A new book by Bill Gates addresses the climate crisis with urgent clarity. The big question, he says, is how best to eliminate the 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases that we spew into the atmosphere each year. He quickly adds that “If that sounds difficult, that’s because it will be.” Reduction at such a scale requires profound change and our success will depend on inventions and innovations not only in carbon sequestration but in the ways we grow and distribute food, how we manufacture and consume goods, and how we work and travel.
“How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe” offers a surprisingly optimistic overview of how this might be done. Gates focuses on the “five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm.” At present the fossil fuels powering most of these activities are not fairly priced and this makes green alternatives seem too expensive. A “green premium” that factors in environmental costs could recalibrate the market. Fairly priced energy would offer “a fantastic lens” enabling us to put “our time, attention and money to their best use” by revealing which “zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren’t cheap enough.” Adroitly sidestepping the minefield of how to set these premiums, Gates writes: “We need the premiums to be so low that everyone will be able to decarbonize.”
Revamped energy markets can only thrive if the new technologies they enable have customers. Gates urges governments and large companies to prioritize green tech by instilling market confidence that will help more innovators through the precarious development stages and allow solutions to achieve sufficient scale. At the moment, innovation is often smothered by economic systems optimized for 20th-century technologies. Most markets, for instance, don’t adequately compensate utilities that invest in long-duration storage; likewise, current regulations “make it hard to use more advanced biofuels in cars and trucks [and] some new forms of low-carbon concrete can’t compete because of outdated government rules.” Fortunately, regulatory changes can be made quickly. Ideally the new systems would mean that “[e]very bureaucrat who makes purchasing decisions should have an incentive to look for green products.”
Working methodically through similar questions, Gates shows that however daunting the climate crisis may be, our situation is not yet hopeless. Citing the late Hans Rosling, he reminds us that “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems .. [and] what we have to do to keep making it better.” This is such a welcome contrast to the many recent jeremiads on climate change. Conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, it is worth recalling how prescient Gates was about the threat of a global pandemic, and his decades of remarkable philanthropic work in Africa. His pragmatic approach to another looming crisis, and his suggestions for moving the issues beyond polarized politics and muddled information offer a glimmer of hope that we still have time to prevent our overheated planet from an impending catastrophe.
