How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
(Knopf, $27)
Bill Gates, the Mr. Fixit of mega-billionaires, has just handed us a blueprint for how to address “the most alarming crisis of all,” said The Economist. Global warming, the philanthropist and Microsoft founder warns, poses an existential threat that requires reducing annual global carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. But How to Avoid a Climate Disaster isn’t a scare screed. Rather, “the most refreshing aspect of this book is its bracing mix of cold-eyed realism and number-crunched optimism.” Today, the world produces 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases, and Gates argues that zeroing it out will require technological innovation and breakthroughs that make noncarbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels. He advocates quintupling R&D spending to meet the 2050 goals—but points out how modest such spending would still be.
Gates actually overestimates the true costs, said Bill McKibben in The New York Times. For a guy who has access to the world’s finest experts, he’s “surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts.” Perhaps because he buys the fictions pushed by the fossil-fuel industry, he seems to have missed an “astonishing” drop in the price of solar and wind power over the past decade that will soon make it cheaper to build solar and wind facilities than to keep a coal-burning plant running. But Gates also appears “curiously unaware of or indifferent to” the arguments against