Open the newspaper, turn on the TV, or go online, and you’ll find alarming headlines about raging wildfires, devastating storms, and severe droughts. Climate change is staring us in the face, and the evidence is everywhere. What's harder to see, unless you know where to look, is growing evidence that we're making real progress in the fight against it. That's why I'm so excited to be in London this week for the Breakthrough Energy Summit. Here, this progress is on full display, and we’re bringing together global leaders, industry executives, innovators, and investors to accelerate it.

When we launched Breakthrough Energy back in 2015, the Paris Agreement had just been adopted. Nearly every country on earth committed to ambitious emissions cuts in the fight against climate change. But it was clear that meeting these goals would require unprecedented investment from the private sector to drive innovation. It would also require extraordinary collaboration across all sectors to get clean energy ideas out of the lab and into the market affordably and at scale. This work has been Breakthrough Energy's mission from day one.

At the first BE Summit in 2022, I shared updates on the cutting-edge concepts and companies we’re supporting that address the five grand challenges—manufacturing, electricity, agriculture, transportation, and buildings—behind most of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. This year, in London, we have much more to share: a portfolio of climate technologies that aren't just theoretical or promising anymore, but proven and ready for the market today.

That's what makes this summit so momentous. In less than a decade, investment has helped turn pipe dreams into a pipeline of transformative solutions. Now, it’s time to invest so those solutions can scale up, deploy, and slash emissions in every sector of the economy.

Manufacturing – 29% of global emissions

Manufacturing—how we make almost everything—is one of the hardest sources of emissions to cut. While the challenges here are complex, the pace of progress has been incredible, and faster than what I hoped when I started Breakthrough, especially in cement and steel, which each contribute around 10 percent of all global emissions. CarbonCure has pioneered a way to inject waste carbon into fresh concrete, the end product cement is used for—making the second-most consumed material on earth much greener. Their retrofits of existing facilities, deployed at over 800 locations worldwide, have prevented nearly half a million tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, Ecocem’s ACT technology for low-carbon cement was recently approved for full commercial use across Europe—while another of its low-carbon concrete solutions was used in construction for the Athletes’ Village at the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris. And Boston Metal has nailed the production of “green” steel without coal at scale, and now has a facility up and running in Brazil.

Electricity – 29% of global emissions

Most experts agree that the world’s electricity needs will triple by 2050. And when it comes to climate change, electrification is a key part of the solution. But only if the electricity is green; otherwise, we’re just swapping one source of emissions for another. Until recently, we haven’t had good options for storing electricity at scale, which made it hard to get the most out of intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Now, Form Energy’s affordable batteries can store this energy for multiple days and make it more reliable. Their West Virginia factory, which is nearing completion, is bringing over 750 jobs to a town whose tin mill recently closed. And TS Conductor’s advanced power lines, already commercially deployed, can double the amount of transmittable power and help maximize our current grid’s efficiency.

Agriculture – 20% of global emissions

What we grow and eat has a huge impact on the climate. But Pivot Bio is lessening that impact with microbial products that allow crops to draw nitrogen from the air, giving farmers something they’ve wanted for a long time: a more reliable and efficient form of fertilizer. Their solutions—which produce less than one percent of the emissions of synthetic fertilizers and need 1,000 times less water—are already being used across five million acres of land to help farmers improve productivity while eliminating emissions. And Rumin8, whose feed supplements have successfully reduced livestock methane emissions by over 90 percent while boosting productivity, demonstrates that we can enjoy beef and dairy without the high environmental costs they're typically associated with. They recently opened a demonstration plant in Australia to showcase the commercial viability of their products.

Transportation – 15% of global emissions

Electric vehicles are the future, but their batteries are made of resources that are both limited and difficult to source responsibly. One solution is recycling—and Redwood Materials has figured out a better way to do it. At their facility in Nevada, the metals found in recycled batteries are refined and then reused in new batteries, all while emitting 40 to 70 percent less than other recycling processes. But recycling alone won’t be enough to meet the growing demand for EVs and electrification more broadly. New supplies will be needed—something KoBold Metals has cracked the code on. They’re using AI to more reliably find minerals and metals that will undergird the energy transition, most recently copper in Zambia.

Long-distance and heavy-duty transportation still have significant technical hurdles to overcome, but there’s impressive progress being made, particularly in aviation and shipping. ZeroAvia, for instance, is developing hydrogen-electric aircraft engines with operations in the U.K. and U.S., and their prototype engines are successfully flying aircraft in early trials.

