Quotes from Bill Gates

Extra heat won't be good for the animals we eat and get milk from; it will make them less productive and more prone to dying young, which in turn will make meat, eggs, and dairy more expensive.

seas getting warmer, they're also bifurcating—developing some places where the water has more oxygen and others where it has less oxygen.

a 2-degree rise wouldn't simply be 33 percent worse than 1.5; it could be 100 percent worse. Twice as many people would have trouble getting clean water. Corn production in the tropics would go down twice as much.

Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can't change as quickly as the computer industry. There's also size. 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.

David Foster Wallace. (I'm preparing for his mammoth novel Infinite Jest by

We've already raised the temperature at least 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, and if we don't reduce emissions, we'll probably have between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by mid-century, and between 4 and 8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.

China makes a lot of cement. The country has already produced more in the 21st century than the United States did in the entire 20th century. (U.S. Geological Survey)

by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.

I love the fact that one of history's greatest heroes had a job title—agronomist—that most of us have never even heard of.

And, because greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for so long, the planet will stay warm for a long time even after we get to zero.

Instead, in all likelihood, in a zero-carbon future we will still be producing some emissions, but we'll have ways to remove the carbon they emit.

It's hard to think of a better response to a miserable 2020 than spending the next ten years dedicating ourselves to this ambitious goal.

As the world eats more meat, it accelerates the deforestation in Latin America. More burgers anywhere mean fewer trees there.

In Africa, for example, it's a matter of clearing land to grow food and fuel for the continent's growing population. Nigeria, which has had one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, has lost more than 60 percent of its forest cover since 1990, and it's one of the world's biggest exporters of charcoal, which is created by charring wood.

In other words, "getting to zero

Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.

For example, it's natural to think of America's electric grid as one single connected network, but in reality it's nothing of the sort. There isn't one power grid; there are many, and they're a patchwork mess that makes it essentially impossible to send electricity beyond the region where it's made. Arizona can sell spare solar power to its neighbors, but not to a state on the other side of the country.

With the price of today's batteries, EV owners save money only if gas costs more than around $3 per gallon.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

China and the U.S. need each other very badly. Yes, we should argue about some things, but it's not an 'us versus them,' it's an 'us and them' type scenario.

Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don't approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.