A billionaire’s practical plan to save the planet

Bill Gates is worth $156bn, so he’s not as rich as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but unlike them he’s ready to apologise.

 

Bill Gates is worth $US122bn ($155.8bn), so he’s not as rich as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but unlike them he’s ready to apologise: “The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do … I can’t deny being a rich guy with an opinion.”

However, on climate change he says his opinion is informed. He knows that from some quarters this will attract jeers. He admits his carbon footprint is “absurdly high”. He owns big houses, he flies in private jets. “So who am I to lecture anyone on the environment?”

The first answer is that he goes to great lengths to mitigate these excesses: using sustainable jet fuel, buying carbon offsets. The better answer is that if we are going to reach zero carbon by 2050 we need people such as Gates to be onside.

He has the mind of an engineer. A problem, for him, is an opportunity for a solution. And he has a boss’s ability to persuade people that his solution will work. Of all the recent books warning of climate catastrophe, Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is the most practical.

This does not mean he simply buys into every green idea in circulation. Planting billions of trees, for example, will not work. To absorb the emissions of the US alone you would have to cover half the landmass of the world in trees.

In addition, our obsession with plastics is a distraction when it comes to climate change. Unlike cement or steel, plastic stores carbon in the production process. In time it may be used to form huge carbon sinks, locking away emissions more or less forever.

Climate change sceptics, however, will find no further consolation from this book. Achieving the 2050 goal means everything has to be decarbonised as quickly as possible. So far we have barely taken a step down this long road. All the green measures taken by the US will cut emissions by only 5 per cent by 2030.

Gates employs two brilliant explan­atory devices to illustrate what this means. First, we should focus on the 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere each year.

Every decarbonising policy or technology should be judged against this figure. For example, he was initially impressed when he learnt an emissions trading scheme in Europe had cut aviation emissions by 17 million tonnes. It sounds a lot, but it isn’t.

Second, he uses the idea of the “green premium” as a way of measuring our progress. This is the additional cost of buying a green technology. Electric cars, for example, are still much more expensive than petrol ones. On the other hand, we should all have gone solar by now. Solar panels are 10 times cheaper than a decade ago.

The wider problem is that fossil fuels are ludicrously cheap and are deeply embedded in our societies. They are the water in which we swim and, like fish, we don’t even notice the water.

What, then, must we do? Well, obviously, go nuclear, he thinks. It kills far fewer people than fossil fuel extraction and it is reliable. No serious decarbonising strategy exists that does not include more nuclear power.

We should use technology to solve the big emission problems. Cement production is “the toughest case of all”: making a tonne emits a tonne of carbon dioxide. This is bad news during a building frenzy, especially in China. Capturing the carbon would work, but the green premium on cement would then more than double the cost. Something new is needed.

Also, we have to do something about cow burps and farts. Cattle emit high emissions of methane, the worst greenhouse gas. Things can be done to reduce this, but obviously the best solution is to reduce the green premium on artificial meat and persuade people to eat it.

The overall message of the book is: do everything we can now and, as for the rest, innovate like crazy. Of the many books I have come across making the case that climate change will be a catastrophe but we can do something about it, this is the best. It is not apocalyptic — if we do nothing, he says, climate change will be as deadly as COVID-19 by 2050 and by 2100 it will be five times as deadly. These are terrible figures, but they are not human extinction.

“It’s hard to think,” Gates concludes, “of a better response to a miserable 2020 than spending the next 10 years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal.”

OK, he’s rich but, come on, he seems nice.

THE SUNDAY TIMES