Bill Gates is energized by big challenges, especially climate change

Bill Gates is a man with a big agenda. He and his wife run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable foundation. It aims to eliminate diseases, boost food production, and end extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. As Gates writes in his latest book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” he gradually came to the realization that climate change poses a major threat to those goals. 

It won’t be enough to just reduce emissions of CO2, as governments pledged to do in the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, Gates insists. The world’s wealthiest countries need to get all the way to zero carbon by the year 2050. That means that, in addition to radically slashing the production of greenhouse gases, we’ll have to start removing them from the atmosphere.

It’s a tall order. But Gates says he’s optimistic. 

We already have the technologies we need – solar and wind power, carbon-capture and storage, and nuclear energy. However, each comes with its own set of problems, which Gates details in the book: The sun doesn’t shine all day long and the wind isn’t always blowing; nuclear power is dirty, dangerous, and prohibitively expensive, as is taking carbon out of the atmosphere; our electric grid is inefficient and out of date.

Breakthroughs are necessary in all of these fields, and they won’t come cheaply. The kinds of innovations that happen relatively quickly in, say, medicine or computing, according to Gates, are harder to come by in the energy field, where transformative technologies take decades to materialize. 

Since the world doesn’t have that kind of time, and no one knows where the energy miracles of the future will be found, Gates says we’ll need to quintuple public investment in climate-related R&D over the next decade and pursue many different lines at once to head off catastrophic warming.

How to go about this is no mere academic exercise for Gates. He has pledged to contribute billions of dollars to support the researchers and companies whose approaches he believes have the best chance of success in limiting climate change and helping humans adapt to it. 

That clout is one reason the book will receive lots of attention. It is written by a man who has (for good or for ill) the power to substantially shape the agenda going forward. Another reason is that this is a surprisingly good read. The author’s enthusiasm and curiosity about the way things work is infectious. He walks us through not just the basic science of global warming, but all the ways that our modern lives contribute to it. He offers a primer on farming; transportation; food waste; and concrete, steel, and plastic manufacturing, to name some of the author’s encyclopedic range of concerns. 

 But how things work will have to be transformed from the bottom up, he argues. Others might be discouraged. Gates seems energized by the sheer size and complexity of the challenge. That’s one of the best things about the book – the can-do optimism and conviction that science in partnership with industry are up to the task. 

The catch, however, is that technology has to be implemented by people. And Gates is less confident about what needs to be done with humans and their social and political structures than he is about machines. 

Can an economic system pushing consumerism and an endless cycle of growth solve a problem that it continues to create? 

Gates argues that corporations are already getting onboard. He says government policies like a carbon tax, subsidies for clean energy, and stricter standards for cleaner fuels and products are needed to further incentivize the private sector to do the right things. But he is mostly silent on how to generate the political will to implement these.

While wealthy countries may have the resources to pay “the green premiums,” as Gates calls them, that will be required to decarbonize their economies, developing nations do not. Even as they attempt to shift to cleaner technologies, the carbon emissions of countries like China and India continue to rise as these countries struggle to expand their industrial base.

Gates never questions the assumption that we need to continue to grow the economy and even substantially increase energy use, especially in the developing world. Some will see this as the book’s blind spot. It takes for granted that the environment can be saved without a change in lifestyle and material aspirations, especially in the developed world. 

He mostly sidesteps questions of ethics and personal behavior, though he admits that sacrifices will be required. “It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high,” the billionaire tech mogul concedes. But eating fewer cheeseburgers and buying carbon offsets may not be enough, either for him or for us. 

Climate change, as the author convincingly argues, is the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced. But it is also an opportunity to rethink our human place on Earth, and to find a simpler, more sustainable way to live here.

Essential reading to save the planet

Here are some other books that readers might enjoy, which approach the challenge of climate change and the environment through different lenses.

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken – The book proposes climate solutions ranging from familiar ones like improving refrigerant management and protecting forests to more surprising ones like offering universal education to girls. The findings are based on extensive research. 

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben – Not so optimistic nor as wonkish as Paul Hawken, McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org, provides a reality check on how we have gotten to our current dire straits. He writes that political activism and non-violent resistance can potentially turn things around.

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E. Mann. A leading climate scientist, Mann says that the climate denialism funded by fossil fuel interests has morphed into what he calls inactivism, a campaign to block effective policies. He takes heart from youth activism as well as the rapidly falling prices for green energy, but warns that powerful forces still oppose action. 

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein. Klein argues that combatting climate change will require a radical overhaul of our economic system as well as fully enlisting government into the fight. A book to be grappled with whether you agree with Klein’s political prescription or not. 

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver – Though she doesn’t write about climate change, the late poet regales us with simple yet eloquent meditations on our human connection to the natural world. Oliver reminds us that loving the world is a prerequisite for saving it.