by Bill Gates
Buy an electric vehicle. EVs have come a long way in terms of cost and performance. Although they might not be right for everyone (they’re not great for lots of long-distance road trips, and charging at home isn’t convenient for everyone), they’re becoming more affordable for many consumers. This is one of the places where consumer behavior can have a huge impact: If people buy lots of them, companies will make lots of them.
Try a plant-based burger. I’ll admit that veggie burgers haven’t always tasted great, but the new generation of plant-based protein alternatives is better and closer to the taste and texture of meat than their predecessors. You can find them in many restaurants, grocery stores, and even fast-food joints. Buying these products sends a clear message that making them is a wise investment. In addition, eating a meat substitute (or simply not eating meat) just once or twice a week will cut down on the emissions you’re responsible for. The same goes for dairy products.
As an Employee or Employer
As an employee or a shareholder, you can push your company to do its part. Of course, big companies will have the largest impact in many of these areas, but small companies can also do a lot, especially if they work together through organizations like local chambers of commerce.
Some steps are easier than others. The easy things do matter—planting trees to offset emissions, for instance, is a good thing to do for environmental and political reasons. It demonstrates that you care about climate change.
But doing only the easy things won’t solve the problem. The private sector will also need to embrace the harder steps.
For one thing, that means accepting more risk—for example, financing projects that might fail, but might turn into a clean-energy breakthrough. Shareholders and board members will have to be willing to share in this risk, making it clear to executives that they’ll back smart investments even if they don’t ultimately pan out. Companies and their leaders need to be rewarded for making bets that could move us forward on climate change.
Companies can also work with each other to identify and try to solve the toughest climate challenges. That means looking for the biggest Green Premiums and trying to reduce them. If the world’s biggest private-sector consumers of materials like steel and cement got together and demanded cleaner substitutes—and committed to investing in the infrastructure needed to make them—it would accelerate research and shift the market in the right direction.
Finally, the private sector can advocate for making these hard choices—for instance, by agreeing to use its resources to develop these markets, and by demanding that governments set up regulatory structures in which new technologies can succeed. Are political leaders focusing on the biggest sources of emissions and the toughest technical challenges? Are they talking about grid-scale energy storage, electrofuels, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, and zero-carbon cement and steel? If not, they’re not helping us get on the path to zero emissions by 2050.
Here are some specific steps the private sector can take along these lines:
Set up an internal carbon tax. Some big companies now impose a carbon tax on each of their divisions. These companies aren’t paying lip service to reducing emissions. They’re helping products get out of the lab and into the market, because the revenue from internal taxes can go directly to activities that reduce the Green Premiums and help create a market for the clean-energy products those firms will need. Employees, investors, and customers can advocate for this approach, giving cover to the executives responsible for implementing it.
Prioritize innovation in low-carbon solutions. Investing in new ideas used to be a point of pride for most industries, but the glory years of corporate R&D are gone. Today, companies in the aerospace, materials, and energy industries spend on average less than 5 percent of their revenue on R&D. (Software companies spend upwards of 15 percent.) Companies should reprioritize their R&D work, particularly on low-carbon innovations, many of which will require long-term commitments. Larger companies can partner with government researchers to bring practical commercial experience to research efforts.
Be an early adopter. Like governments, companies can use the fact that they buy a lot of products to speed up the adoption of new technologies. Among other things, this can involve using electric vehicles for corporate fleets, buying lower-carbon materials to build or renovate company buildings, and committing to use a certain amount of clean electricity. Many companies around the world have already committed to using renewable power for a large part of their operations, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Disney. The shipping company Maersk has said it will cut its net emissions to zero by 2050.
Even if these commitments will be hard to meet, they send important market signals about the value of developing zero-carbon approaches. Innovators see the demand and know they’ll have a market ready to buy their products.
Engage in the policy-making process. Companies can’t be afraid of working with the government, any more than governments should be afraid of working with companies. Businesses should champion getting to zero and support funding for basic science and applied R&D programs that will get us there. This will be especially important given the decline in corporate R&D over the past several decades.
Connect with government-funded research. Businesses should be advising government R&D programs so that basic and applied research is focused on the ideas that have the best shot of turning into products. (No one knows what is or isn’t likely to succeed better than the companies that develop and market products every day.) Joining industry advisory boards and taking part in planning exercises are low-cost ways to inform government R&D programs.
Companies can also help fund R&D through cost-sharing agreements and joint research projects—the kind of public-private collaboration that gave us gas turbines and advanced diesel engines.
