How To Avoid A Climate Disaster - The Soblem Prolver Book Summary
If you care about creating a positive impact in our world, then you have to care about climate change. By now, most of us understand the danger of climate change. But how much do we know about how to solve it? Sure, renewable energy and electric vehicles sound like good ideas. But will they be enough? What other changes are needed? And can we actually deliver these changes?
In this book, Gates gives us a crystal clear view of what we need to do to solve climate change and avoid a climate disaster. It’s deeply researched, well structured, concisely written and focuses on solutions, not just the problems.
It’s a great book and I’d definitely recommend you read it.
Here’s my summary.
TLDR:
We currently emit 51 billion tonnes of CO2 each year, if we want to stop climate change, we need to get to zero. To do this, we need a massive amount of innovation across almost every sector in the economy and it needs to be driven by big changes in governments all around the world.
What’s the problem?
The problem is climate change. The world is getting hotter and this will have some terrible impacts on our world and the people who live in it. Gates gives some insight into what will happen if we don’t solve climate change, but it’s enough to say that it will be VERY, VERY BAD… FOR EVERYONE.
If you want to read a detailed description of what our world will look like if we don’t solve climate change, check out The Uninhabital Earth by David Wallace Wells.
What’s causing the problem?
CO2 emissions cause climate change - simple. Gates starts the book by telling us exactly how much CO2 we emit each year - it’s 51 billion tonnes. To avoid a climate disaster, Gates says we need to get to zero! He shows how it’s not enough to just reduce our emissions, we need to eliminate them entirely. And we need to do it by 2050.
This is a huge task.
It’s like we are sitting on a bike, at the bottom of Mount Everest, and we have to somehow cycle to the top.
Pretty hard right? Well, it gets even harder.
We need to eliminate all these emissions whilst the demand for emission producing products and services grows rapidly. In the next 30 years, we are going to need more energy, more food, more buildings and more things than we have ever needed. This is because the global population is growing and developing countries are raising their standards of living. As people get richer, they want more of the things that produce CO2 emissions (e.g., cars, beef, bigger houses, air conditioning).
Gates shows us how important it is for poorer countries to get access to energy. There is a direct correlation with increased energy and income per person. If we want to help poorer nations to get better standards of living, we need to make sure they get energy. It’s not an option to just exclude millions of people from the access to energy that the western world has benefitted from for decades.
So, we are sitting on our bike, at the bottom of Everest, trying to figure out how to cycle to the top, and now we’ve just been told that there’s going to be a gale force wind into our face the whole way.
Where are CO2 emissions coming from?
Gates spends the majority of the book exploring the 5 main categories of activities that emit CO2. Here’s the 5 categories and the % of the 51 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions they emit;
How we plug in (electricity) - 27%
How we make things (manufacturing) - 31%
How we grow things (agriculture) - 19%
How we get around (transport) - 16%
How we keep cool and stay warm (heating and AC) - 7%
In each chapter, Gates breaks down these 5 categories of emissions, why they emit so much CO2, what solutions exist to reduce emissions and how far those solutions are from being used at scale. I won’t go into the details here but it is all very interesting information for getting a better understanding for the potential for each technology. It also helped me to understand then areas where we have a huge amount of work to do (e.g., making cement) versus where we are already well on our way to a good solution (e.g., electric vehicles).
Why aren’t things already changing?
I read somewhere that if you want to change, you need 3 things;
To be dissatisfied with your current state
To want to achieve some other future state
To know the path to get there
Gates shows how one of the biggest reasons it’s hard for us to change, is that it’s hard to be dissatisfied with our current state. Fossil fuels are great. Really, they are.
They are super cheap, easily transportable and incredibly easy to use. We have spent decades building the infrastructure to support an economy that runs on fossil fuels - consider how easy it is to find a gas station vs. an electric car charger.
If fossil fuels were expensive and hard to use, it would be much easier to convince people to use another source of energy. But they’re not….
It’s the fact that things are so good right now (minus the climate change) that makes it so hard to change.
