Gates has crafted a calm, reasoned,
well-sourced explanation of the greatest challenge of our time and what we must
change to avoid cooking our planet in “How to Avoid Climate Disaster: The
Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.”
اضافة اعلان
Bill Gates shares
what he’s learned in more than a decade of studying climate change and
investing in innovations to address the problems, and sets out a vision for how
the world can build the tools it needs to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Bill Gates explains why he cares so deeply about
climate change and what makes him optimistic that the world can avoid the most
dire effects of the climate crisis. Gates says, “We can work on a local,
national, and global level to build the technologies, businesses, and
industries to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.” His interest in
climate change is a natural outgrowth of the efforts by his foundation to
reduce poverty and disease. Climate change, according to Gates, will have the
biggest impact on the people who have done the least to cause it. As a
technologist, he has seen first-hand how innovation can change the world. By
investing in research, inventing new technologies, and by deploying them quickly
at large scale, Gates believes climate change can be addressed in meaningful
ways. According to Gates, “To prevent the worst effects of climate change, we
have to get to net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases. This problem is urgent,
and the debate is complex, but I believe we can come together to invent new
carbon-zero technologies, deploy the ones we have, and ultimately avoid a
climate catastrophe.”
His goal with this book appears to be to explain and
persuade, and although he doesn’t say so in the book, the implicit theme
parallels something president Abraham Lincoln once said: “Give the people the
facts and the nation will be safe,” meaning people would make the right
decisions about the problems we face if we have the facts.
Watching Bill Gates in the news over the years, his
demeanor usually is that of an earnest, enthusiastic college professor, someone
who draws on research and thinks before he talks. And it turns out, before he
writes, too.
Gates has crafted a calm, reasoned, well-sourced
explanation of the greatest challenge of our time and what we must change to
avoid cooking our planet
Will we though?
Certainly in recent years
many have felt completely free to adopt their own beliefs on everything,
completely unmoored from science and truth.
What should make Gates’ book compelling to
climate-change skeptics however are the concise, straightforward explanations
of, for example, how much carbon is produced in the making of electricity and
what we can do to reduce that.
Gates works
through steel, meat-production, flying and every other way we produces carbon
dioxide and other gasses that are causing our atmosphere, oceans and land to
retain more heat.
One conclusion sure to provoke debate is Gates’
contention that to conquer global warming, we need to produce at least some of
our electricity from nuclear power, which he notes, is clean and safer than
ever.
And Gates is funding multiple research projects
himself focused on finding ways to, among other things, make cement without
releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
Gates cautions however, that we can’t invent our way
to a reprieve from catastrophic global warming.
Can we make the sacrifices and changes necessary to,
for example, shift to a more plant-based diet?
Gates implores federal governments to fund more
research on how we can shift to an economy that can reduce our damaging
emissions to zero by 2050.
He acknowledges that the issue is complex but he
says the Biden administration understands the urgency for action.
What about for the rest of us?
We can buy green products
whenever possible, he asks, and we also must demand public policies that put us
on a path to zero global-warming emissions.
And if we don’t? Gates’ book is high on solutions
and low on dire warnings, the staple of many other writings on climate change.
Still, Gates occasionally points out the realities
of inaction. Just a 2 degrees Celsius rise in ocean temperatures, he notes,
could kill coral reefs and destroy the food source for 1 billion people.
To avert that, he says, “We need to accomplish
something gigantic we have never done before.
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