Buildings – 7% of global emissions

Ensuring that buildings are warm in the winter and cool in the summer takes a lot of energy—and much of it gets wasted by single-pane windows and leaky ducts that let heat and AC slip out. But there are new options to help fix these issues. LuxWall has created ultra-insulating window glass that is so efficient, it performs like a wall you can see through. After years of R&D, their windows are rolling off the production line at their first commercial factory in Michigan; once installed, the windows will cut both costs and emissions. Then there’s Aeroseal, whose innovative polymer technology finds and plugs air leaks in a building’s envelope and ducts and is already commercially deployed.

Carbon Management

To limit global warming, though, it’s not enough to stop emitting greenhouse gases going forward. We also need to manage what’s already been emitted. In Arkansas, Graphyte is turning plant waste into carbon-trapping bricks and burying them underground; if they sequester 50,000 tons of carbon by 2025 as planned, it will be the largest carbon removal project in the world. In California, Heirloom Carbon’s first-in-the-nation commercial Direct Air Capture facility uses limestone forty feet high to absorb carbon from the air like a sponge. The pilot facility is removing 1,000 tons a year already, and they have plans to scale rapidly.

These are just a few of the more than 100 BE-backed companies that are gathered in London this week to showcase their solutions—all addressing the grand challenges, all ready to work, and all proof that the Clean Industrial Revolution is here. (For more on the progress we’ve made and what’s still left to do, see BE’s latest State of the Transition report.)

Now we need to supercharge our support and ramp up our investments. With commitments and capital from governments and industry leaders, we can deploy these solutions and get them to scale. We can drive down the stubborn green premiums that make a lot of clean technologies more expensive than their dirty counterparts (and too expensive for widespread adoption). We can keep the innovation pipeline flowing. We can get much closer to an abundant, affordable, clean energy future.

Thanks to brilliant minds, big ideas, and bold investments, transformative climate tech has arrived. It's here in London. The Breakthrough Energy Summit is where the momentum that’s been building since 2015 meets the marketplace. I can’t wait to talk to everyone here about where we go next. And I’m eager to see how the connections, partnerships, and investments forged over the next few days help this climate tech reach everyone—and help us reach net zero.

Hello from Texas! I’m in Corpus Christi and Houston this week to meet with some of the remarkable innovators building America’s clean energy future. It’s going to be a great trip.

If you want to see what the cutting edge of next-gen clean energy innovation looks like, it’d be hard to find a place better than Texas. Amazing companies are breaking ground not just here in Southeast Texas but across the state. Each one represents a huge boon for the local economy, America’s energy security, and the fight against climate change.

The world is undergoing an energy transition right now, fueled by the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies. The pace of innovation at the heart of this transition is happening faster than many people (including me!) dared hope. The progress makes me optimistic about the future—and excited about the role that American communities will play, especially in places like Texas. Breakthrough Energy and I have invested more than $130 million into Texas-based entrepreneurs, institutions, and projects. It’s a big bet, but it’s one I’m confident in.

Why? Because of the people. Nearly half a million Texans work in the oil and gas industry, and their skills are directly transferrable to next-generation industries. This workforce will help form the backbone of the world’s new clean energy economy, and it will cement Texas’s energy leadership for generations to come.

Many of the companies I’m seeing on this trip already employ or plan to employ oil and gas workers. One of those companies is Infinium, which is working on next-generation clean fuels for trucks, ships, and even planes. I’m visiting their first demonstration plant in Corpus Christi, where they’re turning waste CO2 and renewable energy into electrofuels—or eFuels—for trucks. They’ve already signed a deal with Amazon, and sometime soon, if you live in the area, you might get a delivery supported by Infinium eDiesel.

The key to Infinium’s approach is that their fuels can be dropped into existing engines. That’s huge. It means that companies won’t have to adapt their fleets, removing one of the biggest hurdles to transitioning to a new fuel. I’m especially excited about the work they’re doing on sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF—which could reduce emissions from air travel by as much as 90 percent, according to company estimates. Infinium is in the process of converting an old gas-to-liquid plant in West Texas into a new facility that will increase the company’s capacity for producing eFuels ten-fold. Breakthrough Energy’s Catalyst program has invested in this first-of-its-kind plant, and I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.

Another company I’ll see is Mars Materials. They’re a Breakthrough Energy Fellows project working on a different way to reuse CO2. The company is developing a clever technique for turning captured carbon into one of the key components in carbon fiber, an ultra-light, ultra-strong material that is used in everything from clothing to car frames. (If you’ve never played pickleball with a carbon fiber racket, I recommend trying it—you won’t believe how much power you get with your shots!) The Mars Materials team relocated from California to Texas in part because of the skilled oil and gas talent that they could access in the state, and they aren’t the first Breakthrough Energy company to do that. I’m going to check out their lab, where their scientists are hard at work optimizing the conversion process.

