Summary: Bill Gates: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Scott Campbell

MARCH 22, 2021

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Bill Gates held an AMA on Reddit to speak about climate change and those COVID conspiracy theories.

Ever wondered what Bill Gates prefers on his burgers? If he could still write the code that made him a billionaire?

Or what he thinks about being targeted by weird COVID-19 conspiracy theories?

Wonder no more.

Mr Gates held his ninth Reddit AMA — Ask Me Anything, for the uninitiated — and covered a whole lot of "meaty" ground, as the Microsoft co-founder put it himself.

Here's the best of what he had to say.

Gates is super into synthetic meat right now

While his focus is on fighting climate change (he's just published a book about it), Mr Gates spoke a lot about how important synthetic meat is key to solving the challenge in the years ahead.

Asked what "niche technology do you believe could play a significant role in the future in the battle against climate change?" Mr Gates said: "We need a lot of technologies — synthetic meat, energy storage, new ways of making building materials… We want to be open to ideas that seem wild."

Source: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (Feb. 16, 2021 by Alfred A. Knopf,) Copyright © 2021 by Bill Gates.

"Not long ago, my friend Warren Buffett and I were talking about how the world might decarbonize airplanes. Warren asked, “Why can’t we run a jumbo jet on batteries?” He already knew that when a jet takes off, the fuel it’s carrying accounts for 20 to 40 percent of its weight. So when I told him this startling fact — that you’d need 35 times more batteries by weight to get the same energy as jet fuel — he understood immediately. The more power you need, the heavier your plane gets. At some point, it’s so heavy that it can’t get off the ground. Warren smiled, nodded, and just said, “Ah.”

When you’re trying to power something as heavy as a container ship or jetliner, the rule of thumb I mentioned earlier — the bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity as your power source—becomes a law. Barring some unlikely breakthrough, batteries will never be light and powerful enough to move planes and ships anything more than short distances.

Consider where the state of the art is today. The best all-electric plane on the market can carry two passengers, reach a top speed of 210 miles per hour, and fly for three hours before recharging.* Meanwhile, a mid-capacity Boeing 787 can carry 296 passengers, reach up to 650 miles an hour, and fly for nearly 20 hours before stopping for fuel. In other words, a fossil-fuel-powered jetliner can fly more than three times as fast, for six times as long, and carry nearly 150 times as many people as the best electric plane on the Market.

Batteries are getting better, but it’s hard to see how they’ll ever close this gap. If we’re lucky, they may become up to three times as energy dense as they are now, in which case they would still be 12 times less energy dense than gas or jet fuel. Our best bet is to replace jet fuel with electrofuels and advanced biofuels, but there are hefty premiums that come with them.

The same goes for cargo ships. The best conventional container ships can carry 200 times more cargo than either of the two electric ships now in operation, and they can run routes that are 400 times longer. Those are major advantages for ships that need to cross entire oceans.

Given how important container ships have become in the global economy, I don’t think it will ever be financially viable to try to run them on anything other than liquid fuels. Making the switch to alternatives would do us a lot of good; because shipping alone accounts for 3 percent of all emissions, using clean fuels would give us a meaningful reduction. Unfortunately, the fuel that container ships run on — it’s called bunker fuel — is dirt cheap, because it’s made from the dregs of the oil refining process. Since their current fuel is so inexpensive, the Green Premium for ships is very high.

Would most people be willing to accept these increases? It’s not clear. But consider that the last time the United States raised the federal gas tax — imposed any increase at all — was more than a quarter century ago, in 1993. I don’t think Americans are eager to pay more for gas.

There are four ways to cut down on emissions from transportation.

One is to do less of it — less driving, flying, and shipping. We should encourage more alternative modes, like walking, biking, and carpooling, and it’s great that some cities are using smart urban plans to do just that.

Another way to cut down on emissions is to use fewer carbon-intensive materials in making cars to begin with —although that wouldn’t affect the fuel-based emissions we’ve covered in this chapter. Every car is made from materials like steel and plastics that can’t be manufactured without emitting greenhouse gases. The less of these materials we need in our cars, the lower their carbon footprint will be.

The third way to cut down on emissions is to use fuels more efficiently. This subject gets a lot of attention from lawmakers and the press, at least as it pertains to passenger cars and trucks; most major economies have fuel efficiency standards for those vehicles, and they’ve made a big difference by forcing car companies to fund the advanced engineering of more efficient engines.

But the standards don’t go far enough. For example, there are suggested emissions standards for international shipping and aviation, but they’re almost unenforceable. Which country’s jurisdiction would cover carbon emissions from a container ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?

