by Bill Gates
You’ve already sent your oldest son to work in a big city hundreds of miles away because you couldn’t afford to feed him. One of your neighbors committed suicide when he couldn’t support his family anymore. Should you and your husband stay and try to survive on the farm you know, or abandon the land and move to a more urban area where you might make a living?
It’s a wrenching decision. But it’s the kind of choice that people around the world are already facing, with heartbreaking results. In the worst drought ever recorded in Syria—which lasted from 2007 to 2010—some 1.5 million people left farming areas for the cities, helping to set the stage for the armed conflict that started in 2011. That drought was made three times more likely by climate change. By 2018, roughly 13 million Syrians had been displaced.
This problem is only going to get worse. One study that looked at the relationship between weather shocks and asylum applications to the European Union found that even with moderate warming, asylum applications could go up by 28 percent, to nearly 450,000 a year, by the end of the century. The same study estimated that by 2080 lower crop yields would cause between 2 percent and 10 percent of adults in Mexico to try to cross the border into the United States.
Let’s put all this into terms that everyone who is experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic can relate to. If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and then imagine spreading the pain out over a much longer period of time. The loss of life and economic misery caused by this pandemic are on par with what will happen regularly if we do not eliminate the world’s carbon emissions.
I’ll start with the loss of life. How many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus by climate change? Because we want to compare events that happen at different points in time—the pandemic in 2020 and climate change in, say, 2030—and the global population will change in that time, we can’t compare the absolute numbers of deaths. Instead we will use the death rate: that is, the number of deaths per 100,000 people.
Using data from the Spanish flu of 1918 and the COVID-19 pandemic and averaging it out over the course of a century, we can estimate the amount by which a global pandemic increases the global mortality rate. It’s about 14 deaths per 100,000 people each year.
How does that compare to climate change? By mid-century, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount—14 deaths per 100,000. By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 75 extra deaths per 100,000 people.
In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.
The economic picture is also bleak. The likely impacts from climate change and from COVID-19 vary quite a bit, depending on which economic model you use. But the conclusion is unmistakable: In the next decade or two, the economic damage caused by climate change will likely be as bad as having a COVID-sized pandemic every 10 years. And by the end of the 21st century, it will be much worse if the world remains on its current emissions path.*2
Many of the predictions in this chapter may sound familiar to you if you’ve been following climate change in the news. But as the temperature goes up, all these problems will happen more often, more severely, and to more people. And there’s a chance of relatively sudden catastrophic climate change, if, for example, large sections of the earth’s permanently frozen ground (called permafrost) gets warm enough to melt and releases the huge amounts of greenhouse gases, mostly methane, that are trapped there.
Despite the scientific uncertainties that remain, we understand enough to know that what’s coming will be bad. There are two things we can do about it:
Adaptation. We can try to minimize the impact of the changes that are already here and that we know are coming. Because climate change will have the worst impact on the world’s poorest people, and most of the world’s poorest people are farmers, adaptation is a major focus for the agriculture team at the Gates Foundation. For example, we’re funding a lot of research into new varieties of crops that tolerate the droughts and floods that will be more frequent and severe in the coming decades. I’ll explain more about adaptation and outline a few of the steps we’ll need to take in chapter 9.
Mitigation. Most of this book isn’t about adaptation. It’s about the other thing we need to do: stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. To have any hope of staving off disaster, the world’s biggest emitters—the richest countries—have to get to net-zero emissions by 2050. Middle-income countries need to get there soon after, and the rest of the world will eventually need to follow suit.
I’ve heard people object to the idea that rich countries should go first: “Why should we bear the brunt of this?” It’s not simply because we’ve caused most of the problem (although that’s true). It’s also because this is a huge economic opportunity: The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.
Rich countries are best suited to develop innovative climate solutions; they’re the ones with government funding, research universities, national labs, and start-up companies that draw talent from all over the world, so they’ll need to lead the way. Whoever makes big energy breakthroughs and shows they can work on a global scale, and be affordable, will find many willing customers in emerging economies.
I see many different pathways that can get us to zero. Before exploring them in detail, we need to take stock of just how hard the journey will be.
