Bill Gates in a new book: how to avoid the climate disaster?

Bill Gates' book was recently published: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and in free translation 'How to avoid the climate disaster?' In the subtitle, he promises to offer the solutions and breakthroughs that we must make. Gates testifies that he has not always been around them, but when he realized the severity of the crisis, he offers a solution in the hope that governments and international organizations will implement it.

Bill Gates' book was recently published: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and in free translation 'How to avoid the climate disaster?' In the subtitle, he promises to offer the solutions and breakthroughs that we must make. Gates testifies that he has not always been around them, but when he realized the severity of the crisis, he offers a solution in the hope that governments and international organizations will implement it.

Gates is a hater of conspiracy theorists, as he simply wanted to mark children in Africa who had already received the vaccines, so that there would not be a situation where one child would receive several times and another child would not receive at all in the absence of practice of vaccination registers. This thing has become for them that Bill Gates wants to plant chips, and in order to do this to all the citizens of the world, he was involved in some mysterious way in spreading the corona epidemic that he predicted a few years before."

And speaking of good intentions being misinterpreted now he has also become a passionate supporter of zeroing carbon emissions and warning about the climate crisis that when he was a businessman repressed him.

On his official website - GATES NOTES, Bill Gates explained: "I wrote how to avoid a climate disaster because I think we are at a decisive moment. I have seen the exciting progress over 15 years of studying energy and climate change. The cost of renewable energy from the sun and wind has dropped dramatically. There is more public support for taking major steps to prevent climate catastrophe than ever before. Governments and companies around the world are setting ambitious targets to reduce emissions."

"What we need now is a plan that turns all this momentum into practical steps to achieve our big goals. This is what the book 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster' offers: a plan to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

"The organization I founded called Breakthrough Energy, which started with a venture fund to invest in promising clean energy companies, has expanded into a network of philanthropic programs, investment funds and support efforts to accelerate energy innovation at every step. We will support great thinkers and innovative technologies and businesses, as well as push for public and private sector policies that will accelerate the transition to clean energy. During the coming weeks and months we will turn the ideas in my book into action and try to make this plan a reality."

"Below is an excerpt from the introduction, which gives a sense of what the book is about and how I came to write it. I hope you'll check out the book, but more importantly, I hope you'll do what you can to help us keep Earth alive for generations to come.” Gates explains.

to lower the green premiums

My new book on climate change Recently released. I hope this gives everyone who reads this a better understanding of what we need to do to prevent climate disaster. But if there is only one idea that people will take from the book - I want it to be this idea: We need to lower the green premiums". By this, Gates intends to lower the cost of the green alternatives by raising the price of the non-green alternatives in order to put a price on the climate disaster.

I have already written about the green premiums on this blog. The term refers to the difference in cost between a product that involves carbon emissions and an alternative that does not. For example, the current average price of jet fuel is $2.22 per liter. If an airline wants to replace it with an advanced carbon-free fuel alternative, it will have to pay $5.35 per liter – a whopping 140 percent increase. The difference is the green premium.

A green premium allows us to see which zero-carbon solutions we need to implement now – such as solar energy, which has a low premium in some places – and where we need to continue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives are not cheap enough. The larger the green premium for a certain product, the more expensive it will be to eliminate the emissions of that product - and the harder it will be to obtain it. Lowering these premiums is the only way to reach zero emissions without making things significantly more expensive.

When I talk to presidents and prime ministers about their countries' plans to combat climate change, I always urge them to focus their innovation efforts on the biggest green premiums. Lowering these premiums will take time, so we must speed up work on them immediately. It's tempting to focus on picking the low-hanging fruit - like switching to electric vehicles - and on us. But these solutions will not be enough for us to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. We also have to work on the hard parts, like cement and steel.

So how exactly do we lower the green premiums? There are two There are two directions in which governments can act: reduce the cost of zero-carbon alternatives or charge the hidden costs of pollution. Ideally, any plan to address climate change would need to do both.

