Bill Gate’s Book on How To Prevent A Climate Disaster Was Better Than I Expected

After seeing far too many YouTubers (including anti-capitalist, anti-billionaire ones) advertise this book, I gave in and listened to Bill Gates and it’s much better than I thought it would be. Gates is a geek perspective so the book is more technical than political.

The biggest strength of this book would be how he really understands that addressing climate change requires total decarbonization to 0 and he doesn’t shy from addressing the hard bits. Food, materials, transport and the like. He also gets the politics though he tries to avoid it. Like, how can developing countries increase their standard of wellbeing without shooting up emissions. Despite being a techie, he’s rather skeptical of geoengineering.

The biggest issue with the book is that it can come off as an advertisement for the things he invests in. Like Bill, I get you’re rich but calm down. Also, though I appreciate the tech perspective, it gets annoying at times. In the transport chapter, he spends pages talking about alternative fuels but just a paragraph or alternatives to motor transport. In fairness, he does talk about it later as an example of what lower levels of government can do to help.

In all, this is a good book to survey technical solutions to climate change. While the political aspects are suprisingly good, it doesn’t grapple with tough questions like how to convince the largest pollutors to pay up. I’d recommend getting other perspectives on addressing climate change as well.