Help early-stage innovators get across the valley of death. Many researchers never turn their promising ideas into products because the process would be too risky or too expensive. Established businesses can help by providing access to their testing facilities and providing data like cost metrics. If they want to do more, they can offer fellowships and incubation programs for entrepreneurs, invest in new technology, create business divisions that are specifically focused on low-carbon innovation, and finance new low-emissions projects.
One Last Thought
Unfortunately, the conversation about climate change has become unnecessarily polarized, not to mention clouded by conflicting information and confusing stories. We need to make the debate more thoughtful and constructive, and most of all we need to center it on realistic, specific plans for getting to zero.
I wish there were some magic invention that could steer the conversation in a more productive direction. Of course, no such device exists. Instead, it’s up to each of us.
My hope is that we can shift the conversation by sharing the facts with the people in our lives—our family members, friends, and leaders. And not just the facts that tell us why we need to act, but also those that show us the actions that will do the most good. One of my goals in writing this book is to spark more of these conversations.
I also hope we can unite behind plans that bridge political divides. As I’ve tried to demonstrate, this isn’t as naive as it may sound. No one has cornered the market on effective solutions to climate change. Whether you’re a believer in the private sector, or government intervention, or activism, or some combination, there’s a practical idea you can get behind. As for the ideas you can’t support, you may feel compelled to speak out, and that’s understandable. But I hope you’ll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you’re in favor of than opposing whatever you’re against.
With the threat of climate change upon us, it can be hard to be hopeful about the future. But as my friend Hans Rosling, the late global health advocate and educator, wrote in his amazing book Factfulness: “When we
have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.”
When we have a fact-based view of climate change, we can see that we have some of the things we need to avoid a climate disaster, but not all of them. We can see what stands in the way of deploying the solutions we have and developing the breakthroughs we need. And we can see all the work we must do to overcome those hurdles.
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.
AFTERWORD
CLIMATE CHANGE AND COVID-19
I finished working on this book at the end of the most tumultuous year in recent memory. As I write this afterword in November 2020, COVID-19 has killed more than 1.4 million people around the world and is entering another wave of cases and deaths. The pandemic has changed the way we work, live, and socialize.
At the same time, 2020 also brought new reasons to be hopeful about climate change. With the election of Joe Biden as president, the United States is poised to resume a leading role on the issue. China committed to the ambitious goal of being carbon neutral by 2060. In 2021, the United Nations will gather in Scotland for another major summit on climate change. Of course, none of this guarantees that we’ll make progress, but the opportunities are there.
I expect to spend much of my time in 2021 talking with leaders around the world about both climate change and COVID-19. I will make the case to them that many of the lessons from the pandemic—and the values and principles that guide our approach to it—apply just as well to climate change. At the risk of repeating myself from earlier in this book, I’ll summarize them here.
First, we need international cooperation. The phrase “we have to work together” is easy to dismiss as a cliché, but it’s true. When governments, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies worked together on COVID-19, the world made remarkable progress—for example, developing and testing vaccines in record time. And when we didn’t learn from each other and instead demonized other countries, or refused to accept that masks and social distancing slow the spread of the virus, we extended the misery.
The same is true for climate change. If rich countries worry only about lowering their own emissions and don’t work to make clean technologies practical for everyone, we’ll never get to zero. In that sense, helping others is not just an act of altruism, it’s also in our self-interest. We all have reasons to get to zero and help others do it, too. Temperatures will not stop rising in Texas unless emissions stop rising in India.
Second, we need to let science—actually, many different sciences—guide our efforts. In the case of COVID-19, we are looking to biology, virology, and pharmacology, as well as political science and economics—after all, deciding how to distribute vaccines equitably is an inherently political act. And just as epidemiology tells us about the risks of COVID-19 but not how to stop it, climate science tells us why we need to change course but not how to do it. For that, we must draw on engineering, physics, environmental science, economics, and more.
Third, our solutions should meet the needs of the people who are hardest hit. With COVID-19, the people who suffer most are the ones who have the fewest options—working from home, for example, or taking time off to care for themselves or their loved ones. And most of them are people of color and lower-income people.
In the United States, Black people and Latinx people are disproportionately likely to contract the coronavirus and to die from it. Black and Latinx students are also less likely to be able to attend school online than their white peers. Among recipients of Medicare, the COVID-19 death rate is four times higher for those who are poor. Closing these gaps will be key to controlling the virus in the United States.
