When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.
Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.
Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a day – and overestimate what they can accomplish in a year.
The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it.
To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar.
The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That’s the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions – but not eliminate them – won’t do it.
The point is that when we focus on all three things at once – technology, policies, and markets – we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast.
Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm.
Whatever other resources you may have, you can always use your voice and your vote to effect change.
If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and then imagine spreading the pain out over a much longer period of time.
It may sound old-fashioned, but letters and phone calls to your elected officials can have a real impact.
The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.
But I hope you’ll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you’re in favor of than opposing whatever you’re against.
There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.
How many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus by climate change?
But we can’t solve a problem like climate change without an honest accounting of how much we need to do and what obstacles we need to overcome.
Solar cells, for example, got almost 10 times cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11 percent in 2019 alone.
But giving people more information can help them make better choices.
During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle.
Earlier, I mentioned a related technology called direct air capture. It involves exactly what the name implies: capturing carbon directly from the air. DAC is more flexible than point capture, because you can do it anywhere. And in all likelihood, it’ll be a crucial part of getting to zero; one study by the National Academy of Sciences found that we’ll need to be removing about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by mid-century and about 20 billion by the end of the century.
In essence, governments can say to each other, “If you want to do business with us, you’ll have to take climate change seriously.