# How to Avoid a Climate Disaster **Covers**:: **Source**:: [[How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates]] **Creator**:: [[Bill Gates]] # Highlights ##### ^308344232 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=67 ###### ^308344232q Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. Although the figure may go up or down a bit from year to year, it’s generally increasing. This is where we are today. ^308344232 ##### ^306587582 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=288 ###### ^306587582q Greenhouse gases trap heat, causing the average surface temperature of the earth to go up. The more gases there are, the more the temperature rises. And once greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, they stay there for a very long time; something like one-fifth of the carbon dioxide emitted today will still be there in 10,000 years. ^306587582 ##### ^306587583 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=295 ###### ^306587583q But then we started burning fossil fuels. These fuels are made of carbon that’s stored underground, thanks to plants that died eons ago and got compressed over millions of years into oil, coal, or natural gas. When we dig up those fuels and burn them, we emit extra carbon and add to the total amount in the atmosphere. ^306587583 ##### ^306587584 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=322 ###### ^306587584q During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle. ^306587584 ##### ^306587585 highlight_tags:: [[blue]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=332 ###### ^306587585q Why are some places heating up more than others? In the interior of some continents, the soil is drier, which means the land can’t cool off as much as it did in the past. Basically, continents aren’t sweating as much as they used to. ^306587585 ##### ^306587586 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=339 ###### ^306587586q To keep things simple, most people combine all the different greenhouse gases into a single measure known as “carbon dioxide equivalents.” (You might see the term abbreviated as CO2e.) ^306587586 ##### ^306587587 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=344 ###### ^306587587q When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren’t fully accounting for this important short-term effect. ^306587587 ##### ^306587595 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=361 ###### ^306587595q Sunlight, for example, passes right through most greenhouse gases without getting absorbed. Most of it reaches the earth and warms up the planet, just as it has been doing for eons. Here’s the problem: The earth doesn’t hold on to all that energy forever; ... it radiates some of the energy back toward space, and some of this energy is emitted in just the right range of wavelengths to get absorbed by greenhouse gases. ^306587595 ##### ^306587590 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=368 ###### ^306587590q Only molecules made up of different atoms, the way carbon dioxide and methane are, have the right structure to absorb radiation and start heating up. ^306587590 ##### ^306587591 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=391 ###### ^306587591q we can’t with certainty blame climate change for any particular event. For example, when there’s a heat wave, we can’t say whether it was caused by climate change alone. What we can do, though, is say how much climate change increased the odds of that heat wave happening. ^306587591 ##### ^306587592 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=394 ###### ^306587592q there is growing evidence that climate change is making storms wetter and increasing the number of intense ones. ^306587592 ##### ^306587593 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=410 ###### ^306587593q As water vapor condenses into rain, it releases a massive amount of energy, ^306587593 ##### ^306587594 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=427 ###### ^306587594q Wildfires now occur there five times more often than in the 1970s, largely because the fire season is getting longer and the forests there now contain much more dry wood that’s likely to burn. According to the U.S. government, half of this increase is due to climate change, and by mid-century America could experience more than twice as much destruction from wildfires as it does today. ^306587594 ##### ^306644844 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=441 ###### ^306644844q Thanks to cyclones, storm surges, and river floods, it is now common for 20 to 30 percent of Bangladesh to be underwater, wiping out crops and homes and killing people throughout the country. ^306644844 ##### ^306644845 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=444 ###### ^306644845q a rise of 2 degrees Celsius would cut the geographic range of vertebrates by 8 percent, plants by 16 percent, and insects by 18 percent. ^306644845 ##### ^306644846 highlight_tags:: [[blue]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=461 ###### ^306644846q In many ways, a 2-degree rise wouldn’t simply be 33 percent worse than 1.5; it could be 100 percent worse. Twice as many people would have trouble getting clean water. Corn production in the tropics would go down twice as much. ^306644846 ##### ^308344233 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=567 ###### ^308344233q There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”* Wallace explained, “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” ^308344233 ##### ^307323239 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=569 ###### ^307323239q “What the hell is water?”