How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

By Bill Gates

Penguin Random House/February 2021

Reviewed by Elizabeth May

March 7, 2021

Can billionaires save the world? Whenever I hear of a sustainability scheme from someone both obscenely wealthy and professing big ideas, I get nervous. Take Elon Musk, for example. I am very happy that he has moved the dial on electric vehicles by making them hot and sexy. The Tesla has changed the landscape in a way the Nissan Leaf could never have done. But when Elon Musk talks about a colony on Mars, I figure he’s not banking on planet Earth remaining habitable.

Any veneration of the billionaire class makes me queasy. It may be reduced post-pandemic. During this epic crisis, we’ve not been banging our pots and pans for billionaires, but for the underpaid and marginal front-line workers — from nurses to the people who stock the supermarket shelves. Our perspective on the value of work may have changed. I sense a shift to questions about why we have a tax structure that allows so few to amass so much wealth to the obvious detriment of multitudes. The conversation about Guaranteed Livable Income is gathering momentum, as is the movement for a wealth tax.

The latest billionaire to take on a Big Question is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions we Have and the Breakthroughs we Need

Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation have done much famously good work. As a Rotarian, I am very hopeful that Rotary International, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, may actually eliminate polio — for good and everywhere.

For now, I will plunge into an appraisal of Bill Gates, climate campaigner.

For the most part, Gates has the climate issue, the science and the solutions more right than wrong. That makes this a very worthwhile book. A book by Bill Gates will be read by people who would not read a (better) climate change book by Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Mann or George Monbiot. With this book, Bill Gates establishes that he knows a lot more about both the climate crisis and its solutions than he used to.

Gates confesses much with a welcome transparency. He admits freely that, as a geeky, enormously wealthy man with a penchant for flying in his own private jet, he is “an imperfect messenger on climate change.” He reveals that he got interested in climate change in 2006, a fact that shocked me, as it is 20 years after the world started to notice and governments started to make pledges. He was evidently focused elsewhere for the 1992 Earth Summit, the 1997 negotiations in Kyoto, and the 2005 hurricane called Katrina. He found a reason to be concerned about climate change through his work in the developing world, realizing how desperately much of humanity needs access to electricity and coming up against a carbon-constrained world.

For the most part, Gates has the climate issue, the science and the solutions more right than wrong. That makes this a very worthwhile book.

Seeking solutions, Gates works by trial-and-error. Unlike most of us, his trial-and-error technique often involves plunking $50 million down in an investment and seeing if it falls flat or makes him another $50 million. (That’s an actual example in the book of his failed bet on a company converting biomass to bio-fuel. It sounds like an Iogen-type technology for cellulosic ethanol, but he didn’t give the details except that it was a US company. He has also invested in British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering, a direct air capture carbon removal enterprise).

What he gets right is that we have to get to zero. We emit 51 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year and we have to get to zero. What he does not adequately explore is how fast we have to do this. He makes no mention of the growing risk of tipping points to an unstoppable, self-accelerating runaway global warming crisis. He does convey urgency, but with a techno-optimist glow that left me wondering if he realizes we must cut emissions globally in half by 2030, or we lose the bet on the human race having been a good idea.

On forests, he nails it. “The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees that we already have.” And he correctly focuses on how critical it is that we replant the mangrove forests of the world.

My frustration was with the internal contradictions and errors that tended towards an underestimation of renewable energy’s potential. It is through those errors that the case for nuclear energy gets made. (Again, he helpfully explains his large investments in nuclear energy).

For example, on solar energy, Gates downplays how fast the price for solar photovoltaics continues to decline. New solar is now cheaper than new coal plants. Meanwhile, he makes a rookie error in calculating how much space solar will occupy by assuming vast fields of solar arrays in greenfield sites, while ignoring the obvious imperative to get solar panels on every roof possible, as fast as possible. Every time we install more solar, we bring down the price.

On solar energy, Gates downplays how fast the price for solar photovoltaics continues to decline. New solar is now cheaper than new coal plants.

In the same way, he has an internally inconsistent argument about batteries, first calculating the cost for storing renewable energy as though the only available option is lithium batteries. He calculates the cost of batteries to run Tokyo for three days at $400 billion. Pages later he gets around to mentioning the world’s current elegant technology for energy storage. It reads as an afterthought, having dismissed batteries, he throws in a page on pumped storage. It will not amount to much, he writes, because it has not already amounted to much in the United States. Had he looked to Europe, he would have seen a renaissance in pumped storage with plants of 1000MW planned for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And they are being planned to store renewable energy from offshore wind and solar.

What he gets right is terribly important. It aligns completely with the Green Party’s plan for 60 percent cuts in GHG against 2005 levels by 2030, or Mission Possible (with the tiny modification that Mission Possible relies on soil, green things and other nature-based solutions for carbon capture):

1. Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation.
2. Get that electricity from a power grid that has been decarbonized. This will also take a lot of innovation.
3. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this.
4. Use materials more efficiently. Same

This is a good time for a reasonably good climate book for an American audience. It is likely to help build a consensus for the new Biden commitment for meaningful climate action.

I do hope the folks in the Prime Minister’s Office take note and start getting ready to double targets and efforts at home.

