Quotes from Bill Gates

The Gates Foundation's whole approach to saving lives is based on the idea that we need to be pushing innovation for the poor while also increasing demand for it.

Getting all the world's electricity from clean sources won't be easy. Today, fossil fuels account for two-thirds of all electricity generated worldwide. (bp Statistical Review of World Energy 2020)

The earth is warming, it's warming because of human activity, and the impact is bad and will get much worse. We have every reason to believe that at some point the impact will be catastrophic. Will that point come in 30 years? Fifty years? We don't know precisely. But given how hard the problem will be to solve, even if the worst case is 50 years away, we need to act now.

TerraPower's

I'm glad I've invested all that time learning about electricity. For one thing, it was a great father-son activity. (Seriously.)

Although we can predict the course of broad trends, like "there will be more hot days" and "sea levels will go up," we can't with certainty blame climate change for any particular event. For example, when there's a heat wave, we can't say whether it was caused by climate change alone. What we can do, though, is say how much climate change increased the odds of that heat wave happening.

The vision is about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what's going on so they can do a lot more than they've done in the past

The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases.

In climate terms, a change of just a few degrees is a big deal. 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. It's

At Breakthrough Energy, we fund only technologies that could remove at least 500 million tons a year if they're successful and fully implemented. That's roughly 1 percent of global emissions. Technologies that will never exceed 1 percent shouldn't compete for the limited resources we have for getting to zero. There may be other good reasons to pursue them, but significantly reducing emissions won't be one of them.

fission, carbon capture and sequestration, offshore wind, cellulosic ethanol (a type of advanced biofuel), and meat alternatives.

It was one thing to divest from companies to fight apartheid, a political institution that would (and did) respond to economic pressure. It's another thing to transform the world's energy system—an industry worth roughly $5 trillion a year and the basis for the modern economy—just by selling the stocks of fossil-fuel companies.

Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford's production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.

And it's hard to foresee a future where we decarbonize our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power. In 2018, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed nearly 1,000 scenarios for getting to zero in the United States; all the cheapest paths involved using a power source that's clean and always available—that is, one like nuclear power.

Besides, making electricity accounts for only 27 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we had a huge breakthrough in batteries, we would still need to get rid of the other 73 percent.

How much stuff does it take to build and run a power plant? That depends on the type of plant. Nuclear is the most efficient, using much less material per unit of electricity generated than other sources do.

Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.

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.

Why don't all gases act this way? Because molecules with two copies of the same atom—for example, nitrogen or oxygen molecules—let radiation pass straight through them. Only molecules made up of different atoms, the way carbon dioxide and methane are, have the right structure to absorb radiation and start heating up.

Because every bit of carbon we put into the atmosphere adds to the greenhouse effect. There's no getting around physics.

Keep in mind that this isn't fake meat. Cultivated meat has all the same fat, muscles, and tendons as any animal on two or four legs. But rather than growing up on a farm, it's created in a lab.

What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.

But Germany produced about 10 times more solar in June 2018 than it did in December 2018.

How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7%