* Wallace explained, “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” ^307323239 ##### ^307323240 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=794 ###### ^307323240q Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents). ^307323240 ##### ^307323241 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=819 ###### ^307323241q The good news is that even though electricity is only 27 percent of the problem, it could represent much more than 27 percent of the solution. With clean electricity, we could shift away from burning hydrocarbons (which emits carbon dioxide) for fuel. Think electric cars and buses; electric heating and cooling systems in our homes and businesses; and energy-intensive factories using electricity instead of natural gas to make their products. ^307323241 ##### ^307323242 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=832 ###### ^307323242q the definition of a watt already includes “per second,” so there’s no such thing as watts per second, or watts per hour. It’s just watts.) ^307323242 ##### ^307323243 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=854 ###### ^307323243q Whenever you hear “kilowatt,” think “house.” “Gigawatt,” think “city.” A hundred or more gigawatts, think “big country.” ^307323243 ##### ^307323244 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=938 ###### ^307323244q The premiums give us a different insight from the raw number of emissions, which shows us how far we are from zero but tells us nothing about how hard it will be to get there. What would it cost to use the zero-carbon tools we have now? Which innovations will make the biggest impact on emissions? The Green Premiums answer these questions, measuring the cost of getting to zero, sector by sector, and highlighting where we need to innovate—just ^307323244 ##### ^307323245 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=988 ###### ^307323245q For information on how the Green Premiums in this book were calculated, visit breakthroughenergy.org. ^307323245 ##### ^308344234 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=992 ###### ^308344234q HOW WE PLUG IN 27 percent of 51 billion tons per year ^308344234 ##### ^308344235 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1133 ###### ^308344235q Unfortunately, nighttime intermittency isn’t the hardest problem to deal with. The seasonal variation between summer and winter is an even bigger hurdle. ^308344235 ##### ^308344236 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1182 ###### ^308344236q Because solar and wind are intermittent, our capacity to generate electricity will need to grow even more. ^308344236 ##### ^308344237 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1227 ###### ^308344237q we’ll save money by building renewables in the best locations, building a unified national grid, and shipping zero-emissions electrons wherever they’re needed. ^308344237 ##### ^308344238 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1238 ###### ^308344238q today, burying power lines increases the cost by a factor of 5 to 10. (The problem is heat: Power lines get hot when there’s electricity running through them. That’s no problem when they’re aboveground—the heat just dissipates into the air—but underground there’s no place for the heat to go. If the temperature gets too high, the power lines melt.) ^308344238 ##### ^308344239 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1286 ###### ^308344239q Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel. ^308344239 ##### ^308344240 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1299 ###### ^308344240q TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities. The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated—eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack. Finally, the design would be inherently safe, using some ingenious features to control the nuclear reaction; for example, the radioactive fuel is contained in pins that expand if they get too hot, which slows the nuclear reaction down and prevents overheating. ^308344240 ##### ^308344241 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1313 ###### ^308344241q fusion holds a lot of promise. Because it would run on commonly available elements like hydrogen, the fuel would be cheap and plentiful. The main type of hydrogen that’s usually used in fusion can be extracted from seawater, and there’s enough of it to meet the world’s energy needs for many thousands of years. Fusion’s waste products would be radioactive for hundreds of years, versus hundreds of thousands for waste plutonium and other elements from fission, and at a much lower level—about as dangerous as radioactive hospital waste. There’s no chain reaction to run out of control, because the fusion ceases as soon as you stop supplying fuel or switch off the device that’s containing the plasma. ^308344241 ##### ^308344257 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1396 ###### ^308344257q hydrogen serves as a key ingredient in fuel cell batteries. Fuel cells get their energy from a chemical reaction between two gases—usually hydrogen and oxygen—and their only by-product is water. We could use electricity from a solar or wind farm to create hydrogen, store the hydrogen as compressed gas or in another form, and then put it in a fuel cell to generate electricity on demand. ... Here’s the problem: Right