Quotes About Sustainability

Farther west, Michigan's seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century.

Thanks to years of travel at other people's expense, I have a lifetime supply of soaps, small bottles of shampoo, aromatic lotions, sewing kits, and shoe mitts. I have over eleven hundred shower caps and require now only a reason to use them. I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range

Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe

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.

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.

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.

times with follow-up questions. Eventually it sank in. 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. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn't enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

And—this is a really important point—lowering the Green Premiums that the world pays is not charity. Countries like the United States shouldn't see investing in clean energy R&D as just a favor to the rest of the world. They should also see it as an opportunity to make scientific breakthroughs that will give birth to new industries composed of major new companies, creating jobs and reducing emissions at the same time.

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.

the problem of overgeneration in the summer and undergeneration in the winter.

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.

In the coming years, as electricity becomes an even bigger part of our overall energy diet, we'll need models like these for grids around the world. They'll help us answer questions like: Which mix of clean energy sources will be the most efficient in a given place? Where should transmission lines go? Which regulations stand in the way, and what incentives do we need to create? I hope to see a lot more projects like this one.

divested all my direct holdings in oil and gas companies, as did the trust that manages the Gates Foundation's endowment. (I hadn't had money in coal companies in several years.)

Around the world, there are roughly a billion cattle raised for beef and dairy. The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4 percent of all global emissions.

About half of poop-related emissions come from pig manure, and the rest from cow manure. There's so much animal poop that it's actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation.

If we can spread the improved breeds and best practices more broadly—especially crossbreeding African cows to be more productive and making higher-quality feed available and affordable—it'll reduce emissions and help poor farmers earn more money.

Artificial meats come with hefty Green Premiums, however. On average, a ground-beef substitute costs 86 percent more than the real thing.

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.

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.