Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

When one of the richest men in the world writes a book, people usually take notice. When it is Bill Gates a leader of the tech revolution and it is about climate change, then it becomes a phenomenon. So why has Bill Gates become passionate about climate change and now sees it as the greatest threat to humanity? It all starts with his work with his wife Melinda at the Gates Foundation which was originally focused on global health, development and US education. Two important facts emerged from the funded work of the Gates Foundation. First was that global health and development were being held back by a lack of access to affordable energy: 860 million people still have no access to electricity—which raises the question how to produce this electricity. Second was that all the improvements in global health could be wiped out by climate change—which will increase both food and water insecurity for billions of people. So, Bill Gates went on a journey of discovery and like all super-nerds wanted to find the most efficient technological solutions to the climate crisis. It is important to remember that this book is not just rhetoric: Bill Gates is putting his money where his mouth is, both through his Foundation and the company he founded, Microsoft. For the great monolithic global corporation, Microsoft is following his lead and taking climate change seriously. In 2020, the company announced the ambitious target to go carbon negative by 2030. Even more ambitiously, it has pledged to remove all the carbon pollution from the atmosphere that they and their supply chain have emitted since the founding of the company in 1975 by 2050. But here is the issue; their current plan to reach these targets is to reduce their emissions as much as possible, but then to discount the rest of their emissions by using carbon offsets or credits. Basically, Microsoft will pay others to use renewable electricity, plant trees or biofuels, restore nature or capture carbon dioxide directly from power stations or the atmosphere and dump it deep in the Earth. Many NGO and academics are highly critical of carbon offsets as it does not solve the fundamental issue of producing the emissions in the first place and allows companies to buy their way out of their environmental responsibilities. Bill Gates’s book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, clearly follows the zeitgeist and is based on the fundamental principle that the world must get to net zero carbon emission by 2050 or earlier if possible. In fact, there is a whole chapter call “Why Zero”. This principle needs some unpacking. Net zero carbon emissions means that there will be no increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2050—and if there are any emissions, these must be balanced by carbon dioxide being sucked out of the atmosphere either by technology or by planting vast forests, hence the term ‘net’. What Bill Gates glosses over is that even if we reach net zero carbon by 2050, the science clearly shows we must have negative emissions for the rest of the century if we are to have any hope of keeping global temperatures below the 2 °C limit set by world leaders in Paris in 2015. To try to make the net zero carbon target understandable, Bill Gates refers to the current 51 billion tons of carbon emitted per year as a way of illustrating all the things we need to do to reduce this huge number and eventually hit zero. Chapter 4 addresses 27% of the 51 billion tons and is about our production and use of electricity: it examines how we can decarbonise electricity production and accelerate the uptake of renewables. Chapter 5 covers 31% and mainly focuses on the production of concrete which if it were a country it would the 6th largest emitter in the world. Chapter 6 represents 19% and concerns itself with agriculture and deforestation: it explores how we can produce food more efficiently, with less environmental destruction and greenhouse gas emissions. Chapter 7 analyses howwe transport ourselves and our goods around the world which makes up 16% of the total tons of carbon