now, it’s expensive to produce hydrogen without emitting carbon. ... Hydrogen is also a very lightweight gas, which makes it hard to store within a reasonably sized container. ... Finally, the process of making hydrogen (called electrolysis) also requires various materials (known as electrolyzers) that are quite costly. In California, where cars that run on fuel cells are now available, the cost of hydrogen is equivalent to paying $5.60 a gallon for gasoline. ^308344257 ##### ^308344246 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1448 ###### ^308344246q Some of the ideas overlap each other. If we get a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen, for example, we might not need to worry as much about getting a magic battery. ^308344246 ##### ^308344247 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1478 ###### ^308344247q HOW WE MAKE THINGS 31 percent of 51 billion tons per year ^308344247 ##### ^308344248 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1498 ###### ^308344248q Thomas Edison tried to create entire homes built out of the stuff. He dreamed of making concrete furniture, like bedroom sets, and even tried to design a concrete record player. ^308344248 ##### ^308344249 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1554 ###### ^308344249q Making 1 ton of steel produces about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide. ^308344249 ##### ^308344250 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1563 ###### ^308344250q To make cement, you need calcium. To get calcium, you start with limestone—which contains calcium plus carbon and oxygen—and burn it in a furnace along with some other materials. ^308344250 ##### ^308344251 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1573 ###### ^308344251q Today there are more than two dozen types of plastics, and they range from the kind of thing you might expect—the polypropylene in yogurt containers, for example—to more surprising uses like the acrylic in paint, floor polish, and laundry detergent, or the microplastics in soap and shampoo, or the nylon in your waterproof jacket, or the polyester in all those regrettable clothes I wore in the 1970s. All these different types of plastics have one thing in common: They contain carbon. Carbon, it turns out, is useful in creating all sorts of different materials because it bonds easily with a wide variety of different elements; in the case of plastics, it’s usually clustered with hydrogen and oxygen. ^308344251 ##### ^308344252 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1652 ###### ^308344252q One approach is to take recycled carbon dioxide—possibly captured during the process of making cement—and inject it back into the cement before it’s used at the construction site. The company that’s pursuing this idea has several dozen customers already, including Microsoft and McDonald’s; so far it’s only able to reduce emissions by around 10 percent, though it hopes to get to 33 percent eventually. Another, more theoretical approach involves making cement out of seawater and the carbon dioxide captured from power plants. The inventors behind this idea think it could ultimately cut emissions by more than 70 percent. ^308344252 ##### ^308667891 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1662 ###### ^308667891q electrification, which is the technique of using electricity instead of fossil fuels for some industrial processes. ^308667891 ##### ^308344253 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1669 ###### ^308344253q Clean electricity would help us solve another problem too: making plastics. If enough pieces come together, plastics could one day become a carbon sink—a way to remove carbon rather than emit ^308344253 ##### ^308667892 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1675 ###### ^308667892q In effect, we’d find a way to take carbon out of the air (using plants or some other method) and put it into a bottle or other plastic product, where it would stay for decades or centuries, with no additional emissions. ^308667892 ##### ^308344254 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1692 ###### ^308344254q HOW WE GROW THINGS 19 percent of 51 billion tons a year ^308344254 ##### ^308667893 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1704 ###### ^308667893q With agriculture, the main culprit isn’t carbon dioxide but methane—which causes 28 times more warming per molecule than carbon dioxide over the course of a century—and nitrous oxide, which causes 265 times more warming. All told, each year’s emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are the equivalent of more than 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, or more than 80 percent of all the greenhouse gases in this ag/forestry/land use sector. ^308667893 ##### ^308667894 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1735 ###### ^308667894q As Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat spread around the world, and as other breeders did similar work on corn and rice, yields tripled in most areas. Starvation plummeted, and today Borlaug is widely credited with saving a billion lives. ^308667894 ##### ^308667895 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1749 ###### ^308667895q We need to produce much more food than we do today, but if we keep producing it with the same methods we use now, it will be a disaster for the climate. Assuming we don’t make any improvements in the amount of food we get per acre of pasture or cropland, growing enough