Both of the companies I just mentioned are turning CO2 into useful products. Their business models assume that they’ll have access to lots of carbon. Fortunately for them, Texas is also in the process of becoming a capital for direct air capture. DAC is the process of removing carbon directly from the air. The captured carbon can either be sequestered underground or reused by companies like Infinium and Mars Materials. A recent study found that Texas has the greatest DAC deployment potential in the country and could create as many as 400,000 jobs by 2050.

DAC is the fire extinguisher of clean energy technologies: It’s something you hope you will never need but should have ready if (and when) you do. In an ideal world, we’d adopt clean energy quickly enough that we wouldn’t need to remove carbon from the air. In reality, that hasn’t happened. We already have decades of legacy emissions that we’ll need to clean up, so we need a significant DAC industry.

During my visit, I’ll meet with local business and community leaders involved in the development of a DAC Hub in Kingsville, Texas. The Hub is the brainchild of Occidental’s 1PointFive, and over the next five years, it will bring an estimated 2,500 jobs to the community. I was an early investor in direct air capture technology, and it’s super cool to see it evolve from a concept to real economic opportunity for a local community.

The DAC project has been selected to receive a grant from the Department of Energy as a result of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Having been involved in some of the early discussions of the clean energy bills a couple years ago, I’m amazed to see how much progress has been made since then—and eager to meet with the people moving it forward. The DAC Hubs are a perfect example of how innovation can and should work. Private investors take on risks in developing cutting-edge innovations, which are then scaled up through a mix of public and private investments.

It’s going to be an exciting couple of days. I’m looking forward to catching up with leaders from many of the Breakthrough Energy-supported companies based in the area. I’ll talk about the tremendous potential I see in clean industries at CERAWeek, one of the biggest annual energy conferences in the United States. I’m also going to learn more about the Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub being developed in the area, and I’ll tour Air Liquide’s hydrogen facility in the town of La Porte. Their plant uses steam methane reforming to generate hydrogen fuel for industry, and it will be retrofitted in the coming years to eliminate its emissions. (As I’ve written before, hydrogen will play a key role in the energy transition.)

All the companies I’ll see in Texas this week are at the heart of the energy transition. They’re driving innovation, bringing good jobs to their communities, and boosting the American economy. If you want to catch a glimpse of our country’s clean energy future, you should head on down to the Lone Star State.

Hello from Kemmerer, Wyoming! It’s been just over a year since my last visit, and I’m blown away by how much has changed.

One of the oldest buildings in downtown Kemmerer—once an opera house—has been restored and is now home to a mercantile and a bakery. Just down the street, the owners of the local coffee shop have purchased an 100-year-old building to expand their operation. A law office has opened, and city officials tell me that plans are moving forward for new multi- and single-family housing developments.

I’m thrilled to see so much economic growth happening, because Kemmerer will soon be home to the most advanced nuclear facility in the world. I just left the groundbreaking ceremony for the first-ever Natrium plant, which will bring safe, next-generation nuclear technology to life right here in Wyoming. It’s a huge milestone for the local economy, America’s energy independence, and the fight against climate change.

Today is a big one for Kemmerer—for the coal plant workers who will be able to see their future job site being constructed across the highway, for the local construction workers who will be part of a 1,600-person skilled labor force building the plant, and for the local businesses that will take care of the new workforce. 

The plant was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. But my nuclear journey started several years earlier, when I first read a scientific paper for a new type of nuclear power plant.

The design was far safer than any existing plant, with the temperatures held under control by the laws of physics instead of human operators who can make mistakes. It would have a shorter construction timeline and be cheaper to operate. And it would be reliable, providing dependable power throughout the day and night. As I looked at the plans for this new reactor, I saw how rethinking nuclear power could overcome the barriers that had hindered it—and revolutionize how we generate power in the U.S. and around the world.

So, we started TerraPower, where nuclear scientists could take the concept and transform it into a reality. Since then, the amazing team at TerraPower has proven we can do nuclear better. They are leading the country—and the world—in developing safe, next-generation nuclear technology.

But that technology was just an idea in a lab and on a computer screen until today.

You can read more about the super cool science behind the Natrium plant here. Now that we’ve broken ground, the first order of business is to build the sodium test facility, which will test components and transfer the liquid sodium that will be used to cool the nuclear reactor. Construction will continue over the years ahead before the plant hopefully comes online in 2030.

For a project this big and this important to work, it takes private companies partnering with public leaders and governments. I can’t say enough good things about Mayor Bill Thek, Mayor Mark Langley, and the remarkable communities here in Kemmerer and Diamondville, who have embraced this project.

Today couldn’t have happened without the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which is supporting the project with the largest single contribution the federal government has ever committed to a private project. If we’re going to solve climate change, it’s going to take courage, commitment, and partnership between the federal government and private industry, a point that Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has made repeatedly. Gov. Mark Gordon and Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis have been true champions, and we’re grateful for the support from TerraPower’s investors and development partners, including Bechtel, GE Hitachi, PacifiCorp, and Berkshire Hathaway.

