How do we solve the climate crisis? If you ask today's young people, they want a radical shift in our social and economic systems. They're also ready to pay huge monetary costs now to avoid even bigger ones later. Bill Gates's book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is unlikely to satisfy this crowd. Nor, it must be said, is it written for them. It's written for policymakers, offering up a tidy set of policy-recommendations whereby runaway warming is avoided with the right combination of technological, economic, and logistical innovations. This approach is both the book’s strength and its weakness. Gates gives us many specific goals for green energy, all fitting neatly into our current economic system. But he fails to integrate those goals into a cohesive strategy for how to reach them in the time required.
Still, Climate Crisis is a worthwhile read for those new to the topic of climate change. Bill Gates is a uniquely capable systems thinker, distilling the complexities of climate change and its drivers into an approachable and concise work. Any casual reader will come away understanding just how monumental a 1.5°C net rise in global temperature is, why net zero emissions is so important, and how devastating a progressively warmer planet will be for humanity.
The book’s argument results in three broad policy recommendations: we must quintuple research and development funding for key green technologies, incentivize the public and private sectors to coordinate in the adoption of these technologies, and put a price on carbon.
Gates is refreshingly clear about our society’s addiction to fossil fuels. He justifiably acknowledges that “there are no realistic paths to zero that involve abandoning these fuels completely”. He presents the world as it is – dirty, chaotic, and yearning for growth. Gates doesn’t waste time suggesting that the Global South is going to slow down its development, or that radically lower energy usage in the West is a serious option. Global energy demand, he says, “will go up 50 percent by 2050, and if nothing else changes, carbon emissions will go up by nearly as much”. Our world is one where GDP growth is tightly wound up with carbon emissions.
The bulk of the book is about breaking this connection. Here is where Climate Crisis is most grounded, offering tangible figures on pricing, industrial scale, and energy efficiencies. Gates serves up a breakdown of our primary energy and industrial processes, and a methodical examination of what green technologies need to be invented or quickly scaled up. A key concept is what he calls the “Green Premium,” or the immediate difference in cost between a dirty energy source and a clean one. The higher the Green Premium, the less economical the green option is. At the moment, most energy sources and industrial processes carry large Green Premiums.
For new energy sources, Gates calls for nuclear fission and fusion, offshore wind, geothermal, and an improvement of battery technologies. For industrial processes, he wants greater electrification, carbon capture adoption, and overall better energy efficiency. For agriculture, we need better cow breeds, more plant-based protein as a substitute for meat, and less food waste. Cars and buses should be electrified, and we need to find ways to make alternative fuels more affordable. We also need to drive less. Finally for heating and cooling, furnaces need to be electrified and the power grid de-carbonized, insofar as possible. It’s a tall order but none of it is technically impossible or out of the reach of a determined government.
To help achieve these advances, governments at every level must do so through green investments. More money needs to be spent on riskier technologies with higher rewards. Citizens must pressure their elected officials into taking action on these initiatives.
It’s good that Gates tells us exactly how much the Green Premium must be reduced for each activity. Yet once these concrete suggestions have been made, he stops short. Regardless of how much money is pumped into corporate and government coffers, institutions by their nature move slowly. For them to discover, build, and roll out massive new technologies in less than ten years is a radical proposition. It requires an equally radical implementation plan.
The effects of climate change are amorphous, dispersed, and dripped out over time. Many people don't feel the threat urgently, and object to measures that harm their standard of living. If the French Yellow Vest protests are any guide, the public is not going to swallow visible cost of living increases easily. Yet Gates chooses not to confront this central question of political implementation. “Will people be willing to pay that much more for their gasoline?” he asks. “I’m not going to prescribe what the solution should look like”.
Climate change is a political problem as much as it is a physical one. A real crisis plan would have a clear technical and political vision for every year between now and 2050. Especially the next ten years. Climate Crisis offers none. Where is the list of technical milestones for each year? Where are the immovable political deadlines? Who will pay for these new investments? Gates never strays below 30,000 feet, depriving the reader of key details on how to confront the messier political and economic questions of implementation.
Later on the solutions devolve further into hypotheticals. “In extreme cases, when electricity is especially hard to come by,” Gates says, “we should have the ability to shed demand, meaning we’d ration electricity”. When briefly discussing geo-engineering technology, he makes an almost unbelievable admission: that geo-engineering is probably the “only known way that we could hope to lower the earth’s temperature within years or decades without crippling the economy”.
This observation suggests that even Gates himself lacks confidence in his vision. That he knows that behind the techno optimism, hard timescales and political truths lurk.
Gates is to be commended for providing an approachable framework for exactly how much the price of each green technology needs to decline. He defines the crisis as one that requires a 30% drop in emissions in less than 10 years, but provides a clouded explanation to address how to resolve the serious disruptions his solutions would cause. This is 2021, not 2005. We no longer have the time to pontificate on what our goals ought to be. They have now been long defined, and the true “how” of climate change is how to plausibly implement them. Without a plan to do this, Climate Crisis fails to adequately answer its titular question.