Bill Gates’s recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is both timely and late. Late, in that, according to Eco Watch, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology warned Lyndon B. Johnson more than 50 years ago that carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere would “almost certainly cause significant changes” and “could be deleterious to the future of human beings.”
50 years ago.
And it is timely in that we finally have a president in office who believes climate change is real and who wants to join the global conversation about the real climate disaster we face. Climate activism has gone viral. There’s Greta Thunburg. There is the excellent journalistic work of Elizabeth Kolbert and others. If I think of my work as a writer, I consider bearing witness to our climate disaster one of the most important things I do. I see it in bleaching coral reefs in Hanauma Bay in Hawai’i, in beaches that disappear overnight when the tides are high on the North Shore, in rising sea levels that have put my home town of Miami underwater on sunny days, and in massive hurricanes that destroyed the infrastructure of Puerto Rico, my grandma’s birthplace.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is not a perfect book, but the book is incredibly helpful if you’re a lay reader trying to understand the scope of the climate crisis and trying to really understand the vast changes our world will need to make in order to solve this problem. Gates does an excellent job of explaining how ubiquitous fossil fuels are in every aspect of our lives, pointing out that gas costs about as much as soda (unless you live in California or Hawai’i). The world pumps out about 51 billion tons into the atmosphere every year. Cars and planes only account for about 16% of these total emissions. Construction products, like cement, account for 31 percent, our electricity accounts for another 27 percent, and growing food accounts for another 19 percent. A smaller percentage (seven percent) goes to heating, cooling, and refrigeration. We will need to address how we do each of these things if we are to solve our climate crisis and avoid a climate disaster. These numbers are a little misleading, though. While transportation only accounts for 19 percent of the total source of global emissions, transportation accounts for the leading cause of emissions produced by the U.S., largely due to transportation, but also due to shipping. So, despite what Gates says, Americans still need to focus on how they drive and fly and ship things from place to place.
The Atlantic recently published a story by Peter Brannen that should be read by everyone on the planet. Brannen uses scientific evidence to take us back in time to the Earth the last time there was as much carbon in the atmosphere as there is now. What did the earth look like when the atmosphere contained about 400 parts per million of carbon?
“The Amazon is running backwards…” Oregon is unrecognizable, “flowing with rivers of incandescent rock.” Brannen takes us further back in time, to the atmosphere we are projected to create for ourselves, a world where swampy rainforests grew lush in the Arctic. It takes the earth and animals time to catch up with these changes. And the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere today doesn’t go away; it can stick around for more than 10,000 years, Gates notes.
Brannen’s message is this: the changes we are seeing now are just the beginning, and because we are still pumping carbon into the atmosphere, we won’t even begin to see the more radical changes for years to come. But if the Earth’s geological history is any indication—change is coming, and it doesn’t look good.
In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Gates writes that we need to get our greenhouse gas emissions down from fifty-one billion to zero. Gates might sound ambitious, but after reading Brannen, Gates’s project may not be ambitious enough. For context, during the COVID-19 pandemic, economic slowdowns only reduced carbon emissions by five percent. The fact that the massive economic pain of shutting down and not moving for weeks on end only took the world’s emissions down to about 49 billion tons truly reveals the scope of the problem.
As I’ve written before in this blog, I’m grateful that Gates is trying to solve the climate problem. I wish more ridiculously wealthy people would put their money and energy into solving problems like climate change, poverty, education, and health. When it comes to a problem as big as climate change, we need all hands-on deck. We need wealthy people to invest in clean energy and we need to fund projects that will benefit the environment. We need scientists doing research to create cleaner options. We need politicians with the courage and the will to make difficult decisions, and to put in place policies, and laws that will motivate change. We need young people like Greta Thunburg, using their platforms to give a voice to the planet. If more wealthy people were like Gates, we’d be living in a better world.
But there were moments in this book that deeply disappointed me. For one, I was saddened to learn that Gates only fully accepted that greenhouse emissions were a real problem as late as 2006. He writes that before then, he “assumed that there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster.” And yet, perhaps his “late conversion” admission might help others slower than him take a second look at the science. I can be disappointed and still appreciate his bravery in admitting he took a long time to come around.
I also don’t know what a climate change expert will say when he reads that Gates writes: “‘Weather for Dummies’ is the best book on weather that I’ve found.” That said, I still might find myself buying a copy of Weather for Dummies, either way.