to feed 10 billion people will drive up food-related emissions by two-thirds. ^308667895 ##### ^308667896 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1768 ###### ^308667896q enteric fermentation, bacteria inside the cow’s stomach break down the cellulose in the plant, fermenting it and producing methane as a result. The cow belches away most of the methane, though a little comes out the other end ^308667896 ##### ^308667897 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1777 ###### ^308667897q When poop decomposes, it releases a mix of powerful greenhouse gases—mostly nitrous oxide, plus some methane, sulfur, and ammonia. About half of poop-related emissions come from pig manure, and the rest from cow manure. There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation. ^308667897 ##### ^308667898 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1789 ###### ^308667898q better veterinary care and higher-quality feed, which means it’ll produce less methane. ^308667898 ##### ^308667899 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1791 ###### ^308667899q The same is true for handling manure; rich-world farmers have access to various techniques that get rid of the manure while producing fewer emissions. As these techniques become more affordable, they’ll spread to poor farmers, and we’ll improve our odds of driving emissions down. ^308667899 ##### ^308667900 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1865 ###### ^308667900q For millennia, humans fed their crops extra nitrogen by applying natural fertilizers like manure and bat guano. The big breakthrough came in 1908, when two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen in a factory. ^308667900 ##### ^308667901 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1881 ###### ^308667901q fertilizers were responsible for roughly 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, ^308667901 ##### ^308667902 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1884 ###### ^308667902q we could get rid of the emissions involved in making fertilizer by using clean electricity instead of fossil fuels to synthesize ammonia, but that’s an expensive process that would raise the price of fertilizer considerably. In the United States, for example, using this process to make the nitrogen-based fertilizer urea would raise its cost by more than 20 percent. ^308667902 ##### ^308667903 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1897 ###### ^308667903q one company has developed genetically modified microbes that fix nitrogen; in effect, instead of adding nitrogen via fertilizer, you add bacteria to the soil that always produce nitrogen even when it’s already present. ^308667903 ##### ^308667904 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1938 ###### ^308667904q On balance, trees in snowy areas cause more warming than cooling, because they’re darker than the snow and ice beneath them and dark things absorb more heat than light things do. On the other hand, trees in tropical forests cause more cooling than warming, because they release a lot of moisture, which becomes clouds, which reflect sunlight. Trees in the midlatitudes—between the tropics and the polar circles—are more or less a wash. ^308667904 ##### ^308344255 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1963 ###### ^308344255q HOW WE GET AROUND 16 percent of 51 billion tons a year ^308344255 ##### ^308667905 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=1990 ###### ^308667905q Although transportation isn’t the biggest cause of emissions worldwide, it is number one in the United States, ^308667905 ##### ^308667906 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2083 ###### ^308667906q Corn-based ethanol isn’t zero carbon, and depending on how it’s made, it may not even be low carbon. ^308667906 ##### ^308667907 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2139 ###### ^308667907q Medium-duty vehicles, like garbage trucks and city buses, are generally lightweight enough that electricity is a viable option for them. They also have the advantage of running relatively short routes and parking in the same place every night, so it’s easy to set up charging stations for them. ^308667907 ##### ^308667908 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2151 ###### ^308667908q According to a 2017 study by two mechanical engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, an electric cargo truck capable of going 600 miles on a single charge would need so many batteries that it would have to carry 25 percent less cargo. And a truck with a 900-mile range is out of the question: It would need so many batteries that it could hardly carry any cargo at all. ^308667908 ##### ^308667909 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2154 ###### ^308667909q a typical truck running on diesel can go more than 1,000 miles without refueling. ^308667909 ##### ^308667910 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2300 ###### ^308667910q We should also be exploring nuclear-powered container ships. The risks here are real (for example, you have to make sure the nuclear fuel doesn’t get released if the ship sinks), but many of the technical challenges have already been solved. After all, military submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power already. ^308667910 ##### ^308344256 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2326 ###### ^308344256q HOW WE KEEP COOL AND STAY WARM 7 percent of 51 billion tons a year ^308344256 ##### ^308667911 