What’s next? The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted TerraPower’s construction permit application for review last month. It’s a step that sounds bureaucratic but is, in fact, a huge deal and the first time something like this has happened with a commercial non-light water reactor in more than 40 years. This step starts the review process at the NRC for the permit application—once it is approved, construction can begin on the actual nuclear reactor.

The review process will take a couple of years, so in the meantime, TerraPower will continue to build the non-nuclear parts of the facility. Construction will begin next year on the so-called “energy island,” which is where the steam turbines and other machinery that actually generate power will sit. (The reactor will eventually be part of a “nuclear island,” and the team hopes to start building that in 2026.)

While these first-of-a-kind projects can be big and risky, they are too important for our future to fail to act. I’m proud of all those who have helped ensure the most advanced nuclear project in the world gets built right here in the United States.

I believe that the next-generation nuclear power plant that TerraPower is building here will power the future of our nation—and the world. Everything we do runs on electricity: buildings, technology, and increasingly transportation. To meet our economic and climate goals, we need more abundant clean energy, not less. The ground we broke in Kemmerer will soon be the bedrock of America’s energy future. Today, we took the biggest step yet toward safe, abundant, zero-carbon energy.

Today I’m in the town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, to celebrate the latest step in a project that’s been more than 15 years in the making: designing and building a next-generation nuclear power plant. I’m thrilled to be here after all this time—because I’m convinced that the facility will be a win for the local economy, America’s energy independence, and the fight against climate change.

It’s called the Natrium plant, and it was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. When it opens (potentially in 2030), it will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world, and it will be much safer and produce far less waste than conventional reactors.

All of this matters because the world needs to make a big bet on nuclear. As I wrote in my book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, we need nuclear power if we’re going to meet the world’s growing need for energy while also eliminating carbon emissions. None of the other clean sources are as reliable, and none of the other reliable sources are as clean.

But nuclear has its problems: The plants are expensive to build, and human error can cause accidents. Plus, as we move away from fossil fuels, there’s a risk that we’ll leave behind the communities and workers who have been providing reliable energy for decades.

The Natrium facility is designed to solve these problems, and more.

I’ll start with improved safety. Keep in mind that America’s current fleet of nuclear plants has been operating safely for decades—in fact, in terms of lives lost, nuclear power is by far the safest way to produce energy. And this new facility in Kemmerer will be even better.

Like other power plant designs, it uses heat to turn water into steam, which moves a turbine, which generates electricity. And like other nuclear facilities, it generates the heat by splitting uranium atoms in a chain reaction. But that’s pretty much where the similarities stop.

A typical reactor keeps the atom-splitting nuclear reaction under control by circulating water around a uranium core. But using water as a coolant presents two challenges. First, water isn’t very good at absorbing heat—it turns to steam and stops absorbing heat at just 100 degrees C. Second, as water gets hot, its pressure goes up, which puts strain on your pipes and other equipment. If there’s an emergency—say, an earthquake cuts off all the electricity to the plant and you can’t keep pumping water—the core continues to make heat, raising the pressure and potentially causing an explosion.

But what if you could cool your reactor with something other than water? It turns out that, by comparison, liquid metals can absorb a monster amount of heat while maintaining a consistent pressure. The Natrium plant uses liquid sodium, whose boiling point is more than 8 times higher than water’s, so it can absorb all the extra heat generated in the nuclear core. Unlike water, the sodium doesn’t need to be pumped, because as it gets hot, it rises, and as it rises, it cools off. Even if the plant loses power, the sodium just keeps absorbing heat without getting to a dangerous temperature that would cause a meltdown.

Safety isn’t the only reason I’m excited about the Natrium design. It also includes an energy storage system that will allow it to control how much electricity it produces at any given time. That’s unique among nuclear reactors, and it’s essential for integrating with power grids that use variable sources like solar and wind.

Another thing that sets TerraPower apart is its digital design process. Using supercomputers, they’ve digitally tested the Natrium design countless times, simulating every imaginable disaster, and it keeps holding up. TerraPower’s sophisticated work has drawn interest from around the globe, including an agreement to collaborate on nuclear power technology in Japan and investments from the South Korean conglomerate SK and the multinational steel company ArcelorMittal.

I can’t overstate how welcoming the people of Kemmerer are being. While I’m here, I’ll get to visit the future site of the plant, and I’ll also have a chance to talk with the mayor, other local leaders, and members of the community so I can thank them for their efforts. And this project wouldn’t be happening without strong support from Gov. Mark Gordon and Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis.