Already experts are quibbling with Gates. Bill McKibben, who writes the Climate Crisis newsletter for the New Yorker, reviewed How to Avoid a Climate Disaster for the New York Times, and disputed Gates’s claim that wind and solar couldn’t solve the climate disaster, noting that the price of solar is lowering and so are the prices of storage batteries that would make these sources of energy viable when the “wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.”
Here’s one thing for certain. Gates understands that money runs the world and more importantly, he understands how money runs the world. We can’t solve the climate disaster by policy alone. We can’t just tell people in developing countries that they can’t have electricity because coal is harming the planet. Gates writes: “The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.”
Pitting economics and politics against one another creates a false dichotomy and a zero-sum game for our climate disaster that doesn’t exist. Gates’ solution is multifaceted. We will need to make clean energy cheap, but we’ll also need policy to make that happen. Politicians can incentivize clean energy by taxing dirty energy (and carbon-heavy products) so the costs actually reflect the cost to our planet. This means investing in clean energy (research in particular), and choosing not to invest in dirty energy like coal and oil. Investment in clean energy on the private and public scale would mean there would be more research, and more people able to explore the problem. Right now money wants to support the status coal.
Gates himself notes that we need government intervention to increase investment in research and development for cleaner energy, and for other climate change initiatives that may not be supported by the private sector. He notes that we spend only around 0.02 percent of the global economy researching and funding clean energy initiatives. The fact that the most pressing problem of our lifetimes gets less than one percent of the global economy says a great deal about our culture, what we prioritize, and how far we need to go. Gates argues that the government should invest in the bolder and riskier ideas that have the potential to solve a bigger chunk of the problem, because private investors won’t likely invest in them.
I am not a politician nor economic expert nor climate scientist, but these just seem like common sense solutions that jump out to me as obvious. In fact, before even reading the book, I drafted some of them out as possible solutions, and was pleased to see Gates was thinking along the same lines.
Gates reports that “Even America’s investment in energy research was (and still is) far lower than in other essential areas, like health and defense.” We need government to improve our infrastructure so that we can deliver clean energy from places with sun and wind to places that may not have these things. Gates notes that “transmission and distribution are responsible for more than a third of the final cost of electricity.” We will need strong leaders to promote better infrastructure projects, require carbon capture in industry, and provide the financial incentives to make these projects possible.
And Gates notes that the private sector doesn’t invest in green tech because “returns were so low. They were used to investing in biotechnology and information technology, where success often comes quickly and there are fewer government regulations to deal with.” You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that money isn’t always forward thinking or able to delay gratification.
Gates is wise to restrict the book to the domains he knows—technology, investment, business. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is not necessarily the full answer to the problem it promises to be (we’ll need experts, too), but it offers a detailed (and readable) explanation of the problem, and this is useful. One thing is for sure: we’re not going to solve the climate disaster if we keep having partisan conversations. Gates offers an approach that can appeal to someone who may be more conservative, and given that we live in a world where money guides political policy, we need someone to bridge the partisan divides that make progress impossible.
Gates looks at the big-picture problems in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. This isn’t a feel-good book about how you can live a greener life. But after reading the book, there were some important new things I discovered about how I could personally be greener in my daily life, and some were surprising. If you read the book closely, you’ll see ways you can help. For example:
- Reduce Food Waste. Gates notes that food waste alone in the United States contributes immensely to our climate disaster. “When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.” My boyfriend and I make a point to buy the “older vegetables” on sale at the store and at the market. They may not be pretty, but they are inexpensive and they reduce food waste.
- When buying your next car, if you can afford it, buy electric.
- Travel less, drive less; walk, bike, and swim more.
- Switch to an electric heat pump to heat and cool your home. Use energy efficient appliances, and if you can, switch to a green pricing program that uses green sources to power your home (it may cost a little more).
Solving our climate challenges won’t be easy. We won’t be able to solve this problem in a way that won’t involve sacrifice from us all: from business, governments, and people. Government needs to ask business to pay more taxes and play a greater role in carbon capture and infrastructure-building. Government leaders may need to make hard decisions. Businesses and investors need to stop focusing entirely on the bottom line and think about how their actions affect people and the environment. People may need to change their behavior and diets (less travel and less food waste and less meat eating for one).
If you’re looking for easy ways that you can live a greener life by reading Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, you’ll be disappointed (Gates cares more about the big picture). But if you’re looking for a book to help you understand the scope of the problem so that you can demand more of yourself, your leaders, and the companies from which you buy things—this is a great read.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.