“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones,” he concluded. But if we are to deliver affordable clean energy, we have to go much further. Gates is modest enough to say: “I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change,” but he too knows that the solution he seeks is inextricably tied up in political decisions. Second, new corporate laws should be agreed, to be applied worldwide, that ensure global companies disclose their carbon footprints, adopt impact-weighted accounting that would reveal the full environmental cost of their operations, and break with business-as-usual by publishing transition plans to a zero net carbon economy. Gates mentions in passing at one point that he chose to divest his fortune from fossil fuel companies, but only because “I don’t want to profit if their stock prices go up because we don’t develop zero-carbon alternatives.” He scoffed at the idea that activists (who otherwise go mostly unmentioned in this book) thought that “divesting alone” would “transform the world’s energy system.” But of course those activists, myself included, thought no such thing. In “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” the billionaire Microsoft founder lays out his concerns for the earth and some concrete ideas for the future. To achieve this, Gates provides a set of measures that could, if the UK government is listening, be transposed point by point into the formal agenda for the this year’s 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, Cop26, in Glasgow. HOW TO AVOID A CLIMATE DISASTER: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates book review Written by Jacob Dykes Published in Books. And this new volume could not be more timely — it emerges after a year that saw the costliest slew of weather disasters in history, and that despite a cooling La Niña current in the Pacific managed to set the mark for record global temperature. So vested interests like big oil will have to be enlisted for change. We need, Gates calculates, to remove 51bn tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere every year. An earlier version included Gordon Brown’s recollection that Kevin Rudd “had to be physically restrained from punching the Chinese negotiator” at the 2009 Copenhagen summit. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster details the transformation necessary to reverse the effects of decades of catastrophic practices. 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 retained control of the Senate, the chances for those ambitious climate policies would have been nil. This would include investing in nuclear fusion as well as nuclear fission; thermal energy (creating energy from hot rocks underground); carbon mineralisation; sea-based carbon removal to de-acidify the oceans; and direct air capture using scrubbing machines. But to operationalise the Paris agreement – to limit warming to 1.5 degrees – requires countries to halve their CO2 emissions by 2030. The title of Bill Gates’ new book – How to Avoid a Climate Disaster — is very Bill Gates-ian. A persuasive, optimistic strategy for reducing greenhouse emissions to zero by midcentury. Gates is a pedestrian writer who uses technocratic language to convey conventional ideas with a billionaire’s confidence. There is still hope, says the Microsoft founder in this very practical call to action. Last modified on Wed 24 Feb 2021 11.37 GMT. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. Gordon Brown’s Seven Ways to Change the World will be published by Simon & Schuster in June. And why, when it is more cost-effective for advanced economies to fund the total cost of mitigation and adaptation in the poorest countries than to suffer decades of worsening pollution, has the world simply failed to come together? “Humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere,” he writes, which is as useful a sentence as the English language admits. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need is published by Allen Lane. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need is published by Allen Lane. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. But that’s not really the target here: In fact, as the analyst Ramez Naam pointed out last spring, the price of solar power has dropped astonishingly in the last decade, far outpacing even the most optimistic forecasts. We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN. In his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates takes a technology-centered approach to understanding the climate crisis. How Does Bill Gates Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis? who bravely stood out for an ambitious deal. About How to Avoid a Climate Disaster #1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER 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. 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 toward certain environmental disaster. How To Avoid A Climate Disaster is an odd book in a lot of ways. Global carbon emissions are now 65% higher than they were in 1990, and the term “global warming”, with its cosy overtones and accompanying stories of vintners making English and even Scottish champagne, does not adequately explain the intensity of storms, hurricanes, floods and severe droughts that are putting our planet on course to reach temperatures not seen in millions of years. His breakthrough in economic thinking offered a way out of the world depression and mass unemployment of the 1930s. Success will come by demonstrating that the real power countries can wield to create a better world is not the power they can exercise over others but the power they can exercise with others. 