Kemmerer has a particular interest in the Natrium facility’s success: The coal plant that has been operating here for more than 50 years is scheduled to shut down. If it weren’t for the Natrium plant, the 110 or so workers there would lose their jobs.

But the plan is for all of them to get jobs in the Natrium facility if they want one. The new plant will employ between 200 and 250 people, and those with experience in the coal plant will be able to do many of the jobs—such as operating a turbine and maintaining connections to the power grid—without much retraining.

Another benefit: Building the facility will take several years and at its peak will bring 1,600 construction jobs to town. And all those construction workers will need food, housing, and entertainment. It’ll be a huge boost to a community that could use one right now.

Finally, I’m excited about this project because of what it means for the future. It’s the kind of effort that will help America maintain its energy independence. And it will help our country remain a leader in energy innovation worldwide. The people of Kemmerer are at the forefront of the equitable transition to a clean, safe energy future, and it’s great to be partnering with them.

Cheeseburgers are my favorite food. But I wish they weren’t, given the impact they have on the environment. I’ve tried many of the best meat and dairy replacements out there, and while I’ve had some great ones, nothing currently on the market would fool a burger lover completely. Even when the taste is close, there’s still something missing: the greasy, oily sizzle that brings the ideal sandwich together and makes it so delicious—and difficult to replicate.

The secret ingredient is animal fat. It’s what gives so many foods their richness, juiciness, meltability, unique “mouthfeel,” and overall flavor. It’s what distinguishes butter from margarine, dairy ice cream from a plant-based frozen dessert, and a great burger from one made of soy protein or peas. Unfortunately, it’s also a disaster for the climate. Each year, the world emits 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases—and the production of fats and oils from animals and plants makes up seven percent of that. To combat climate change, we need to get the number to zero.

Our plan can’t be to simply hope that people give up foods they crave. After all, humans are wired to want animal fats for a reason—because they’re the most nutrient-rich and calorie-dense macronutrient—in the same way we’re wired to crave sugar for an instant energy kick. What we need are new ways of generating the same fat molecules found in animal products, but without greenhouse gas emissions, animal suffering, or dangerous chemicals. And they have to be affordable for everyone.

It might sound like a pipe dream, but a company called Savor (which I’m invested in) is in the process of doing it. They started with the fact that all fats are made of varying chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Then they set out to make those same carbon and hydrogen chains—without involving animals or plants. They ultimately developed a process that involves taking carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heating them up, and oxidizing them to trigger the separation of fatty acids and then the formulation of fat. The result is real fat molecules like the ones we get from milk, cheese, beef, and vegetable oils. The process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does. And most important, it tastes really good—like the real thing, because chemically it is.

I’ve tasted Savor’s products, and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eating real butter. (The burger came close, too.) The big challenge is to drive down the price so that products like Savor’s become affordable to the masses—either the same cost as animal fats or less. Savor has a good chance of success here, because the key steps of their fat-production process already work in other industries.

The focus on animal fats is a priority because they have an outsized impact on climate—and play an outsized role in many beloved foods. But even if we could eliminate emissions from the production of all animal fats overnight, we’d still have a challenge: Even some plant-based fats and oils can be a problem for climate change. The worst culprit is palm oil.

Today, it’s the most widely consumed plant-based fat in the world. It’s found in half of all packaged goods—everything from peanut butter, cookies, instant ramen, coffee creamer, and frozen dinners to makeup, body wash, toothpaste, laundry detergent, and deodorant to candles, cat food, baby formula, and so much more. It’s even used as a biofuel for diesel engines.

The issue with palm oil isn’t necessarily how we use it but how we get it. That’s because the oil palm tree, a variety of palm that’s native to Central and West Africa, doesn’t grow everywhere. The opposite, actually—the tree will only grow well within five to ten degrees of the equator. That has led to slash-and-burn deforestation of rainforests in equatorial regions around the world, which are then converted to oil palm plantations.

This process has been bad for biodiversity, putting entire ecosystems at risk. It’s also a one-two punch for climate change: The combustion involved in burning forests emits tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and as the wetlands they sit on are destroyed, the carbon they’ve been storing gets released too. In 2018, the devastation in Malaysia and Indonesia alone was bad enough to account for 1.4 percent of global emissions—more than the entire state of California and nearly as much as the aviation industry worldwide.

Unfortunately, palm oil is hard to replace. It’s cheap, odorless, and abundant. While most plant oils are liquid at room temperature, palm oil is semi-solid, creamy, and easily spreadable. Since it acts as a natural preservative, it has an extremely long shelf-life. (It actually raises the melting point of ice cream.) It’s also the only plant oil with a near-equal balance of saturated and unsaturated fats, which is why it’s so versatile. If animal fat is the superstar of some meals, then palm oil is the team player that can work to make almost all foods—and non-edible goods—even better.

