They’ve led him to found Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $2 billion investment fund for companies that want to solve difficult climate-change problems. These hard problems are at the center of Gates’s understanding of climate change and of his helpful new book, entitled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. As is agriculture, responsible for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse-gas pollution each year. Heating and cooling buildings, which together emit 7 percent of greenhouse-gas pollution, are another. Making concrete, for instance, causes 8 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide pollution, and we have no way to do it cheaply in a climate-friendly way-that’s one of Gates’s hard problems. No, he means the vital processes of industrial society for which we still have no zero-carbon alternative-the as-yet-unsolved engineering problems that are key to zeroing out global greenhouse-gas pollution. Nor does he mean the associated political challenges of overcoming partisan opposition. He isn’t talking about the challenges that we usually discuss in this newsletter, such as how to generate zero-carbon electricity (use wind, solar, and some nuclear). Lately, Bill Gates has been thinking about what he calls the “hard stuff” of climate change. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox. Every Tuesday, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet.
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