How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes | Bill Gates | Scribble Whatever

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How to Avoid a Climate
Disaster
Bill Gates (Author of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster)

“A 2-degree rise wouldn’t simply be 33 percent worse than 1.5; it could be 100 percent worse. Twice as many people would have trouble getting clean water. Corn production in the tropics would go down twice as much.” (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes)

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes

“According to the listing on the UNESCO website, “The gastronomic meal emphasizes togetherness, the pleasure of taste, and the balance between human beings and the products of nature.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“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.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“And, because greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for so long, the planet will stay warm for a long time even after we get to zero.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“As my friend Hans Rosling, the late global health advocate and educator, wrote in his amazing book Factfulness, ‘When we have a fact based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems. And we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.’ When we have a fact based view of climate change, we can see that we have some of the things we need to avoid climate disaster, but not all of them.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“At Breakthrough Energy, we fund only technologies that could remove at least 500 million tons a year if they’re successful and fully implemented. That’s roughly 1 percent of global emissions. Technologies that will never exceed 1 percent shouldn’t compete for the limited resources we have for getting to zero. There may be other good reasons to pursue them, but significantly reducing emissions won’t be one of them.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Because every bit of carbon we put into the atmosphere adds to the greenhouse effect. There’s no getting around physics.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Besides, making electricity accounts for only 27 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we had a huge breakthrough in batteries, we would still need to get rid of the other 73 percent.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“But Germany produced about 10 times more solar in June 2018 than it did in December 2018.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“But giving people more information can help them make better choices.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“But I hope you’ll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you’re in favor of than opposing whatever you’re against.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“But we can’t solve a problem like climate change without an honest accounting of how much we need to do and what obstacles we need to overcome.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes

“By mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“CGIAR is the world’s largest agricultural research group: In short, it helps create better plants and better animal genetics.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“China makes a lot of cement. The country has already produced more in the 21st century than the United States did in the entire 20th century. (U.S. Geological Survey)”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there’s no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Extra heat won’t be good for the animals we eat and get milk from; it will make them less productive and more prone to dying young, which in turn will make meat, eggs, and dairy more expensive.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Heatstroke will be another major problem, and it’s linked to the humidity, of all things. Air can contain only a certain amount of water vapor, and at some point it hits a ceiling, becoming so saturated that it can’t absorb any more moisture. Why does that matter? Because the human body’s ability to cool off depends on the air’s ability to absorb sweat as it evaporates. If the air can’t absorb your sweat, then it can’t cool you off, no matter how much you perspire. There’s simply nowhere for your perspiration to go.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“How many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus by climate change?”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“How quickly do we need to get to zero? Science tells us that in order to avoid a climate catastrophe, rich countries should reach net-zero emissions by 2050. You’ve probably heard people say we can decarbonize deeply even sooner—by 2030.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“I am aware that I’m an imperfect messenger on climate change. The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think technology can fix any problem. And I own big houses and fly in private planes—in fact, I took one to Paris for the climate conference—so who am I to lecture anyone on the environment? I plead guilty to all three charges. I can’t deny being a rich guy with an opinion. I do believe, though, that it is an informed opinion, and I am always trying to learn more.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“I didn’t think it was fair for anyone to tell Indians that their children couldn’t have lights to study by, or that thousands of Indians should die in heat waves because installing air conditioners is bad for the environment. The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“I love the fact that one of history’s greatest heroes had a job title—agronomist—that most of us have never even heard of.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“I watched Earth’s Changing Climate, a series of fantastic video lectures by Professor Richard Wolfson available through the Great Courses series. I read Weather for Dummies, still one of the best books on weather that I’ve found.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

I wrote this book because I don’t just see the problem of climate change; I also see an opportunity to solve it.

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“I’m also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I’ll look for technology to fix it.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“I’m glad I’ve invested all that time learning about electricity. For one thing, it was a great father-son activity. (Seriously.)”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“If we get a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen, for example, we might not need to worry as much about getting a magic battery.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“If you want to do business with us, you’ll have to take climate change seriously.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and then imagine spreading the pain out over a much longer period of time.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and I know what people can accomplish.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“In climate terms, a change of just a few degrees is a big deal. During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle. It’s”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“In Indonesia, on the other hand, forests are being cut down to make way for palm trees, which provide the palm oil you’ll find in everything from movie-theater popcorn to shampoo. It’s one of the main reasons why the country is the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes