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2351 ###### ^308667911q although A/C units demand the most electricity, they’re not the largest consumers of energy in American homes and businesses. That honor goes to our furnaces and water heaters. ^308667911 ##### ^308667912 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2385 ###### ^308667912q their demand for electricity isn’t the only thing that makes air conditioners a problem. They also contain refrigerants—known as F-gases, because they contain fluorine—that leak out little by little over time when the unit ages and breaks down, as you’ve no doubt noticed if you’ve ever had to replace the coolant in your car’s air conditioner. F-gases are extremely powerful contributors to climate change: Over the course of a century, they cause thousands of times more warming than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If you don’t hear much about them, it’s because they’re not a huge percentage of greenhouse gases; in the United States, they represent about 3 percent of emissions. ^308667912 ##### ^308667913 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2401 ###### ^308667913q furnaces and water heaters account for a third of all emissions that come from the world’s buildings. ^308667913 ##### ^308667914 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2415 ###### ^308667914q You already have a heat pump in your home, and it’s probably operating right now. It’s called a refrigerator. The warm air that you feel blowing from the bottom of your fridge is what carries the heat away from your food and keeps it cool. ^308667914 ##### ^308667915 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2508 ###### ^308667915q smart glass, which automatically turns darker when the room needs to be cooler and lighter when it needs to be warmer. ^308667915 ### CHAPTER 9 ADAPTING TO A WARMER WORLD ##### ^308667917 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2604 ###### ^308667917q The best way we can help the poor adapt to climate change is to make sure they’re healthy enough to survive it. And to thrive despite it.” ^308667917 ##### ^308667918 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2637 ###### ^308667918q CGIAR isn’t just focused on new seeds. Its scientists have also created a smartphone app that allows farmers to use the camera on their phones to identify specific pests and diseases attacking cassava, an important cash crop in Africa. It’s also created programs for using drones and ground sensors to help farmers determine how much water and fertilizer their crops need. ^308667918 ##### ^308667919 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2644 ###### ^308667919q Every dollar invested in CGIAR’s research generates about $6 in benefits. ^308667919 ##### ^308667920 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2688 ###### ^308667920q Today, many city leaders in the developing world don’t have even basic maps to indicate which areas of town are most prone to floods.) ^308667920 ##### ^308667921 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2699 ###### ^308667921q We should shore up our natural defenses. Forests store and regulate water. Wetlands prevent floods and provide water for farmers and cities. Coral reefs are home to the fish that coastal communities depend on for food. But these and other natural defenses against climate change are rapidly disappearing. ^308667921 ##### ^308667922 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2703 ###### ^308667922q the world’s largest cities could save $890 million a year by restoring forests and watersheds. ^308667922 ##### ^308667923 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2721 ###### ^308667923q With enough cheap, clean energy, we can make all the potable water we’ll ever need.) ^308667923 ##### ^308667924 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2741 ###### ^308667924q There’s no way to put a price tag on everything the world needs to do to adapt to climate change. But the commission I’m involved with priced out spending in five key areas (creating early-warning systems, building climate-resilient infrastructure, raising crop yields, managing water, and protecting mangroves) and found that investing $1.8 trillion between 2020 and 2030 would return more than $7 trillion in benefits. ^308667924 ##### ^308667925 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2765 ###### ^308667925q Most approaches to geoengineering are based on the idea that to compensate for all the warming caused by greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere, we need to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth by around 1 percent. ^308667925 ### CHAPTER 10 WHY GOVERNMENT POLICIES MATTER ##### ^308667927 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2855 ###### ^308667927q National leaders around the world will need to articulate a vision for how the global economy will make the transition to zero carbon. That vision can, in turn, guide the actions of people and businesses around the world. ^308667927 ##### ^308667928 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3045 ###### ^308667928q Science tells us that in order to avoid a climate catastrophe, rich countries should reach net-zero emissions by 2050. ^308667928 ##### ^308667929 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3049 ###### ^308667929q What we can do—and need to do—in the next 10 years is adopt the policies that will put us on a path to deep decarbonization by 