Skip Notes
*1 Most climate change reports use the Celsius scale for reporting temperature changes. I’ll follow that practice in this book, because that’s what you’ll see in most news reports. To get an idea of a temperature change in Fahrenheit that is accurate enough for most purposes, you can just double the Celsius number and remember that your estimate is a little high. Since most Americans think more naturally in Fahrenheit, I’ll use that scale when I’m referring to daily temperatures.
*2 Here’s the math. Recent models suggest that the cost of climate change in 2030 will likely be between 0.85 percent and 1.5 percent of America’s GDP per year. Meanwhile, current estimates for the cost of COVID-19 to the United States this year range between 7 percent and 10 percent of GDP. If we assume that a similar disruption happens once every 10 years, that’s an average annual cost of 0.7 percent to 1 percent of GDP—roughly equivalent to the projected damage from climate change.
CHAPTER 2
THIS WILL BE HARD
Please don’t let the title of this chapter depress you. I hope it’s clear by now that I believe we can get to zero, and in the coming chapters I will try to give you a sense of why I feel that way and what it will take to get there. But we can’t solve a problem like climate change without an honest accounting of how much we need to do and what obstacles we need to overcome. So with the idea in mind that we will get to solutions—including ways to speed up the transition from fossil fuels—let’s look at the biggest barriers we’re facing.
Fossil fuels are like water. I’m a big fan of the late writer David Foster Wallace. (I’m preparing for his mammoth novel Infinite Jest by slowly making my way through everything else he ever wrote.) When Wallace gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, he started with this story:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”*
Wallace explained, “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”
Fossil fuels are like that. They’re so pervasive that it can be hard to grasp all the ways in which they—and other sources of greenhouse gases—touch our lives
. I find it helpful to start with everyday objects and go from there.
Did you brush your teeth this morning? The toothbrush probably contains plastic, which is made from petroleum, a fossil fuel.
If you ate breakfast, the grains in your toast and cereal were grown with fertilizer, which releases greenhouse gases when it’s made. They were harvested by a tractor that was made of steel—which is made with fossil fuels in a process that releases carbon—and ran on gasoline. If you had a burger for lunch, as I do occasionally, raising the beef caused greenhouse gas emissions—cows burp and fart methane—and so did growing and harvesting the wheat that went into the bun.
If you got dressed, your clothes might contain cotton—also fertilized and harvested—or polyester, made from ethylene, which is derived from petroleum. If you’ve used toilet paper, that’s more trees cut down and carbon emitted.
If the vehicle you took to work or school today was powered by electricity, great—though that electricity was probably generated using a fossil fuel. If you took a train, it went along tracks made of steel and through tunnels made using cement, which is produced with fossil fuels in a process that releases carbon as a by-product. The car or bus you took is made of steel and plastic. The same goes for the bike you rode last weekend. The roads you drove on contain cement as well as asphalt, which is derived from petroleum.
If you live in an apartment building, you’re probably surrounded by cement. If you live in a house made of wood, the lumber was cut and trimmed by gas-powered machines that were made with steel and plastic. If your home or office has heating or air-conditioning, not only is it using a fair amount of energy, but the coolant in the air conditioner may be a potent greenhouse gas. If you’re sitting in a chair made of metal or plastic, that’s more emissions.
Also, virtually all of these items, from the toothbrush to the building materials, were transported from someplace else on trucks, airplanes, trains, and ships, all of which were themselves powered by fossil fuels and made using fossil fuels.
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.
Even after you account for fluctuations in the price of oil, the conclusion is the same: Every day, people around the world rely on more than 4 billion gallons of a product that costs less than Diet Coke.
It’s no accident that fossil fuels are so cheap. They’re abundant and easy to move. We’ve created big global industries devoted to drilling for them, processing and moving them, and developing innovations that keep their prices low. And their prices don’t reflect the damage they cause—the ways they contribute to climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation when they’re extracted and burned. We’ll explore this problem in more detail in chapter 10.
Just thinking about the scope of this problem can be dizzying. But it does not need to be paralyzing. By deploying the clean and renewable sources we already have while also making breakthroughs in zero-carbon energy, we can figure out how to reduce our net emissions to zero. The key will be to make the clean approach as cheap—or almost as cheap—as the current technology.