Contributing Writer Elizabeth May, former Leader of the Green Party of Canada, is the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands.

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– Mark Twain

I just read two recent political pot-boilers, back to back.  If this fiction is stranger than the truth, we are in real trouble.

Given the pathetic state of the national news media, with so few reporters allowed the time and resources to actually uncover news, it may be that the clearest truth about what is happening in Ottawa will come from our fiction.

Reading these books in sequence was purely coincidental.  Linda Svendsen’s publishers had been kind enough to send me a copy of her book “Sussex Drive – Inside the backrooms and the bedrooms of the nation,” last fall when it was released.  It was in my pile of books I wanted to read, but went to the top of the pile thanks to a conversation I had at the Galiano Island Writers Festival.  Annabel Lyon (BC writer of The Golden Mean, nominated for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s award for literature, and winning the Rogers fiction prize, and its sequel The Sweet Girl) and I started chatting at the Galiano Island festival and she highly recommended Svendsen’s new novel.  I had just started Sussex Drive when one of my favourite Hill reporters, Stephen Maher (half of the MacGregor-Maher team working on the robocalls scandal) came out with his first novel, Deadline.

Both books revolve around life on Parliament Hill.  Both are clearly fiction, with events outside even my most cynical take on what goes on in Ottawa.  (Cars blowing up, murders, blackmailing etc.)  Still the story lines of both track very closely to real-life events.

Sussex Drive features a nasty Prime Minister who prorogues Parliament twice and a fashionable Governor General from a small African country who has to grapple with the decisions.  Deadline has Auditor General reports accusing the government of zero-record keeping and waste of money in building new prisons, as well as shady dealings of Chinese State owned Enterprises buying up the oil sands. Both involve a lot of blackberry messages.  However, it is not the plot line nor the fictitious events and personalities that make me see both books as speaking to a larger truth.  Even the banal details assume a level of cynicism in politics, a manipulation of media, and a persistent effort to keep the public in the dark that ring very true.

I heartily recommend both as great reads — entertaining, page-turners that would also make successful Canadian movies.  Still, there is something in Svendsen’s prose that made me stop and wonder how she so accurately knows the threats to our democracy:

“It was clear now that she could do nothing at all to help Canada. Its democracy has early-onset Alzheimer’s. Its democracy was in a media-induced ethical coma; it had permanent parliamentary amnesia…”

Maybe fiction can help wake us up.

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On November 26, I was home in the riding and on Salt Spring Island. The primary purpose for my being on Salt Spring on that rainy Saturday was to be at an event sponsored by the Institute for Child Honouring, created by my dear friend and notable eco-troubadour, Raffi.  Another friend, Pummy Kaur, heard I would be in the area and asked if I could manage to fit in her book launch.  Easy as pie.

So on November 26th at the lovely venue of Jill Louise Campbell’s fine art gallery in Ganges, a supportive crowd gathered for the launch of Pummy’s newest book, A Season of Non-Violence: 64 Ways for 64 Days.  Pummy was born in India to a Sikh family in a Hindu state, influenced by Muslims and then sent to Catholic school. Quite the range of influences!  Her first book, What Would Gandhi Do? Simple Solutions to Global Problems gave voice to the relationship between all the major global issues and our daily choices, with solutions based on Gandhian principals.  In her new book, she chose the anniversary dates of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (January 30) to the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s (April 4) as book ends for what she describes as a “season of non-violence.”  The book’s premise is that a world of non-violence is a great deal more than a world without wars, and offers 64 concrete spiritual and not quite spiritual practices to move toward a culture of non-violence.  The book has inspirational quotes from everyone from Mother Theresa to Benjamin Franklin to the Sermon on the Mount.  For “ways” she suggests everything from “recycling” to “NOT recycling” (a plea for reducing consumption), to “hug four people a day.”

During the launch, I described how I tried to embrace non-violent communication in the House of Commons.  I shared an example of how I dealt with what I had found to be extremely offensive remarks from government MPs in the (abbreviated) debate on the Omnibus Crime Bill.  Every time an Opposition MP criticized the idea of mandatory minimum sentences (and the billions required to build new prisons to house the increasing numbers of our fellow citizens to face mandatory incarceration), the government MPs would accuse us of caring more about criminals than about victims of crime.  To keep my pledge to myself, to always speak respectfully toward other MPs, I criticized what “government MPs have been forced by their talking points to say.” I did not sense that any of the government MPs took it personally when I described why I found such an accusation offensive.

As we talked about the importance of taking the personally nasty out of politics, someone in the room said, “Wouldn’t it be great if every MP had a copy of A Season of Non-Violence?”  I said I would love to give it to very MP for Christmas, and suddenly every one was chipping in and making pledges.  Pummy’s publisher gave us a deep discount and the boxes of books began to pile up in my Parliament Hill office.

So before the House rose for the holidays, every MP got a card wishing them “Peace in Parliament” and explaining that the enclosed book was a gift from my constituents in Saanich-Gulf Islands, as well as a third generation Conservative from Surrey who donated 60 books.  Quite a few MPs (of all parties) came over to thank me, and I could genuinely say my own role in the gift had been pretty minimal.

May 2012 bring greater peace and harmony.  Let us all be the change we want to see in the world.

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