How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero.

Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. Although the figure may go up or down a bit from year to year, it’s generally increasing. This is where we are today.

Zero is what we need to aim for. To stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change—and these effects will be very bad—humans need to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”

These opening paragraphs set the book’s overall tone and target. Gates repeatedly cites these two numbers as he makes his case for why and how we need to get to zero emissions by 2050. He also refers to 51 billion tons in Chapter 3, where he suggests ways of understanding climate change. In discussing emission reductions or savings, he says, we must always convert the numbers to a percentage of 51 billion to compare them adequately and gauge their true size and impact.

“Eventually it sank in. The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases.”

This excerpt clearly expresses Gates’s belief that people worldwide—especially poor people in developing countries—need more, not less, access to energy because it can improve their lives and help them out of poverty. This may seem counterintuitive in a book on fighting climate change, but the end of the quotation is the key. Gate argues that increasing energy use is fine—if it’s clean energy.

“Consider what it took to achieve this 5 percent reduction. A million people died, and tens of millions were put out of work. To put it mildly, this was not a situation that anyone would want to continue or repeat. And yet the world’s greenhouse gas emissions probably dropped just 5 percent, and possibly less than that. What’s remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less. Just as we needed new tests, treatments, and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, we need new tools for fighting climate change: zero-carbon ways to produce electricity, make things, grow food, keep our buildings cool and warm, and move people and goods around the world. And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people—many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a warmer climate.”

Gates refers to the 2020 reduction in emissions due to the pandemic, when the world virtually shut down for much of the year. The pandemic offered an unprecedented glimpse into what happens when people stop traveling. Gates notes that this huge disruption resulted in only a 5% drop in greenhouse gas emissions.