Reducing the cost of zero carbon alternatives

The world needs to reach zero emissions by 2050 if we want to avoid a climate disaster. To do this, we need to find ways to generate and store clean electricity to grow food, move, and heat and cool our buildings without releasing greenhouse gases. Some of these clean alternatives already exist, but we need breakthroughs to lower their green premiums. Others don't exist at all, let alone cost low enough for middle-income countries to afford.

If we lower the costs of zero-carbon alternatives, we need a lot of innovation. Governments should lead the way for much of this innovation, as they can invest in new ideas that may have too high an economic risk to be funded by the private sector. This is why in my book I call on governments to invest in clean energy and climate-related R&D in the next decade. The discoveries that will come out of that R&D will fuel innovative work in private companies around the world. Philanthropic funding can also help by supporting people with early-stage innovative ideas who can take great ideas from the lab and turn them into new products and services.

However, it will not be enough to just provide more innovation – we also need to create demand so that these new products and services can gain a foothold in the competitive market. Companies can work with governments to fund the first projects that demonstrate a new technology or system that works safely, which can prove to investors that subsequent projects are ready for funding.

Once a product is ready for purchase, companies can use their purchasing power to increase the clean products they consume in their supply chains. Federal and state governments have the same power and can also do things like require the use of clean steel and cement in the infrastructure projects they fund.

The real value of government leadership in this area is that it can take risks on bold ideas that may fail or may not immediately pay off. When an idea is in its early stages, the right policies and funding can ensure it is fully explored. This is especially important for zero-carbon alternatives that do not yet exist. We have to try lots of different ideas to find the ones that work.

Paying for the hidden costs of pollution

Today, when businesses make products or consumers buy things, they bear no additional cost for the carbon emitted during production and transportation. But this carbon imposes a very real cost on society. Just think of all the money that countries and cities are spending - and will spend in the future - to adapt to the effects of climate change.

It is in the power of governments to ensure that at least some of these external costs are paid by those who are responsible for them. This, in turn, will create an incentive for companies to come up with carbon-free alternatives. By addressing the hidden costs of fossil fuels, the government is telling the market that there will be additional costs associated with products that emit greenhouse gases. And by slowly raising the price of carbon to reflect its true cost, we can nudge producers and consumers toward more efficient decisions and encourage innovation that lowers green premiums. 

We can make pollution more expensive through a carbon tax or a cap and trade system, where companies can buy and sell the right to emit carbon. Where the revenue generated by these programs will go is less important than the signal the act sends. Many economists argue that the money should be returned to consumers or businesses to cover the resulting price increase, although others believe it should be reinvested in R&D and other incentives to help solve climate change.

The biggest impact will come from putting a price on carbon at the national level, although local governments and states can also play a big role. States can test policies like carbon pricing before implementing them on a wider scale, and they can join regional alliances, as several states in the northeastern US have done with a cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions.

Governments must take the lead if we are going to bring down green premiums, but there are things everyone can do as an individual to help. Anyone can use their purchasing power as a consumer to purchase green alternatives, which sends a signal to companies that there is a market for these products. You can also use your voice as a citizen to urge your elected officials to take the steps I described above. You can read more about what you can do to fight climate change HERE.

You will hear me talk a lot about green premiums in the coming months and years, because addressing them is the most important thing we can do to prevent a climate disaster. And I will do more than talk: it will be a central part of the work we do in  Breakthrough Energy  My organization is dedicated to accelerating the transition to clean energy. So, the next time someone asks you what they can do to fight climate change, I hope you tell them: Do everything you can to lower green premiums.

How to avoid a climate disaster - introduction

By Bill Gates

Two decades ago, I never imagined that one day I would be speaking publicly about climate change, much less writing a book about it. My background is in software, not climate science. These days my full-time job with my wife Melinda is at the Gates Foundation, where we are very focused on global health, development and education in the US.

I came to focus on climate change indirectly - through the problem of energy poverty.