For these reasons, companies like C16 Biosciences are working hard on alternatives to palm oil. Since 2017, C16 (which I’m invested in) has been developing a product from a wild yeast microbe using a fermentation process that doesn’t produce any emissions. While it differs from conventional palm oil chemically, C16’s oil contains the same fatty acids, which means it can be used in the same applications. And it’s as “natural” as palm oil—it's just grown on fungi instead of trees. Like Savor’s, C16’s process is entirely agriculture-free; its “farm” is a lab in midtown Manhattan.

The company’s consumer brand launched its first product last year. It plans to roll out more of its own products and work with existing brands—first in the beauty and personal care sectors and then in food—to replace the palm oil they’re currently using. Because fermentation is a relatively affordable, scalable, and quick process, especially compared to slash-and-burn deforestation, I’m betting that C16 will succeed.

I hope they do. The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first. But their potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint is immense. By harnessing proven technologies and processes, we get one step closer to achieving our climate goals.

When I start to feel overwhelmed by the climate challenges we face, I turn to Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at Our World in Data. Her data-driven approach is an essential antidote to environmental doomsday-ism and provides some much-needed optimism about humanity’s ability to tackle big problems. I recently sat down with Hannah to talk about her terrific new book Not the End of the World, why it’s so hard to wrap our minds around human progress, what we would ask a time traveler about the future, and more.

Between wildfires, floods, and other disasters, climate change is in the news nearly every day. And it will get even more attention late this month as we approach COP, the United Nations’ annual global meeting on climate change.

When COVID struck, the world wasn’t ready. The limited money that was available to help came at the expense of other lifesaving efforts—causing a major setback for nutrition, polio, malaria, and immunization. We should learn from this mistake and respond to the risk of a climate disaster equitably while we regain and maintain our progress on these other priorities. By investing in innovation that works for everyone, we can tackle the world’s biggest threats to human lives and livelihoods and get closer to a truly equitable world.

My first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest. It was an amazing learning experience. We were computerizing the grid, and I got to work with some top-notch programmers. But when I would tell people about my job, I’d often get blank stares. The power grid just wasn’t something many people thought about back then.

That’s no longer the case these days. Extreme weather events have made a lot more people aware of power grids—and how they can fail. Two years ago in Texas, the local grid failed after three winter storms in a row. Hundreds of people died, and millions were without power for days. And just last month, extreme cold across the United States once again pushed power grids to the brink.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The solution is clear: We need to upgrade our grid, build more high-voltage transmission lines that can carry electricity long distances, and use those transmission lines to better connect regions and communities to one another.

If we do, we will make sure people always have power when they need it. And in the process, we will unleash the potential of affordable and abundant clean energy.

The United States has made remarkable progress over the last two years toward a future where every home is powered by clean energy. Thanks in part to historic federal investments, we’re on a path to use more clean electricity sources than ever before—including wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal energy—which would reduce household costs, cut pollution, and diversify our energy supply so we’re not dependent on any one thing.

But to take advantage of this opportunity, we need to first bring our grid into the 21^st century. (This is an issue in other places around the world, too, but I’m going to focus on the U.S. here.) The way we move electricity around in this country just isn’t designed to meet modern energy needs.

Since the beginning of the electric grid, power companies have placed most power plants close to cities. Railroads and pipelines were used to ship fossil fuels from wherever they were extracted to the power plants where they’d be burned to make electricity.

That model doesn’t work with solar and wind, because many of the best places to generate lots of electricity are far away from urban centers. Picture the windy plains of Iowa or the sunny deserts of Arizona. You can’t exactly ship sunlight in a railcar, so to maximize clean energy’s potential, we’re going to need much longer lines to move that power from where it’s made to where it’s needed. We’ll also need more lines, because our country’s demand will only go up in the years ahead as we electrify more things (like our cars!). Many estimates suggest electricity demand could more than double by 2050 to reach net zero.

Even if we weren’t working toward a clean energy future, though, we’d still need to update our grid. That’s because our grid infrastructure is just plain old. Most of our current transmission and distribution lines were built between the 1950s and 1970s, and they only have a 50-year life expectancy. This would be a problem in normal times, but the repeated extreme weather of recent years has only served to underline how vulnerable we are as we enter an era when these events will be more common.

Beyond being old and outdated, there’s another big problem making everything worse: Our grid is fragmented. Most people (including me a lot of the time) talk about the “electric grid” as if it’s one single grid covering the whole nation from coast to coast, but it’s actually a complicated patchwork of systems with different levels of connection to one another.

