{"id":9590,"date":"2021-02-17T10:09:20","date_gmt":"2021-02-17T10:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/?p=9590"},"modified":"2021-02-17T10:09:22","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T10:09:22","slug":"how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster-by-bill-gates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster-by-bill-gates\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A year or so ago I read The Uninhabitable Earth<\/a><\/em> by David Wallace-Wells, which laid out in often horrific details, the kinds of things that would happen to the planet if we didn\u2019t change our ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill Gates goes for the much more practical, \u201cSo what can we do about it now?\u201d approach. This book is basically his plan to cut our carbon emissions from 51 billion tonnes to zero by 2050. That\u2019s it in a nutshell. If we don\u2019t then, like a bath, with even just a slow dripping tap, we\u2019ll end up overflowing and facing some of the consequences that Wallace-Wells laid out in his earlier work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To do this, in this enormously readable book, Gates takes us through where the emissions come from, and examines ways to work through each of those sectors, which he breaks down into making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around and keeping warm and cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He tackles each in turn, although he notes that we spend a lot of time thinking about \u201cgetting around\u201d \u2013 aka transport \u2013 which accounts for 16% of net emissions, but not so much on making steel and concrete. The food industry also gets a good look-in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gates is putting his money where his mouth is. Throughout the book he talks about the various companies he\u2019s invested in. This could sound a bit, \u201cAren\u2019t I clever?\u201d but it doesn\u2019t. He\u2019s just being practical. It comes from the work he and his wife Melinda have carried out through their Gates Foundation in doing very practical things like fighting malaria. So he\u2019s constantly referring to people he\u2019s met, and businesses he\u2019s keenly following.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And throughout, he is very pragmatic. Only a few of us are willing \u2013 or even able \u2013 to pay a \u201cGreen Premium\u201d for some of life\u2019s essentials. He readily acknowledges that the lower the income you are in, the bigger a proportion of your overall costs something like transport will be. So paying even a small premium is simply not affordable. He\u2019s also very aware that the big growth in greenhouse gases is likely to come from developing parts of the world where billions are coming to expect the same kinds of middle-class lifestyles that Americans and Europeans have experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what are the solutions? Well, this isn\u2019t really a list of things that you or I can do directly \u2013 assuming neither of us is a world leader. There are some of those things, but this is more about policy as well as corporate and governmental support and investment. When we buy the cheapest concrete or steel, there is no carbon-cost attached to it. There\u2019s no incentive to use the greener materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And where there are financial incentives, they don\u2019t necessarily help. The energy industry is rife with them, but they protect the enormously cheap fossil fuel industry. On the other hand, laws might make it ridiculously hard to build things like windfarms (a particular problem, seemingly, in the US).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are things which make you raise your eyebrows a bit. Gates doesn\u2019t believe that just planting lots of trees will fix things. He\u2019s got nothing against trees but I think sees them as a too simplistic solution that will require ongoing care to payback their investment over centuries. He is a big proponent of nuclear fuel, pointing out that while wind and solar energy are fantastic, they don\u2019t provide consistent power. And even though at heart, Gates is a technologist through and through, he doesn\u2019t see battery technology meaningfully moving on, which causes difficulties if you need to store vast amounts of power to even out supply on windless or cloudy days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some will look at Gates, flying around in his private jet and wonder if he really practices what he preaches? He acknowledges his own shortcomings, but I think this book shows that he is indeed putting his money where his mouth is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting to net zero will not be easy, as he repeats throughout, but it\u2019s achievable and he\u2019s laid out a plan to get us there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster<\/a> is out now.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A year or so ago I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, which laid out in often horrific details, the kinds of things that would happen to the planet if we didn\u2019t change our ways. Bill Gates goes for the much more practical, \u201cSo what can we do about it now?\u201d approach. This book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[108],"class_list":["post-9590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-books-2"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9592,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590\/revisions\/9592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}