Quotes from Bill Gates

How much power does it take? The world 5,000 gigawatts The United States 1,000 gigawatts Mid-size city 1 gigawatt Small town 1 megawatt Average American house 1 kilowatt

To sum up, the path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. Get that electricity from a power grid that's been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. Use materials more efficiently. Same.

Nuclear fission. Here's the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It's the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.

The United States gets around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants; France has the highest share in the world, getting 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear. Remember that by comparison solar and wind together provide about 7 percent worldwide.

Y'all feel like playing Minecraft on the Xbox 360?

High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R., and Fukushima in Japan put a spotlight on all these risks. There are real problems that led to those disasters, but instead of getting to work on solving those problems, we just stopped trying to advance the field.

If you could pick just one thing to lower the price of, to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy.

Nuclear fusion. There's another, entirely different approach to nuclear power that's quite promising but still at least a decade away from supplying electricity to consumers. Instead of getting energy by splitting atoms apart, as fission does, it involves pushing them together, or fusing them.

And consider how long it took for oil to become a big part of our energy supply. We started producing it commercially in the 1860s. Half a century later, it represented just 10 percent of the world's energy supply. It took 30 years more to reach 25 percent.

The typical Kenyan produces 55 times less carbon dioxide than an American, and rural farmers like the Talams produce even less.

Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world's energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years.

This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world's energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.

Why do energy transitions take so long, anyway? Because… Coal plants are not like computer chips.

The largest power station in the world, the Three Gorges Dam in China, can produce 22 billion watts. (Remember that the definition of a watt already includes "per second," so there's no such thing as watts per second, or watts per hour. It's just watts.)

The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.

These "point capture" devices have existed for decades, but they're expensive to buy and operate, they generally capture only 90 percent of the greenhouse gases involved, and power companies don't gain anything from installing them. So very few are in use.

Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase "government policy" doesn't exactly set people's hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won't get to zero unless we get this right, and we're a long way from doing that. (I'm talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)

Power density is the relevant number here. It tells you how much power you can get from different sources for a given amount of land (or water, if you're putting wind turbines in the ocean). It's measured in watts per square meter. Below

2. What's Your Plan for Cement? If you're talking about a comprehensive plan for tackling climate change, you need to consider everything that humans do to cause greenhouse gas emissions.

La vida no es justa, acostúmbrate a ello

F-gases are extremely powerful contributors to climate change: Over the course of a century, they cause thousands of times more warming than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If you don't hear much about them, it's because they're not a huge percentage of greenhouse gases; in the United States, they represent about 3 percent of emissions.

In Indonesia, on the other hand, forests are being cut down to make way for palm trees, which provide the palm oil you'll find in everything from movie-theater popcorn to shampoo. It's one of the main reasons why the country is the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Together, furnaces and water heaters account for a third of all emissions that come from the world's buildings. And unlike lights and A/C units, most of them run on fossil fuels, not electricity. (Whether you use natural gas, heating oil, or propane depends largely on where you live.)

If you want to do business with us, you'll have to take climate change seriously.