Our convoluted network prevents communities from importing energy when challenges like extreme weather shut off their power. It also prevents power from new clean energy projects from making it to people’s homes. Right now, over 1,000 gigawatts worth of potential clean energy projects are waiting for approval—about the current size of the entire U.S. grid—and the primary reason for the bottleneck is the lack of transmission. Complicating things further is the fact that new infrastructure projects are typically planned and executed by hundreds of individual utility companies that aren’t required to coordinate.

To clear the way, the United States needs to address the three main barriers that are to blame for the lack of progress:

1. Planning: Like all infrastructure projects, new transmission lines and grid upgrades start with planning. Plans are usually based on near-term energy use forecasts or even backward-looking data—which means new lines aren’t being built with future needs in mind. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, has recently proposed a rule that would require transmission providers to do longer-term and more forward-looking planning. It’s also considering other new policies that would potentially require regular regional coordination on interstate power lines. How these policies are developed and implemented will be critically important.
2. Paying: The federal government determines how large-scale infrastructure improvements are funded—either via tax payments or through allocating cost to consumers. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021 invested some money in transmission projects, but we need to invest more on the federal level while also making it more affordable for local authorities to undertake new projects. FERC should help address cost allocation problems by spreading the costs of big projects across entire regions instead of asking only the people at the end of the line to pay.
3. Permitting: Although the federal government determines who pays for most transmission upgrades, states are primarily the ones who issue permits for new projects. The current permitting process is long, convoluted, and often outdated. As a result, we don’t build lines fast enough, and we’re slower than other countries. Some states—like New Mexico and Colorado—are doing innovative work to speed up the process. But there is a lot more room for policymakers to work together and make the permit process easier.

Although transmission is primarily a policy problem, innovation will help too. For example, grid-enhancing technologies like dynamic line ratings, power flow controls, and topology optimization could increase the capacity of the existing system. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is part of the climate initiative I helped start, has invested in new technologies like advanced conductors and superconductors—wires that use cutting-edge materials to get more energy out of smaller lines. But these technologies aren’t a substitute for real systemic improvements and building lines in places where they don’t already exist.

Climate change is the hardest problem humanity has ever faced, but I believe we have the human ingenuity to solve it. And if you care about climate change, you should care about transmission.

Put simply: Transmission is key to our clean energy future. If we address the barriers standing in the way of that future, it will lead to lower emissions, cleaner air, more jobs, fewer blackouts, more energy and economic security, and healthier communities across the country.

I planted drought-tolerant seeds, fed and weighed chickens, and used a mobile phone to monitor weather forecasts and local crop prices.

These were a few of the chores I was given during my visit with Mary Mathuli, a smallholder farmer in rural Kenya.

I stopped at her home in Makueni County, south-east of Nairobi, during my recent trip to Kenya to better understand how farmers like Mary are faring in the face of climate change.

I arrived expecting to hear her talk about the record droughts and smaller harvests many farmers are experiencing throughout Africa.

Instead, to my surprise, she led me out to her fields to show off the innovations that are allowing her to continue to grow crops and earn an income to support her family, despite the drastic changes in rainfall and weather patterns.

A natural teacher, Mary encouraged me to learn by doing. She put me to work so I could understand how these new agricultural inputs and practices can make a big difference in their lives.

This experience taught me a couple important lessons.

First, my farming skills—like holding a chicken and swinging a hoe—need some work.

Second, and more importantly, I got a personal reminder of how resourceful and resilient African smallholder farmers like Mary are. Battered by years of drought and other extreme weather patterns, they are developing new skills and embracing new technologies to adapt to some of the toughest conditions for growing crops and raising livestock.

To be clear, African farmers face huge challenges due to climate change. Although sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only about four percent of the world’s carbon emissions, the continent is bearing the brunt of climate change impacts. Climate-related losses on many African farms are more than double those seen globally. In Makueni County, where Mary farms, yields of maize have been falling since 1994, largely due to changes in the weather.

While more innovation is needed to help Africa’s smallholder farmers keep pace with the threats posed by climate change, Mary and other farmers in Kenya are adopting some incredible new tools and practices that can limit crop losses and help their farms thrive even in extreme weather:

As farms go, Mary’s farm is quite small. Just about 4 acres, which is typical for farms in Africa. Still, she packs a lot of activities in this space, growing commercial and subsistence food crops and rearing poultry and livestock. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of the population works in agriculture. Together, they produce about 80 percent of the continent’s food supply. And most of the people doing the backbreaking farm work—like the chores I performed—are women.

I was impressed by Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit and her optimism. She appeared to seize every opportunity to try out new technologies and agricultural practices. It’s one of the reasons why she was trained as a model farmer and Village Based Advisor by the Cereal Growers Association, an organization that works with smallholder farmers to help improve their productivity. In this role, Mary provides guidance to several hundred farmers in her community, showing them how to use drought-tolerant seeds, raise chickens, and adopt other climate adaptation agricultural strategies.

