Name: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
ISBN: 9780593215777

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

"Bill Gates shares what he's learned in more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address the problems, and sets out a vision for how the world can build the tools it needs to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions. Bill Gates explains why he cares so deeply about climate change and what makes him optimistic that the world can avoid the most dire effects of the climate crisis. Gates says, "We can work on a local, national, and global level to build the technologies, businesses, and industries to avoid the worst impacts of climate change." His interest in climate change is a natural outgrowth of the efforts by his foundation to reduce poverty and disease. Climate change, according to Gates, will have the biggest impact on the people who have done the least to cause it. As a technologist, he has seen firsthand how innovation can change the world. By investing in research, inventing new technologies, and by deploying them quickly at large scale, Gates believes climate change can be addressed in meaningful ways. According to Gates, "to prevent the worst effects of climate change, we have to get to net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases.

What Hacker News says

insane_dreamerJan 2026

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster has a pretty good summary of the challenges and solutions.

There is developing real practical solutions, and then there there is the willingness of governments, big corporations, and the general population, to implement real practical solutions. The latter is much much harder than the former.

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jebarkerJul 2025

Thanks for the suggestion. Two I’ve already read that I thought were decent were Bill Gate’s “How to avoid a climate disaster” and Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future”. I have Drawdown next on my list.

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frafraAug 2024

Short answer: no, they are not (read footnotes 1 and 2)

CAISO, 1st column, 1st bar: - blue is the cost of solar - beige is the cost of firming intermittency using gas

CAISO, 2nd column, 1st bar: - blue is the cost of solar+battery (max 4 hours) - beige is the cost of firming intermittency using gas

Using batteries improves the ELCC (contribution to meet peak demand), but it is not enough, so it has to be compensated somehow. Want to get a higher ELCC? Get a larger battery (and install more solar panels). Be aware, this is not a linear relationship: getting from 10 % to 20 % of renewables is cheaper than getting from 70 % to 80 % (this is why the costs are lower when the penetration rate shown in the slide is low). You reach a point where you just waste energy or need to pay to use it, like in Germany, Netherlands or Denmark.

There is no best energy source. There are different networks, energy mixes, needs, etc. Under CAISO, it is just more convenient to go with nuclear. Under SPP, solar has a very high ELCC and a very low penetration, which makes it convenient just to install solar, but up to which percentage?

Overall, some mix of renewables and nuclear, depending on the network, seems a reasonable solution. Otherwise we would need to go with fossil power plants to meet the remaining demand (carbon capture seems wishful thinking) or to over provision renewables while building incredibly large storage systems (be aware that there are places where fluctuation are not on a daily or weekly basis, but on a seasonal basis - good luck storing the energy for ~3 months using lithium ion batteries because you live in a polar region).

The book "How to avoid a climate disaster" (Bill Gates) has a chapter just for that. I would recommend it.

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gravitronicNov 2023

> pv uses orders of magnitude more land per megawatt

Glad we agree

If anyone's reading this and wants a decent resource I suggest Bill Gates's book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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gravitronicSep 2023

There's other significant issues, such as concrete.

Read Bill Gates' "how to avoid a climate disaster" for a complete rundown, with receipts.

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kerkeslagerMay 2023

> One of my favorite climate change books is How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates, in which he outlines where the biggest opportunities lie. His approach seems far more practical and likely to make a dent in the problem.

This is one of your favorite books, and it literally, explicitly disagrees with what you're saying?

One of the core points of that book is that reducing emissions is not enough--we have to eliminate emissions, not reduce them, and investing in reduction solutions may in fact prevent eliminating emissions. Natural gas is literally the example he gives of this. He notes that natural gas is a minor carbon emitter compared to other fossil fuels, but continued investment in natural gas means that we'll still be emitting carbon in 2050, which is his target date for eliminating carbon emissions. That reduction won't be enough--elimination is the only solution.

I mean, dude, it's in the Wikipedia summary. Why would you cite this without at least putting in 30 seconds to investigate whether it supports what you're saying?

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