Quotes from Bill Gates

Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a day - and overestimate what they can accomplish in a year.

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.

Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people's lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.

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.

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.

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

my full-time job is working with my wife, Melinda

But giving people more information can help them make better choices.

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.

Creating a PCR test for a new pathogen is a pretty easy task once you've sequenced its genome. Because you already know what its genes look like, you can create the special substances, dye, and other necessary products very quickly—which is why researchers were able to establish PCR tests for COVID just twelve days after the first genome sequences were published.

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.

It's the main thing I do in my life. I read and I chew glasses. That's my job. -- WSJ interview, 9/10/19

Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world's current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents).

Just think about how many landowners, utility companies, and local and state governments you'd need to bring together to build power lines that could move solar energy from the Southwest all the way to customers in New England. Merely picking the routes and establishing rights-of-way would be a massive undertaking; people tend to object when you want to run a big power line through the local park.

Meanwhile, making steel and cement alone accounts for around 10 percent of all emissions. So the question "What's your plan for cement?" is just a shorthand reminder that if you're trying to come up with a comprehensive plan for climate change, you have to account for much more than electricity and cars.

It may sound as if I'm cherry-picking

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.

According to the listing on the UNESCO website, "The gastronomic meal emphasizes togetherness, the pleasure of taste, and the balance between human beings and the products of nature.

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.