“In particular, Green Premiums are a fantastic lens for making decisions.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Instead, in all likelihood, in a zero-carbon future we will still be producing some emissions, but we’ll have ways to remove the carbon they emit.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“It may sound old-fashioned, but letters and phone calls to your elected officials can have a real impact.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“It turns out the amount of methane produced by a given cow depends a lot on where the cow lives; for example, cattle in South America emit up to five times more greenhouse gases than ones in North America do, and African cattle emit even more. If a cow is being raised in North America or Europe, it’s more likely to be an improved breed that converts feed into milk and meat more efficiently. It will also get better veterinary care and higher-quality feed, which means it’ll produce less methane.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of a problem as big as climate change. But you’re not powerless.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“It’s hard to think of a better response to a miserable 2020 than spending the next ten years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Keep in mind that this isn’t fake meat. Cultivated meat has all the same fat, muscles, and tendons as any animal on two or four legs. But rather than growing up on a farm, it’s created in a lab.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Making 1 ton of steel produces about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Making Carbon-Free Electricity Nuclear fission. Here’s the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It’s the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Meanwhile, making steel and cement alone accounts for around 10 percent of all emissions. So the question “What’s your plan for cement?” is just a shorthand reminder that if you’re trying to come up with a comprehensive plan for climate change, you have to account for much more than electricity and cars.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Now compare both with the energy industry. First, you have huge capital costs that never go away. If you spend $1 billion building a coal plant, the next plant you build will not be any cheaper. And your investors put up that money with the expectation that the plant will run for 30 years or more. If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Seas getting warmer, they’re also bifurcating—developing some places where the water has more oxygen and others where it has less oxygen.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“That’s nearly 600 pounds for every person in the country. And we’re not even the biggest consumers of the stuff—that would be China, which installed more concrete in the first 16 years of the 21st century than the United States did in the entire 20th century!”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That’s the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The electricity causes the iron oxide to break apart, leaving you with the pure iron you need for steel, and pure oxygen as a by-product. No carbon dioxide is produced at all. This technique is promising—it’s similar to a process we’ve been using for more than a century to purify aluminum—but like the other ideas for clean steel it hasn’t yet been proven to work at an industrial scale.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The Gates Foundation’s whole approach to saving lives is based on the idea that we need to be pushing innovation for the poor while also increasing demand for it.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The Green Premiums answer these questions, measuring the cost of getting to zero, sector by sector, and highlighting where we need to innovate”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The math suggests you’d need somewhere around 50 acres’ worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime. Multiply that by the population of the United States, and you get more than 16 billion acres, or 25 million square miles, roughly half the landmass of the world.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The point is that when we focus on all three things at once—technology, policies, and markets—we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The problem of overgeneration in the summer and undergeneration in the winter.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The typical Kenyan produces 55 times less carbon dioxide than an American, and rural farmers like the Talams produce even less.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“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. Now the problem seemed even harder.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“There are other downsides to synthetic fertilizer. To make it, we have to produce ammonia, a process that requires heat, which we get by burning natural gas, which produces greenhouse gases. Then, to move it from the facility where it’s made to the warehouse where it’s stored (like the place I visited in Tanzania) and eventually the farm where it’s used, we load it on trucks that are powered by gasoline. Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“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.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“There’s one last way we can cut down on emissions from the food we eat: by wasting less of it. In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent. That’s bad for people who don’t have enough to eat, bad for the economy, and bad for the climate. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

This book suggests a way forward, a series of steps we can take to give ourselves the best chance to avoid a climate disaster.

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Quotes

“Times with follow-up questions. 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. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents).”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“To grow crops, you want tons of nitrogen—way more than you would ever find in a natural setting. Adding nitrogen is how you get corn to grow 10 feet high and produce enormous quantities of seed. Oddly, most plants can’t make their own nitrogen; instead, they get it from ammonia in the soil, where it’s created by various microorganisms. A plant will keep growing as long as it can get nitrogen, and it’ll stop once the nitrogen is all used up. That’s why adding it boosts growth.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“We need to channel the world’s passion and its scientific IQ into deploying the clean energy solutions we have now, and inventing new ones, so we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“We’ve already raised the temperature at least 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, and if we don’t reduce emissions, we’ll probably have between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by mid-century, and between 4 and 8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“Whatever other resources you may have, you can always use your voice and your vote to effect change.”

Bill Gates
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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