2050. ^308667929 # New highlights added April 19, 2022 at 2:33 PM ##### ^311801484 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2574 ###### ^311801484q The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it. ^311801484 ##### ^311801485 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2576 ###### ^311801485q As the climate gets warmer, droughts and floods will become more frequent, wiping out harvests more often. Livestock eat less and produce less meat and milk. The air and soil lose moisture, leaving less water available for plants; in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, tens of millions of acres of farmland will become substantially drier. Crop-eating pests are already infesting more acreage as they find more hospitable environments to live in. The growing season will also get shorter; at 4 degrees Celsius of warming, most of sub-Saharan Africa could see it shrink by 20 percent or more. ^311801485 ##### ^311801486 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2610 ###### ^311801486q CGIAR is the world’s largest agricultural research group: In short, it helps create better plants and better animal genetics. ^311801486 ##### ^311801487 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2634 ###### ^311801487q rice plants respond to flooding by stretching out their leaves to escape the water; if they’re underwater long enough, they expend all their energy trying to escape, and they essentially die of exhaustion. Scuba rice doesn’t have that problem: It’s got a gene called SUB1 that kicks in during a flood, making the plant dormant—so it stops stretching—until the waters recede. ^311801487 ##### ^311801488 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2709 ###### ^311801488q Mangroves are short trees that grow along coastlines, having adapted to life in salt water; they reduce storm surges, prevent coastal flooding, and protect fish habitats. All told, mangroves help the world avoid some $80 billion a year in losses from floods, ^311801488 ##### ^311801489 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2755 ###### ^311801489q Climate scientists have identified many tipping points that could dramatically increase the rate at which climate change happens—for instance, if the ice-like crystalline structures containing large amounts of methane on the ocean floor become unstable and erupt. ^311801489 ##### ^311801490 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2832 ###### ^311801490q “policy” is a vague, dull-sounding word. A big breakthrough like a new type of battery would be sexier than the policies that led some chemist to invent it. But the breakthrough wouldn’t even exist without a government spending tax dollars on research, policies designed to drive that research out of the lab and into the market, and regulations that created markets and made it easy to deploy at scale. ^311801490 ##### ^311801491 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2873 ###### ^311801491q The first microwave oven hit the market in 1955. It cost, in today’s dollars, nearly $12,000. ^311801491 ##### ^311801492 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2882 ###### ^311801492q Companies in the energy business spend an average of just 0.3 percent of their revenue on energy R&D. The electronics and pharmaceutical industries, by contrast, spend nearly 10 percent and 13 percent, respectively. ^311801492 ##### ^311801493 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2888 ###### ^311801493q the government’s role is to invest in R&D when the private sector won’t because it can’t see how it will make a profit. ^311801493 ##### ^311801494 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2909 ###### ^311801494q The idea isn’t to punish people for their greenhouse gases; it’s to create an incentive for inventors to create competitive carbon-free alternatives. By progressively increasing the price of carbon to reflect its true cost, governments can nudge producers and consumers toward more efficient decisions ^311801494 ##### ^311801495 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=2938 ###### ^311801495q in communities where extracting coal or natural gas is a big part of the local economy, it’s understandable that people worry about how the transition might make it harder for them to make ends meet. The fact that they voice those worries doesn’t make them climate change deniers. You don’t have to be a political scientist to think that national leaders who champion getting to zero will find more support for their ideas if they understand the concerns of families and communities whose livelihoods will be hit hard and if they take those concerns seriously. ^311801495 # New highlights added April 25, 2022 at 6:33 PM ##### ^313029675 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3067 ###### ^313029675q if you want a measuring stick for which countries are making progress on climate change and which ones aren’t, don’t simply look for the ones that are reducing their emissions. Look for the ones that are setting themselves up to get to zero. ^313029675 ##### ^313029676 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3083 ###### ^313029676q Innovation is not just a matter of inventing a new machine or some new process; it’s also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new inventions come to life and reach a global scale. ^313029676 ##### ^313029677 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3152 ###### ^313029677q we need governments to commit to