Besides, although making and using more efficient vehicles are important steps in the right direction, they won’t get us to zero. Even if you’re burning less gasoline, you’re still burning gasoline.

That brings me to the fourth — and most effective — way we can move toward zero emissions from transportation: switching to electric vehicles and alternative fuels.

We can speed up the transition by adopting policies that encourage people to buy EVs and creating a network of charging stations so they’re more practical to own. Nationwide commitments can help drive up the supply of cars and drive down their cost; China, India, and several countries in Europe have all announced goals to phase out fossil-fueled vehicles — mostly passenger cars — over the coming decades. California has committed to buying only electric buses by 2029 and to banning the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.

Next, to run all these EVs we hope to have on the road, we’ll need a lot of clean electricity—one more reason why it’s so important to deploy renewable sources and pursue breakthroughs in generation and storage.

Finally, we need a massive effort to explore all the ways we can make advanced biofuels and cheap electrofuels. Companies and researchers are exploring several different pathways—for example, new ways to make hydrogen using electricity, or using solar power, or using microbes that naturally produce hydrogen as a by-product. The more we explore, the more opportunities we’ll create for breakthroughs."

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Audiobook: $2.99-

In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical--and accessible--plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions--suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

“I wrote How to Avoid a Climate Disaster because I think we’re at a crucial moment. I’ve seen exciting progress in the more than 15 years that I’ve been learning about energy and climate change. The cost of renewable energy from the sun and wind has dropped dramatically. There’s more public support for taking big steps to avoid a climate disaster than ever before. And governments and companies around the world are setting ambitious goals for reducing emissions. What we need now is a plan that turns all this momentum into practical steps to achieve our big goals. That’s what How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is: a plan for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. I hope you’ll check out the book, but much more important, I hope you’ll do what you can to help us keep the planet livable for generations to come.” - Bill Gates

REVIEWS:

“The most comprehensible explanation for what’s driving our warming planet; how to measure the impact of the myriad contributions to this staggering and seemingly incalculable problem; and ultimately how to go about finding more effective approaches to each of them. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a how-to guide for addressing the climate crisis.” —Clinton Leaf, Fortune “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster presents ideas with the methodical approach of a college textbook . . . Remarkably, given the state of the world, it is an optimistic, can-do sort of book, chock-full of solutions.” —Christina Binkley, The Wall Street Journal Magazine “The most refreshing aspect of this book is its bracing mix of cold-eyed realism and number-crunched optimism . . . Ultimately his book is a primer on how to reorganise the global economy so that innovation focuses on the world’s gravest problems. It is a powerful reminder that if mankind is to get serious about tackling them, it must do more to harness the one natural resource available in infinite quantity—human ingenuity.” —The Economist “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 . . . 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.” —Richard Schiffman, The Christian Science Monitor “With the help of experts in fields such as physics, engineering, chemistry, finance and politics, the technologist and philanthropist offers a practical and accessible plan for getting the world to zero greenhouse gas emissions and averting climate catastrophe.” —Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is clear, concise on a colossal subject, and intelligently holistic in its approach to the problem. Gates may not be the perfect messenger, but he has written a fine primer on how to get ourselves out of this mess.” —Adama Vaughan, New Scientist “Bill Gates has a plan to save the world . . . While acknowledging that the challenge is daunting, and how we make things, grow things, move around, keep cool and stay warm will all need to fundamentally change, Gates argues that wholesale transformation is possible while maintaining lifestyles in high income countries and continuing to lift billions out of poverty.” —Greg Williams, Wired “His expertise . . . is apparent in the book’s lucid explanations of the scientific aspects of climate change. The solutions he outlines are pragmatic and grounded in forward-thinking economic reasoning. Although he does not avoid the hard truths we must face as our climate changes, Gates remains optimistic and believes that we have the ability to avoid a total climate disaster.” —Miriam R. Aczel, Science “Concise, straightforward . . . Gates has crafted a calm, reasoned, well-sourced explanation of the greatest challenge of our time and what we must change to avoid cooking our planet.” —Jeff Rowe, Associated Press “A persuasive, optimistic strategy for reducing greenhouse emissions to zero by midcentury . . . Though Gates doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the daunting challenges ahead, his narrative contains enough confidence—and hard science and economics—to convince many readers that his blueprint is one of the most viable yet . . . supremely authoritative and accessible.” ––Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Those looking for an accessible review of how global warming can be countered will find this a handy—and maybe even hope-inspiring—guide.” ––Publishers Weekly “Gates has put his considerable wealth behind global health, educational, and economic initiatives and now turns his laser-like attention to this most existential of issues . . . He provides illuminating contexts for [his] perspectives and offers a treatise that is imperative, approachable, and useful.” ––Booklist --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

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