Review of Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Crisis: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (New York, Alfred A Knopf, 2021)

For everyone convinced that the world is on the verge of a climate disaster Bill Gates has written a sobering, well reasoned account of what it would take to eliminate that threat.  Rather than just talk about somehow lowering greenhouse gases by a finite percent such as the goal of the Paris Accord, Gates widens the conversation.  Reasoning that all global warming is due to industrializing humanity and will therefore keep increasing with additional emissions, he sets the goal of zero percent emissions by 2050: zero emissions in order to halt all future warming, and the deadline of 2050 to ensure that it is halted in time for the earth to remain inhabitable at an acceptable level for all humanity—rich and poor alike.

After setting this goal, Gates uses the lessons he has learned from his business and philanthropic experience to create a political, economic, technological plan to reach it.  He rejects several common assumptions found in the usual proposals to manage global warming.  He denies that that fossil fuels can be replaced merely by wind and solar renewables; that people lower down the economic ladder should be stopped from climbing up; and that emissions reduction concerns only fossil fuel generated electricity and powered vehicles.  

 He argues that to get to zero emissions there are five categories each of which has to be addressed.  He presents this table with the percent of greenhouse gases that each category emits.

The economic goal for each category is to reduce what Gates defines as its Green Premium.  The Green Premium is the increased cost of an emissions-reducing product over its current counterpart.  The goal can be reached in two ways—by adding the cost of environmental damage caused by the present product to its price and by incentivizing innovation to create an emissions-reducing competitor that would have a cost acceptable to the market.

Gates points out that getting to zero emissions by 2050 with reduced Green Premiums will take global cooperation, reform of government regulations, economic incentives to increase long term R & D innovation efforts by both corporations and government laboratories, rebuilding the national power grid, shifting from dietary meat to plant-based replacements, and deployment of new zero-emission, efficient and safe nuclear powered generating plants. 

Gates puts his money where his mouth is.  He describes his investments in promising start-up companies and the risk he has to accept.  He has lost money on ideas that didn’t work, but he also is invested in several areas such as developing newly designed, smaller, and less waste-producing nuclear reactors.  He also has invested significant amounts in improving health and agricultural practices in poor areas of Africa so unlike many in the climate alarmist community he understands what his zero emissions plan has to accomplish for these people.

Gates’ book is a useful read for understanding the enormous magnitude of effort that would be required if indeed “the science is settled” as widely proclaimed by outspoken politicians and environmentalists.  Sadly, however, Gates’ seems utterly unaware of how science needs to work in order to confirm truth to build a reliable foundation for public policy.  He devotes less than 3 pages of the 257 pages in the book to how he became aware of climate change, referring to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the book “Weather for Dummies, still one of the best books on weather that I’ve found.”  

His considerable experience in working with global vaccine and agricultural projects involving complex interactions of political and scientific communities has apparently led him to prematurely undertake a crusade to halt climate change when so little is known about its causes.  Thus his book describes a big project built on a very shaky foundation. 

Featured image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.