How To Avoid A Climate Disaster

How To Avoid A Climate Disaster is Bill Gates’ plea to the individuals, governments, and business leaders of the world to reduce greenhouse emissions by changing the way we make things, plug in, grow things, get around, and keep warm and cool.

One of the best places to begin is our electricity consumption. That’s because it has such a big impact in the other categories that the effects can be widespread.

The reason we still use fossil fuels for electricity is that they’re more efficient than planet-safe alternatives like nuclear and hydroelectric. Although these options have some drawbacks that make them difficult, they will be worth it in the end.

Nuclear, for instance, has had its name unfairly tainted by disasters like what happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima. But if we compare death rates, nuclear is still much less deadly than fossil fuels.

Wind and solar are also tough because they’re not constant. We’ll need big, expensive batteries to store excess energy when they produce a lot so we can use it at other times when these sources don’t produce well.

To fix this, we need to not worry so much about innovating to be more efficient at alternative energy sources. Instead, we need to find new ways to update our outdated infrastructure like power grids that still rely on fossil fuels.

If we can find ways to change these over to renewables and supplement any deficiencies with nuclear power we will be well on our way to net-zero emissions!

Green Premiums are the additional cost necessary to switch an energy source to more climate-friendly options. Concrete, for example, costs about $125 to make. If we used carbon capture technology to make it cleaner, it would be upwards of $300. That’s a 140% increase! Only when we know these numbers can we focus our research and funding to make the switch more cost-effective. When it comes to transportation, we’ve already made some progress. Public transportation in many areas has already been electrified, like in Shenzhen, China where every one of its 16,000 busses is electric. Shorter travel requirements like this are easy to fix. It’s the longer ones like planes and trucking that will be more difficult and expensive. If we want to move to the use of batteries, this presents a whole lot of issues with weight. To make the same amount of energy as gasoline, your battery would need to be 35 times heavier than the gas! Instead, we can look to biofuels and electrofuels, which derive energy from plants and combining carbon dioxide with hydrogen in water, respectively. Currently, however, their green premiums are 106% for biofuels and 237% for electrofuels. This means we’ve got to invest…