How to evaluate solutions:
Gates gives a great framework for evaluating proposed technical solutions to reducing emissions. I’ve boiled it down to the 4 most important questions [excluding his question about cement as I think this is effectively captured in (1)]:
How many tonnes of CO2 emissions will this reduce? (Remember the goal is to get from 51 billion tonnes per year, to zero!)We need to make sure that this is a net emissions number - the number must take into account all activities needed to create this new solution. For example, if you are going to build new wind turbines, you best make sure to include teh CO2 emissions from all the cement needed to create these turbines. To know if the number you get ,
What is the Green Premium? Gates introduces a a great little metric to evaluate if new technologies will be a good solution for reducing emissions at scale. It’s called the Green Premium. The Green Premium is how much extra you have to pay for a carbon neutral technology versus the incumbent fossil fuel emitting solution. Gates shows us that unless new technologies are similar in price or cheaper to existing CO2 emitting solutions, it will be hard to get many people to adapt them.
How much power will it deliver and how consistently? We are going to need way more electricity. But not all sources of electricity are created equally. Power that can be delivered consistently and ramped up and down at will (e.g., Natural Gas and Nuclear) is much more valuable to power we have little control over (e.g., Solar and Wind).
How much space will it need? Space on this earth is a limited resource. For any new solution, we need to be aware of how much space it will need. The less, the better.
What is the solution?
Climate change is a ultimately technical problem - we need to create the technologies and systems that allow us to stop emitting CO2. To achieve this, we need to develop new technologies and deploy them at scale.
But, we can’t just click our fingers and get new technologies and deploy them. We have to create a system that incentivises these two things to happen. Gate’s proposed solution is all about how we set up this system.
How to develop new technologies.
Gates believes that a market based approach to develop technology is the best way to encourage the kind of innovation we need. He explains the things we should do to encourage activity on both sides of the marketplace, supply and demand.
Expand the supply of new technologies;
Invest massively in Research in Development
Make big bets on high risk, high reward projects
Ensure there is a focus on how we bring ideas to market and don’t let them die in the testing phase
Ensure we work together as cross functional teams. Government and industry need to work closely to create new technologies and bring them to market.
Expand the demand for new technologies;
Governments should be the first customers of new technologies
Governments should create incentives to lower the costs of new technologies and reduce the risk of customers adopting them
Governments should build the infrastructure to allow new technologies to get to market and reach customers
Governments should write rules which allow new technologies to compete with incumbent technologies
Deploy existing technologies at scale.
It’s no good developing new technologies if we don’t deploy them at scale. Remember, we need to get from 51 billion tones of CO2 emissions to zero! That means finding a new way to do pretty much everything in our economy. Gates recommends we (mainly governments) do 5 things to encourage the deployment of technologies at scale
Put a price on carbon
Implement clean electricity standards
Implement clean fuel standards
Implement clean product standards
Incentivise companies to shut down old activities that produce emissions
My reflections:
This book made me think a lot. The main recommendations that Gates makes seem super clear and spot on. However, there are a few other reflections I had after reading this book;
Electricity is going to be super important! A lot of the tactics for reducing emissions, is to shift energy sources to electricity (e.g., use electric vehicles instead of gas power cars). This means the demand on our electrical grid is going to be ENORMOUS! Also, Gates is not too bullish on electricity storage, which makes it even harder to run an emissions free electricity grid. This is going to be a HUGE industry in the future.
The opportunity is massive. Talking about huge industries, all the changes we need to make is going to create massive industries. This will mean massive opportunities for companies working in this space and their investors. I know we’ve had green bubbles before, but it now seems that we have no other choice but to create these new, sustainable industries.
Innovation is everything. If we don’t invent new technologies, we are F*#$ed. Really, we are. We need to do everything we can to encourage research, innovations and entrepreneurship. These are the heroes who will lead us to a new world.
Cooperation is critical. It is crystal clear that solving this mess is going to need cooperation. Cooperation across organisations, across industries, across nations. Finding ways to encourage this cooperation is critical.
We need to focus on what works, not what feels good. A lot of the sustainability work and policy I see focuses on stuff that makes headlines - e.g., banning plastic straws. But most of this stuff doesn’t actually make a difference to stopping climate change. We need to stop doing what feels nice, and start doing more of what actually works, in order to get from 51 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions, to zero!
If you care about climate change, and you want to know what we should do to stop it, read this book. I enjoyed every second of it and Gates does a skillful job of presenting complex problems, in a way that’s easy to understand.
10/10 - go read it!