We need to hurry up, though, because…
It’s not just the rich world. Almost everywhere, people are living longer and healthier lives. Standards of living are going up. There is rising demand for cars, roads, buildings, refrigerators, computers, and air conditioners and the energy to power them all. As a result, the amount of energy used per person will go up, and so will the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per person. Even building the infrastructure we’ll need to create all this energy—the wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, electricity storage facilities, and so on—will itself involve releasing more greenhouse gases.
But it’s not just that each person will be using more energy; there will also be more people. The global population is headed toward 10 billion by the end of the century, and much of this growth is happening in cities that are highly carbon intensive. The speed of urban growth is mind-boggling: By 2060, the world’s building stock—a measure that factors in the number of buildings and their size—will double. That’s like putting up another New York City every month for 40 years, and it’s mainly because of growth in developing countries like China, India, and Nigeria.
Where the emissions are. Emissions from advanced economies like the United States and Europe have stayed pretty flat or even dropped, but many developing countries are growing fast. That’s partly because richer countries have outsourced emissions-heavy manufacturing to poorer ones. (UN Population Division; Rhodium Group)
This is good news for every person whose life improves, but it’s bad news for the climate we all live in. Consider that nearly 40 percent of the world’s emissions are produced by the richest 16 percent of the population. (And that’s not counting the emissions from products that are made someplace else but consumed in rich countries.) What will happen as more people live like the richest 16 percent? Global energy demand will go up 50 percent by 2050, and if nothing else changes, carbon emissions will go up by nearly as much. Even if the rich world could magically get to zero today, the rest of the world would still be emitting more and more.
It would be immoral and impractical to try to stop people who are lower down on the economic ladder from climbing up. We can’t expect poor people to stay poor because rich countries emitted too many greenhouse gases, and even if we wanted to, there would be no way to accomplish it. Instead, we need to make it possible for low-income people to climb the ladder without making climate change worse. We need to get to zero—producing even more energy than we do today, but without adding any carbon to the atmosphere—as soon as possible.
The world will be building the equivalent of another New York City every month for the next 40 years.
Unfortunately…
History is not on our side. Judging only by how long previous transitions have taken, “as soon as possible” is a long time away. We have done things like this before—moving from relying on one energy source to another—and it has always taken decades upon decades. (The best books I have read on this topic are Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions and Energy Myths and Realities, which I’m borrowing from here.)
Many farmers still have to use ancient techniques, which is one of the reasons they’re trapped in poverty. They deserve modern equipment and approaches, but right now using those tools means producing more greenhouse gases.
For most of human history, our main sources of energy were our own muscles, animals that could do things like pull plows, and plants that we burned. Fossil fuels did not represent even half of the world’s energy consumption until the late 1890s. In China, they didn’t take over until the 1960s. There are parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where this transition still hasn’t happened.
And consider how long it took for oil to become a big part of our energy supply. We started producing it commercially in the 1860s. Half a century later, it represented just 10 percent of the world’s energy supply. It took 30 years more to reach 25 percent.
It takes a really long time to adopt new sources of energy. Notice how in 60 years coal went from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But natural gas reached only 20 percent in the same amount of time. (Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions)
Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world’s energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0
to 10 percent in 27 years.
This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.
Fuel sources aren’t the only issue. It also takes us a long time to adopt new types of vehicles. The internal combustion engine was introduced in the 1880s. How long before half of all urban families had a car? Thirty to 40 years in the United States, and 70 to 80 years in Europe.
What’s more, the energy transition we need now is being driven by something that has never mattered before. In the past, we’ve moved from one source to another because the new one was cheaper and more powerful. When we stopped burning so much wood and started using more coal, for example, it was because we could get a lot more heat and light from a pound of coal than from a pound of wood.
Or take a more recent example in the United States: We’re using more natural gas and less coal to generate electricity. Why? Because new drilling techniques made it much cheaper. It was a matter of economics, not the environment. In fact, whether natural gas is better or worse than coal depends on the way carbon dioxide equivalents are calculated. Some scientists have argued that gas can actually be worse for climate change than coal is, depending on how much leaks out while it’s being processed.