Globally, COVID-19 has undone decades of progress on poverty and disease. As governments moved to deal with the pandemic, they had to pull people and money away from other priorities, including vaccination programs. A study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that in 2020, vaccination rates dropped to levels last seen in the 1990s. We lost 25 years of progress in about 25 weeks.
Rich nations, already generous in their giving for global health, will need to be even more generous to make up for this loss. The more they invest in strengthening health systems around the world, the more prepared we will be for the next pandemic.
In the same way, we need to plan for a just transition to a zero-emissions future. As I argued in chapter 9, people in poor countries need help adjusting to a warmer world. And wealthier countries will need to acknowledge that the energy transition will be disruptive for the communities that rely on today’s energy systems: the places where coal mining is the main industry, where cement is made, steel is smelted, or cars are manufactured. In addition, many people have jobs that indirectly rely on those industries—when there is less coal and fuel to move around, there will be fewer jobs for truck drivers and railroad workers. A significant portion of the working class economy will be affected, and there should be a transition plan in place for those communities.
Finally, we can do the things that will both rescue economies from the COVID disaster and spark innovation to avoid a climate disaster. By investing in clean-energy research and development—R&D—governments can promote economic recovery that also helps reduce emissions. Although it’s true that R&D spending has its biggest impact over the long term, there’s also an immediate impact: This money creates jobs quickly. In 2018, the U.S. government’s investment in all sectors of research and development directly and indirectly supported more than 1.6 million jobs, producing $126 billion in income for workers and $39 billion in federal and state tax revenue.
R&D isn’t the only area where economic growth is connected to zero-carbon innovation. Governments can also help clean-energy companies grow by adopting policies that reduce the Green Premiums and make it easier for green products to compete with their fossil-based competitors. And they can use funding from their COVID relief packages for things like expanding the use of renewables and building integrated electricity grids.
The year 2020 was a huge and tragic setback. But I am optimistic that we will get COVID-19 under control in 2021. And I’m optimistic that we’ll make real progress on climate change—because the world is more committed to solving this problem than it has ever been.
When the global economy went into severe recession in 2008, public support for action on climate change plummeted. People just couldn’t see how we could respond to both crises at the same time.
This time is different. Even though the pandemic has wrecked the global economy, support for action on climate change is just as high as it was in 2019. Our emissions, it seems, are no longer a problem that we’re willing to kick down the road.
The question now is this: What should we do with this momentum? To me, the answer is clear. We should spend the next decade focusing on the technologies, policies, and market structures that will put us on the path to eliminating greenhouse gases by 2050. It’s hard to think of a better response to a miserable 2020 than spending the next ten years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank the people at Gates Ventures and Breakthrough Energy who helped make How to Avoid a Climate Disaster possible.
Josh Daniel is an invaluable writing partner. He helped me express the complexities of climate change and clean energy as simply and clearly as possible. If this book is as effective as I hope it will be, it is largely due to Josh’s skill.
I wrot
e this book because I want to encourage the world to adopt effective plans for dealing with climate change. In that effort, I could not have better partners than Jonah Goldman and his team, including Robin Millican, Mike Boots, and Lauren Nevin. They provide me with essential advice on climate policy and on strategies to make sure that the ideas in this book will have an impact.
Ian Saunders led the creative and production process with all the ingenuity I’ve come to count on from him. Anu Horsman and Brent Christofferson designed the charts—with expert help from Beyond Words—and picked the photographs that help bring this book to life.
Bridgitt Arnold and Andy Cook led the promotional effort.
And Larry Cohen managed all this work with his usual calm and wisdom.
The team at the Rhodium Group, led by Trevor Houser and Kate Larsen, was extraordinarily helpful. Their research and advice are reflected throughout this book.
Thanks also to everyone on the board of Breakthrough Energy Ventures: Mukesh Ambani, John Arnold, John Doerr, Rodi Guidero, Abby Johnson, Vinod Khosla, Jack Ma, Hasso Plattner, Carmichael Roberts, and Eric Toone.
Jabe Blumenthal and Karen Fries are the two former Microsoft colleagues who organized my first learning session on climate change in 2006. In that session, they introduced me to two climate scientists, Ken Caldeira—then at the Carnegie Institution for Science—and David Keith of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with Ken and David that have shaped my thinking.
Ken and a team of his postdoctoral fellows—Candise Henry, Rebecca Peer, and Tyler Ruggles—pored over the manuscript line by line to check for factual mistakes. I’m thankful for their meticulous work. Any remaining errors are my responsibility.
