Quotes from Bill Gates

That's nearly 600 pounds for every person in the country. And we're not even the biggest consumers of the stuff—that would be China, which installed more concrete in the first 16 years of the 21st century than the United States did in the entire 20th century!

In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it's 40 percent. That's bad for people who don't have enough to eat, bad for the economy, and bad for the climate. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

All told, fertilizers were responsible for roughly 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, and the number will probably rise to 1.7 billion tons by mid-century

To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.

And it's a huge boon for animal welfare whenever fewer livestock are being kept in small cages.

the math suggests you'd need somewhere around 50 acres' worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime. Multiply that by the population of the United States, and you get more than 16 billion acres, or 25 million square miles, roughly half the landmass of the world.

What's now known as the Haber-Bosch process made it possible to create synthetic fertilizer, greatly expanding both the amount of food that could be grown and the range of geographies where it could be grown.

la estrategia más eficaz para luchar contra el cambio climático consiste en dejar de talar tantos árboles que ya existen.

For the most part, you can get trees to grow only in places where they've already grown, so planting them could help undo the damage caused by deforestation. But there's no practical way to plant enough of them to deal with the problems caused by burning fossil fuels. The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have.

It's mind-blowing how cheap and effective masks are. This is a little hard to admit, because the power of inventing things is so central to my worldview, but it's true: We may never devise a cheaper, more effective way to block the transmission of certain respiratory viruses than a piece of inexpensive material with a couple of elastic straps sewn onto it.

But California is a dramatic example of what's going on. Wildfires now occur there five times more often than in the 1970s, largely because the fire season is getting longer and the forests there now contain much more dry wood that's likely to burn.

Although transportation isn't the biggest cause of emissions worldwide, it is number one in the United States, and it has been for a few years now, just ahead of making electricity. We Americans drive and fly a lot.

How quickly do we need to get to zero? Science tells us that in order to avoid a climate catastrophe, rich countries should reach net-zero emissions by 2050. You've probably heard people say we can decarbonize deeply even sooner—by 2030.

that a lot? Over the past decade, we've added an average of 22 gigawatts a year. Now we need to install more than three times that much each year, and keep up the pace for the next three decades.

Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more.

Another, more theoretical approach involves making cement out of seawater and the carbon dioxide captured from power plants. The inventors behind this idea think it could ultimately cut emissions by more than 70 percent.

The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have.

Consider what it took to achieve this 5 percent reduction. A million people died, and tens of millions were put out of work. To put it mildly, this was not a situation that anyone would want to continue or repeat. And yet the world's greenhouse gas emissions probably dropped just 5 percent, and possibly less than that. What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

The Green Premiums answer these questions, measuring the cost of getting to zero, sector by sector, and highlighting where we need to innovate

When you use carbon dioxide equivalents, you aren't fully accounting for this important short-term effect.

I didn't think it was fair for anyone to tell Indians that their children couldn't have lights to study by, or that thousands of Indians should die in heat waves because installing air conditioners is bad for the environment. The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.

It's aviation, trucking, and shipping—not passenger cars—that account for all the emissions growth in this sector.

The reason the world emits so much greenhouse gas is that—as long as you ignore the long-term damage they do—our current energy technologies are by and large the cheapest ones available. So moving our immense energy economy from "dirty," carbon-emitting technologies to ones with zero emissions will cost something.