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. Maybe that’s a weakness that comes with wealth; it’s obviously easy enough to slag Gates for flying in a private jet (and his publisher must have winced a little when he chose the winter of his book launch to join a bidding war for ownership of the world’s largest private jet servicing company). Agreement was reached on a global target: to prevent temperatures rising to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels – preferably 1.5 degrees. They understood that weakening the fossil fuel industry was simply one key part of the job of rapid decarbonization, just like engineering. This book covers one of the single most important topics facing the earth as a whole, written by Bill Gates and enforces such an important message. The price drop is 50 to 100 years ahead of what the International Energy Agency was forecasting in 2010, mostly because we’re getting better at building and installing solar panels. The Australian prime minister was reported to have been very angry about China’s stance in the climate talks but the writer has confirmed that no threat was issued. Gates correctly understands the basic challenge, which is to “get to zero” as soon as we can. By the end of his thoughtfully argued 230 pages, the reader doesn’t have to … The book spends only a few initial pages making the argument for the anthropogenic nature of climate change, as it is clearly intended for readers who accept the scientific consensus for it. Already, scientific advance has brought an astonishing reduction in the prices of solar, wind and wave energy, battery storage, electric vehicles, remote sensing monitoring and smart grids. As London’s Carbon Tracker Initiative explained last year, building new sun- and wind-power facilities is already, or soon will be, cheaper even than operating existing coal-fired power. Just as his global health initiatives specialised in scientific solutions to combat disease – “show me a problem and I’d look for a technology to fix it”, he writes – his principal interest is in a technological breakthrough, the environmental equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the moon landing. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/books/review/bill-gates-how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster.html. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster review: Bill Gates's call to arms Don’t Miss: Capitalism vs environmentalism at London’s Science Museum Greenland review: A great comet disaster movie on … So we have to ask why, when what needs to be done seems obvious, we have been so slow to act. Gates thinks that Fossil fuels are responsible for Global warming and in order to counter the worst effects, the world needs to be “net zero carbon emissions” in 2050. Gates insists this will be difficult and expensive to do, but that new and existing technologies can get us there. Or they can be sabotaged by geopolitical rivalries or simply by nations clinging to old-fashioned and absolutist views of national sovereignty. The Paris accord of 2015 helped reverse many of the setbacks of Copenhagen. HOW TO AVOID A CLIMATE DISASTERThe Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We NeedBy Bill Gates, First things first — much respect to Bill Gates for his membership in the select club of ultrabillionaires not actively attempting to flee Earth and colonize Mars. The book’s illustrations include photos of him inspecting industrial facilities, like a fertilizer distribution plant in Tanzania; definitely the happiest picture is of him and his son grinning identical grins outside an Icelandic geothermal power station. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is clear, concise on a colossal subject, and intelligently holistic in its approach to the problem. This article was amended on 24 February 2021. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need is a 2021 book by Bill Gates. But Bill Gates’s discussion of “the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need” is ultimately hopeful. Taken together these measures could meet the world’s objective of net carbon zero. Two important new books by prominent American authors, both written before the result of the presidential election was known, should help to capitalise on the new spirit of cautious optimism by laying out bold but well-argued plans for accelerating action against climate change. But he was unable to persuade the political leaders of the day, and in frustration decried politics as “the survival of the unfittest”. But I think that’s missing the point: The exhaust plume from his airplane won’t make or break the planet’s temperature, but given his resources and political reach, the quality of his analysis just might. We would need to use more renewables and fewer fossil fuels (which would account for roughly 27% of the reduction needed in emissions), and change how we manufacture our goods (31%), grow our food (18%), travel (16%), and keep our buildings warm or cool (6%). If he had, he might have understood more clearly that the things that really interest him — advanced nuclear power, for instance, where he describes his considerable investments — are more about mopping up: He’s absolutely right that we should be investing in research across a wide list of technologies because we may need them down the line to help scrub the last increments of fossil fuel from the system, but the key work will be done (or not) over the next decade, and it will be done by sun and wind. Power comes in many forms, from geothermal and nuclear to congressional and economic; it’s wonderful that Gates has decided to work hard on climate questions, but to be truly helpful he needs to resolve to be a better geek — he needs to really get down on his hands and knees and examine how that power works in all its messiness. But there are lessons from the current crisis that should guide our response to the next one. Climate change could be worse. 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. COVID-19 is awful. Third, we should advance the cause of carbon pricing by agreements to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and by taking up Biden’s plan for border adjustment mechanisms that, for the first time, tax carbon-intensive imports and exports. A Bloomberg analysis last fall found that Microsoft had given only a third of its contributions to “climate-friendly” politicians. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. Climate change could be worse. “I think more like an engineer than a political scientist,” he says proudly — but that means he can write an entire book about the “climate disaster” without discussing the role that the fossil fuel industry played, and continues to play, in preventing action. “How to Avoid Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” by Bill Gates (Knopf) Watching Bill Gates in the news over the years, his demeanor usually is that of an earnest, enthusiastic college professor, someone who draws on research and thinks before he talks. Ever the technologist, Gates sets out a spreadsheet for getting rid of those 51bn tonnes of greenhouse gases and achieving net carbon zero emissions by 2050. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates review — saving the planet without ditching capitalism The co-founder of Microsoft gives us solutions instead of forecasts of climate doom. The co-founder of Microsoft looks to science and tech to end climate crisis ... but can nations cooperate? This brand of blandness is on prominent display in his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We … “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is clear, concise on a colossal subject, and intelligently holistic in its approach to the problem. I’ve been looking forward to reading Bill Gates’ new book How to avoid a Climate Disaster.. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. That’s why we’ve wasted almost three decades of scientific warning. One wishes Gates had talked, for instance, with Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, whose team has calculated how almost every country on earth could go to 80 percent renewable energy by 2030. 31 Mar 2021 . . These staggering numbers are why Gates’s current-day snapshots of the “Green Premiums” you need to pay for clean energy don’t mean as much as he thinks they do: Especially since storage batteries are now dropping in price on a similar curve, it’s clear that the imperative is to install as much solar (and wind power, which is on the same price trajectory) as fast as humanly possible, since if we don’t make huge progress in the next 10 years scientists have made clear we can kiss the targets we set in Paris goodbye. Failing to do so would cost more than the 1.5 million lives already lost to Covid-19 and could cause, he calculates, five times more deaths than the Spanish flu a century ago. That’s because of politics, and this is where Gates really wears blinders. But when it comes to generating that electricity, he worries that solar panels aren’t becoming more efficient fast enough: Unlike computer chips, for instance, there’s no “Moore’s law” that doubles their usefulness every two years. Picking up a book titled “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” it’s easy to expect a guilt trip. And it turns out, before he writes, too. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. As a result, the multilateral cooperation necessary to deal with a global problem does not emerge, and the very real tensions between economic and environmental priorities, and between the developed and developing world, go unresolved. Politics very much included. And yet, his miscalculations are important, because they are widely shared. Seemingly unanswerable scientific evidence can be torpedoed by powerful vested interests, or sidelined by bureaucratic indifference, or undermined by weak and incompetent political leaderships that make commitments they do not honour. And he understands that the key to doing this is to electrify as much human activity as possible: from powering our computers to turning the wheels of our cars and buses to producing steel. So determined were they to avoid binding commitments that they rejected Europe’s offer to unilaterally bind itself to a 50% cut in its emissions. As everyone can attest who watched the blazes of Australia and California, or the hurricanes with odd Greek names crashing through the gulf, we are in dire need of solutions to the greatest crisis our species has yet faced. His affection for his home planet and the people on it shines through clearly in this new book, as does his proud and usually endearing geekiness. It is a disappointment, then, to report that this book turns out to be a little underwhelming. In it, Gates presents what he learned in over a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address global warming and recommends strategies to tackle it. It also comes at a time when the science is more definitive, the technology more cost-effective, and the price of inaction far clearer. ‘Show me a problem and I’d look for a technology to fix it’ … Bill Gates at the UN climate action summit in September 2019. ill Gates has changed our lives through his Microsoft software; he has improved countless lives through his foundation’s work to eliminate polio, TB and malaria; and now he proposes to help save our lives by combating climate change. . We now know from great investigative reporting that the oil companies knew everything about climate change back in the 1980s, and that they systematically built an edifice of disinformation and denial to keep us in the dark. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Since he confesses that he completely missed the climate challenge until 2006, when he met with some scientists almost two decades after the problem emerged (previously “I had assumed there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster”), it’s perhaps not surprising that he’s still catching up. Early on, Gates asserts that the mere reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is not sufficient to avoid a climate disaster. Gates demands what he calls “a renewable portfolio standard” of energy pricing and an immediate quintupling of climate-related research and development. “Rory and I used to visit power plants for fun,” he writes, “just to learn how they worked.”. And while we could not bind the major economies to precise commitments on carbon reductions, they agreed to a ratcheting up of their ambitions every five years. Gates — who must have easy access to the greatest experts the world can provide — is surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts, and he’s worse at interpreting the deeper and more critical aspects of the global warming dilemma. The Unterer Theodulgletscher glacier above Zermatt is melting at a markedly increased rate. I sit back into my sofa and open a brand-new hardback. In addition to accepting Gates’s proposals for more funding of new technologies, I envisage advances in Glasgow on four major fronts. He favours a green new deal, carbon pricing and heightened corporate responsibility. How to avoid a climate disaster is textbook overlaid with Gates’ opinion on how to save the world. Most people, Gates included, have not caught on yet to just how fast this engineering miracle is happening. Let’s do the numbers first. by Bill Gates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 16, 2021. “I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change,” Gates writes, but in fact he does: He founded, and his foundation is a shareholder in, a company that has donated money to exactly the politicians who are in the pocket of big