funding mega-scale projects (in the range of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars) that can advance the science of clean energy—especially in the areas I listed above. And they need to commit to funding them for the long haul so that researchers know they’ll have a steady flow of support for years to come. ^313029677 ##### ^313029678 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3155 ###### ^313029678q There’s a practical distinction between blue-sky research into novel scientific concepts (also called basic research) and efforts to take scientific discoveries and make them useful (what’s known as applied or translational research). ^313029678 ##### ^313029679 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3199 ###### ^313029679q Governments can play a huge role by adopting zero-carbon policies and shaping the way markets attract money for these projects. A few principles: Government policies should be technology neutral (benefiting any solutions that reduce emissions, rather than a few favored ones), predictable (as opposed to regularly expiring and then getting extended, as happens frequently now), and flexible (so that many different companies and investors can take advantage of them, not just those with large federal tax bills). ^313029679 ##### ^313029680 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3227 ###### ^313029680q the value of a carbon price is that by raising the cost of fossil fuels, it tells the market that there will be extra costs associated with products that emit greenhouse gas emissions. Where the revenue from this carbon price goes is not as important as the market signal sent by the price itself. Many economists argue that the money can be returned to consumers or businesses to cover the resulting increase in energy prices, though there’s also a strong argument that it should go to R&D and other incentives to help solve climate change. In the longer term, as we get closer to net-zero emissions, the carbon price could be set at the cost of direct air capture, and the revenues could be used to pay for pulling carbon out of the air. ^313029680 ##### ^313029681 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3268 ###### ^313029681q Local governments play an important role in determining how buildings are constructed and what kinds of energy they use, whether buses and police cars run on electricity, whether there’s a charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, and how waste gets managed. Most state or provincial governments have a central role in regulating electricity, planning infrastructure like roads and bridges, and selecting the materials that go into these projects. National governments generally have authority over activities that cross state or international borders, so they write the rules that shape electricity markets, adopt pollution regulations, and create standards for vehicles and fuels. They also have enormous procurement power, are the primary source of fiscal incentives, and usually fund more public R&D than any other level of government. ^313029681 ##### ^313029682 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3291 ###### ^313029682q U.S. emissions would be about 8 percent higher if you included all the products that Americans consume but are made elsewhere. Britain’s would be about 40 percent higher.) ^313029682 ##### ^313029683 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3397 ###### ^313029683q When somebody wants toast for breakfast, we need to make sure there’s a system in place that can deliver the bread, the toaster, and the electricity to run the toaster without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We aren’t going to solve the climate problem by telling people not to eat toast. ^313029683 ##### ^313029684 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3400 ###### ^313029684q engaging in the political process is the most important single step that people from every walk of life can take to help avoid a climate disaster. ^313029684 ##### ^313029685 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3473 ###### ^313029685q Some big companies now impose a carbon tax on each of their divisions. These companies aren’t paying lip service to reducing emissions. They’re helping products get out of the lab and into the market, because the revenue from internal taxes can go directly to activities that reduce the Green Premiums and help create a market for the clean-energy products those firms will need. ^313029685 ##### ^313029686 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3480 ###### ^313029686q Companies should reprioritize their R&D work, particularly on low-carbon innovations, many of which will require long-term commitments. Larger companies can partner with government researchers to bring practical commercial experience to research efforts. ^313029686 ##### ^313029687 highlight_tags:: [[lastlines]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07YRY461Y&location=3518 ###### ^313029687q I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and because I know what people can accomplish. I’m profoundly inspired by all the passion I see, especially among young people, for solving this problem. If we keep our eye on the big goal—getting to zero—and we make serious plans to achieve that goal, we can avoid a disaster. We can keep the climate bearable for everyone, help hundreds of millions of poor people make the most of their lives, and preserve the planet for generations to come. ^313029687