How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates — Notes

Sohil Gupta

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Dec 14, 2021

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1. Around the world, there are roughly a billion cattle raised for beef and dairy. The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4 percent of all global emissions.
2. There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation.
3. In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent.
4. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.
5. Along with Norman Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat and new varieties of corn and rice, synthetic fertilizer was a key factor in the agricultural revolution that changed the world in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s been estimated that if we couldn’t make synthetic fertilizer, the world’s population would be 40 to 50 percent smaller than it is.
6. Fertilizer provides plants with essential nutrients, including phosphorus, potassium, and the one that’s especially relevant to climate change: nitrogen.
7. Fertilizers were responsible for roughly 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, and the number will probably rise to 1.7 billion tons by mid-century.
8. There’s more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined.
9. the American-style diet is responsible for almost as many emissions as all the energy Americans use in generating electricity, manufacturing, transportation, and buildings.
10. How much carbon dioxide can a tree absorb in its lifetime? It varies, but a good rule of thumb is 4 tons over the course of 40 years.
11. You’d need somewhere around 50 acres’ worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime. Multiply that by the population of the United States, and you get more than 16 billion acres, or 25 million square miles, roughly half the landmass of the world.

CHAPTER 7 HOW WE GET AROUND

1. 16 percent of 51 billion tons a year
2. Gas contains an amazing amount of energy — you’d need to bundle 130 sticks of dynamite together to get as much energy as a single gallon of gas contains.
3. Gasoline is cheaper than Dasani bottled water, yogurt, honey, laundry detergent, maple syrup, hand sanitizer, latte from Starbucks, Red Bull energy drink, olive oil, and the famously low-cost Charles Shaw wine
4. Transportation contributes only 16 percent of global emissions, ranking fourth behind how we make things, plug in, and grow things.
5. Although transportation isn’t the biggest cause of emissions worldwide, it is number one in the United States, and it has been for a few years now, just ahead of making electricity. We Americans drive and fly a lot.
6. For the first 99.9 percent of human history, we managed to move around without relying on fossil fuels at all. We walked, rode animals, and put ships under sail. Then, in the early 1800s, we figured out how to run locomotives and steamboats on coal, and we never looked back. Within the century, trains were crossing entire continents and ships were moving people and products across the oceans. The gas-powered automobile came along in the late 19th century, followed in the early 20th century by the commercial air travel that would become so essential to today’s global economy.
7. It’s aviation, trucking, and shipping — not passenger cars — that account for all the emissions growth in this sector.
8. Maritime shipping now handles nine-tenths of the goods traded around the world by volume, producing nearly 3 percent of global emissions.
9. passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs, motorcycles, and such) are responsible for almost half the emissions. Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles — everything from garbage trucks to 18-wheelers — account for another 30 percent. Airplanes add in a tenth of all emissions, as do container ships and other marine vessels, with trains accounting for the last bit.

1. There are about a billion cars on the road around the world.
2. In 2018 alone, we added roughly 24 million passenger cars, after accounting for the ones that got retired.
3. With the price of today’s batteries, EV owners save money only if gas costs more than around $3 per gallon.
4. The city of Shenzhen, China — home to 12 million people — has electrified its entire fleet of more than 16,000 buses and nearly two-thirds of its taxis.
5. Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline. In other words, to get the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas, you’ll need batteries that weigh 35 times more than the gas.
6. 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.
7. A typical truck running on diesel can go more than 1,000 miles without refueling.
8. When a jet takes off, the fuel it’s carrying accounts for 20 to 40 percent of its weight.
9. You’d need 35 times more batteries by weight to get the same energy as jet fuel.
10. The bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity as your power source.
11. The best all-electric plane on the market can carry two passengers, reach a top speed of 210 miles per hour, and fly for 3 hours before recharging.
12. A mid-capacity Boeing 787 can carry 296 passengers, reach up to 650 miles an hour, and fly for nearly 20 hours before stopping for fuel.
13. A fossil-fuel-powered jetliner can fly more than three times as fast, for six times as long, and carry nearly 150 times as many people as the best electric plane on the market.
14. The best conventional container ships can carry 200 times more cargo than either of the two electric ships now in operation, and they can run routes that are 400 times longer.
15. Shipping alone accounts for 3 percent of all emissions.
16. military submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power already.

CHAPTER 8 HOW WE KEEP COOL AND STAY WARM

1. 7 percent of 51 billion tons a year
2. Malaria kills 400,000 people a year, most of them children.
3. All the electricity used by buildings — for air-conditioning as well as lights, computers, and so on — is responsible for nearly 14 percent of all greenhouse gases.
4. Together, furnaces and water heaters account for a third of all emissions that come from the world’s buildings.
5. We’ll add 2.5 trillion square feet of buildings by 2060, the equivalent of putting up another New York City every month for 40 years.
6. Smart glass, which automatically turns darker when the room needs to be cooler and lighter when it needs to be warmer.

CHAPTER 9 ADAPTING TO A WARMER WORLD

1. 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.
2. Urban areas are home to more than half the people on earth
3. Making water out of thin air — A solar powered dehumidifier with advanced filtering system to filter out air pollution costs thousands of dollars today.
4. 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.
5. Sunlight is absorbed by the earth at a rate of about 240 watts per square meter. There’s enough carbon in the atmosphere now to absorb heat at an average rate of about 2 watts per square meter. So we need to make the sun dimmer by 2/240, or 0.83 percent. However, because clouds would adjust to solar geoengineering, we would actually need to dim the sun a bit more, to about 1 percent of the incoming sunlight. If the amount of carbon in the atmosphere doubles, it would absorb heat at a rate of about 4 watts per square meter, and we would need to double the dimming to about 2 percent.
6. To get the 1 percent reduction of sunlight, we’d only need to brighten clouds that cover 10 percent of the earth’s area by 10 percent.

CHAPTER 10 WHY GOVERNMENT POLICIES MATTER

1. In 2019 America exported more energy than it imported for the first time in nearly 70 years.
2. 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.
3. We can reduce Green Premiums by making carbon-free things cheaper (which involves technical innovation), by making carbon-emitting things more expensive (which involves policy innovation), or by doing some of both.

CHAPTER 11 A PLAN FOR GETTING TO ZERO

1. Technologies needed: Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon, Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season, Electrofuels, Advanced biofuels, Zero-carbon cement, Zero-carbon steel, Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy, Zero-carbon fertilizer, Next-generation nuclear fission, Nuclear fusion, Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture), Underground electricity transmission, Zero-carbon plastics, Geothermal plastics, Pumped hydro, Thermal storage ,Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops, Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil, Coolants that don’t contain F-gases
2. government funding for clean energy R&D amounts to about $22 billion per year, only around 0.02 percent of the global economy. Americans spend more than that on gasoline in a single month. The United States, which is by far the largest investor in clean energy research, spends only about $7 billion per year.