is a really important point—lowering the Green Premiums that the world pays is not charity. Countries like the United States shouldn’t see investing in clean energy R&D as just a favor to the rest of the world. They should also see it as an opportunity to make scientific breakthroughs that will give birth to new industries composed of major new companies, creating jobs and reducing emissions at the same time.”

This passage refers to the notion that rich countries must take the lead in combatting climate change, something Gates mentions a few times. Here, he notes the importance of reducing Green Premiums and the fact that less developed countries lack the resources to do so. The US, Europe, and other developed nations must help others do this to reach the goal of zero emissions by 2050. What he says here at the end reiterates another point he makes several times in the book: This need for change and innovation really means more business opportunities. Thus, we can fight climate change and create economic development at the same time. In other words, the change is not a burden but an advantage on which innovative leadership can capitalize.

“I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and because I know what people can accomplish. I’m profoundly inspired by all the passion I see, especially among young people, for solving this problem. If we keep our eye on the big goal—getting to zero—and we make serious plans to achieve that goal, we can avoid a disaster. We can keep the climate bearable for everyone, help hundreds of millions of poor people make the most of their lives, and preserve the planet for generations to come.”

In this concluding paragraph of the last chapter, Gates ends on a positive note. Throughout the book, he’s both a realist and a cheerleader of sorts. Although he doesn’t deny the enormity of the challenge or the difficulties it will entail, he reiterates at every opportunity his belief that we can succeed.