In the early XNUMXs, when our foundation was just getting started, I started traveling to low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia so I could learn more about child mortality, HIV, and the other big issues we were working on. But my mind wasn't always just about diseases. I would fly to the big cities, look out the window and think, why is it so dark out there? Where are all the lights I would see if it were New York, Paris or Beijing?

I learned that a billion people do not have reliable access to electricity and that half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa (the picture has improved slightly since then; today only about 860 million people do not have electricity). I started thinking about how the world could make energy affordable and reliable for the poor. It didn't make sense for our foundation to take on this huge problem—we needed it to stay focused on its core mission—but I started kicking around ideas with some of my fellow inventors.

At the end of 2006, I met with two former Microsoft colleagues who had founded non-profits focused on energy and climate. They brought along with them two climate scientists who were familiar with the issues, and the four of them showed me the data connecting greenhouse gas emissions to climate change.

I knew that greenhouse gases were raising the temperature, but I assumed that there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a real climate disaster. It was hard to accept that as long as humans continue to emit any amount of greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise.

I returned to the group several times with follow-up questions. Eventually I caved in. The world needs to provide more energy so that the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing more greenhouse gases.

Now the problem seemed even more difficult. It is not enough to provide cheap and reliable energy to the poor. It also had to be clean.

In a few years I became convinced of three things

To avoid a climate disaster, we must 1. reach zero greenhouse gas emissions. 2. We must apply tools we already have, such as solar and wind, in a faster and smarter way, and 3: we must create and spread breakthrough technologies with which we can move forward.

The explanation for the need to reach zero greenhouse gas emissions was that setting a goal where we only reduce our emissions - but not eliminate them - will not do it. The only logical goal is zero emissions.

This book offers a way forward, a series of steps we can take to give ourselves the best chance of avoiding climate disaster. It breaks down into five parts.

Why zero? In the first chapter I will explain more about why we need to get to zero, including what we know (and what we don't) about how rising temperatures will affect people around the world.

The bad news: getting to zero will be really hard. Because any plan to achieve anything begins with a realistic assessment of the roadblocks that stand in the way. In the second chapter we will take a moment to examine the challenges we face.

In chapter 3 I will explain how to have an informed conversation about climate change. I'll review some of the confusing statistics you may have heard and share the handful of questions I remember from every conversation I have about climate change. They have kept me from making mistakes more times than I can count, and I hope they will do the same for you.

The good news: we can do it. In chapters 4 to 9 I will detail the areas where today's technology can help and where we need breakthroughs. This will be the longest part of the book because there is so much to cover. We have some solutions that we need to implement in a big way now, and we also need a lot of innovations to develop and spread around the world in the coming decades.

These are steps we can take right now. I wrote this book because I don't just see the problem of climate change; I also see a possibility to solve it. This is not utopian optimism, not dreams and imaginations, but it has real solutions and it is possible. We already have two of the three things needed to perform any major action. First, we have ambition, thanks to the passion of a growing global movement led by young people who are deeply concerned about climate change. Second, we have big goals for solving the problem as more national and local leaders around the world commit to doing their part.

Now we need the third component: a concrete plan to achieve our goals.

Just as our ambitions are driven by an appreciation of climate science, any practical plan to reduce emissions should be driven by advances in other fields: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more. So in the final chapters of this book, I will offer a plan based on guidance I have received from experts in all of these fields. In chapters 10 and 11 I will focus on policies that governments can take; In Chapter 12 I will suggest steps each of us can take to help the world reach zero. Whether you're a government leader, an entrepreneur, or you've chosen a busy life with little free time (or all of the above), there are things you can do to prevent climate disaster.

that's it. lets start.

For Bill Gates' blog post

• Earth Day - what each of us can do for the environment
• Summary of 2020 in the environment: not only Corona
• The lesson worth learning from 2020
• About Bill Gates, microchips and conspiracy theories
• The climate crisis: Bill Gates recommends adapting