oil. Lowering the Green Premiums is the single most important thing we can do to avoid a climate disaster. Bill Gates touring the Yara fertilizer distribution facility in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2018. Gates may not be the perfect messenger, but he has written a fine primer on how to get ourselves out of this mess.” Emily Atkin, in a December issue of her climate newsletter Heated, pointed out that Microsoft had joined 42 other corporations in a letter to President-elect Biden calling on him to enact “ambitious” climate policies — and then donated to David Perdue for his Georgia Senate runoff (other signatories to the letter also gave to Kelly Loeffler). Gates begins with … I look back on the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009, when the UKand Europe’s enthusiasm for a deal failed to overcome both the reluctance of the US to make legally binding commitments, and the deep suspicion of China, India and the emerging economies of any obligations that they believed might threaten their development. But Gates’s most important proposals involve new technologies. So bitter were the divisions that the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, who bravely stood out for an ambitious deal, exchanged an angry war of words with the Chinese negotiator. So why aren’t we moving much faster than we are? And we created new obligations on each country to report, monitor and continuously review their emissions. But we must also do more to capture emissions across the entire energy, transport and manufacturing sectors before they are released back to the atmosphere: to store them deep underground or in long-lived products such as concrete, or even by combining CO2 with calcium to produce limestone that could replace concrete. And fourth, we could agree a big boost to nature-based solutions from afforestation to the better land use now championed by the World Resources Institute. The Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, a week after Hurricane Maria descended on Puerto Rico in 2017. How to Avoid Climate Disaster book review: Bill Gates points out realities of inaction in calm, reasoned manner One conclusion sure to provoke debate is Gates’ contention that to conquer global warming, we need to produce at least some of our electricity from nuclear … How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster provides a run-through of all the reasons we need to act on climate change and achieve net zero emissions. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (Random House Large Print) at Amazon.com. Had they won and the G.O.P. In doing so we could finally make a reality of the promised $100bn green climate fund that was planned 10 years ago to collect and allocate payments for climate mitigation and adaptation in the developing world. Because even the most advanced solar panels currently convert only around a quarter of the sun’s energy, we need to address problems caused by the intermittency in the output of renewable energy, seasonal differences in its supply, and the high storage costs. The release Tuesday of “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” his third book, follows a year in which Gates was in the public eye as much as ever, emerging as … “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster presents ideas with the methodical approach of a college textbook . Bill Gates has changed our lives through his Microsoft software; he has improved countless lives through his foundation’s work to eliminate polio, TB and malaria; and now he proposes to help save our lives by combating climate change. Every time we double the number of panels installed, the price drops another 30 to 40 percent, and there’s plenty of runway left. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates, review — the billionaire’s plans to save the planet. How To Avoid a Climate Disaster is a study in denial of the climate impact of both Gates’s own activities and those of his fellow billionaires. What’s more, President Biden and his new climate envoy John Kerry are promising a renewal of American leadership, and corporations and cities are on board for change. It was born out of two things: Gates’ interest in innovation and the sciences, and “the irresistible challenge of furthering … But if politics was simply the application of reason and science to contemporary challenges, we might have not only solved the climate crisis by now but easily cured Covid-19 and other infectious diseases too. Fossils fuels - they’re so entrenched into our everyday lives, the way we live and how … Gates clearly prefers science to politics – “I think more like an engineer than a political scientist” – and his touching, admirable faith in science and reason reminds me of a similar faith, this time in economic rationality, held by the great prewar economist John Maynard Keynes. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. COVID-19 is awful. Gates’s wealth commands deference from both governments and the media, so his book has been glowingly reviewed. First, the globally coordinated fiscal stimulus we now need for a post-Covid economic recovery should have, at its heart, a green new deal, centred around a massive expansion in environmentally sustainable infrastructure and the creation of millions of much needed new jobs. And supporters of a stronger set of commitments will have to show why sharing sovereignty is in every nation’s self-interest, and that coordinated global action is indeed the only way to end the mismatch between the scale of the environmental problems we face and our current capacity to solve them. Gates is right about the scale and urgency of the problem. That is, the activists were thinking multidimensionally, which Gates is so far not. Recognising that we cannot continue to deny electricity to 800 million of the world’s poorest people, his starting point is a plan to develop clean energy and cut its costs. The importance of Glasgow’s Cop26 in November is that it is the first of these “ratchet” points, and, with 70 countries already committed to net zero carbon emissions, it represents the best opportunity in years to make progress. The populist nationalist and protectionist rhetoric of irresponsible demagogues will have to be taken head on. Nor, as this book shows, does it satisfactorily reflect the biggest market failure in history and the most difficult global collective action problem the world has ever had to face.