She is clearly doing a good job in this role because more than 90 percent of farmers in her area have embraced one of the new adaptation practices.

I look forward to hearing how the seeds I planted with Mary are doing, despite the disappointing rains in recent months. I can’t imagine them in better hands than hers.

Thanks so much for the visit, Mary!

Hello from COP28! I’m at the climate conference here in Dubai. I just wrapped up my first day, and it was an exciting, productive, and inspiring start. The energy in the room was just amazing—especially from the young activists whose passion sets the tone for every COP. You can read more about why I’m feeling optimistic about the days ahead here.

I participated in a number of super interesting sessions today, including one on food security. It’s remarkable to see how climate adaptation has been elevated at COP in recent years. I’m going to spend a lot of time over the next couple days talking about how we need to help the people who are most vulnerable to climate change.

I was honored to close out the first day of the World Climate Action Summit by addressing COP28 delegates. My remarks took place during a session dedicated to the important role business and philanthropic leaders play in fighting climate change. I spoke about the need to direct climate investment towards projects that maximize the number of lives impacted. You can read the full text of my speech below.

Remarks as prepared
December 1, 2023
COP28 World Climate Action Summit

Good evening. Eight years ago, I joined many of you on the stage in Paris to send three messages to the world.

1. The climate crisis demands our immediate attention.
2. If we’re going to solve it, we need to invent and scale the innovations that get us to zero.
3. To develop these technologies, the public and private sectors came together to make historic commitments.

Eight years later, I am excited to report that these commitments are showing real results. To see proof, just walk around the Innovation Hub. Most of the companies you will find there didn’t exist eight years ago. Some are supported by Breakthrough Energy, the organization I committed to starting in Paris to complement the efforts that governments were undertaking. Others have emerged in recent years and are doing incredible work.

As you know, the world’s emissions can be divided into five sectors. We must get to zero emissions in each one to meet our climate goals.

Electric vehicles and power plants get the most attention, but emissions come from lots of different human activities. The good news is that we are making progress across all five sectors.

In manufacturing, we are well on the way to making steel with electricity instead of coal. Buildings are getting greener thanks to a company that has developed a window that is many times more efficient than most windows used today. The transportation sector continues to take huge leaps forward: Earlier this year, a sports car went 600 miles on a single charge using a new type of battery. In agriculture, one company has developed microbes that provide plants with the fertilizer they need without producing excess greenhouse gases. And earlier this year, I visited the future site of TerraPower’s next-generation power plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming—which will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world when it opens.

The world is making remarkable progress, but our task is far from complete. We still have a lot of work to do to get to zero in all five areas.

For example, we won’t realize the full potential of the world’s incredible clean electricity advancements without the infrastructure to deliver it. That is why we need to build new, smarter power grids.

We also need to create more pathways to zero. Technologies like clean hydrogen and carbon capture have huge potential but need significant investment.

Philanthropists, governments, and companies need to make big bets now that will help crucial innovations get developed and deployed as quickly as possible. Since Paris, I have put more than $2 billion into clean energy technologies. I plan to double that amount in the coming years, but more investment is needed. If you are in a position to fund a clean energy future, I urge you to do so.

To bring innovations to scale, we need to reduce the cost difference between things that emit and things that don’t—a difference I call the Green Premium. The cost of the transition must be low enough that the whole world can afford it. 

I believe there is a path to a zero Green Premium, and I believe that we can still reach our climate goals and achieve zero emissions. But unfortunately, our efforts are complicated by two factors.

First, we must help people adapt to a planet that is already getting warmer.

Our priority should be those who are most affected. That means farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, who contribute the least to the problem but suffer the most. Farmers need support so they can produce more crops and livestock even as temperatures rise and the weather gets more extreme. I spoke about this earlier today during the Food Systems Summit, where the Gates Foundation announced a $200 million partnership with the UAE to support food systems innovation.

This starts with arming them with more information, including local, long-range climate forecasts. And it requires developing more sustainable, resilient approaches to crop and livestock production.

For example, scientists have bred 160 drought-tolerant and disease-resistant varieties of maize. Farmers in Zimbabwe who planted one of these varieties harvested enough extra maize to feed their families for nine months.

These were developed by researchers from the agricultural research network called CGIAR. The Gates Foundation is proud to call them one of our partners. Countries must meet the commitment they made two years ago in Glasgow to double the amount of funding for adaptation by 2025—including support for CGIAR’s goal of raising $4 billion.

No other effort to adapt to climate change will have more impact.

The second factor complicating our progress toward our climate goals is a cold, hard truth: The world has limited resources available to reduce inequities. I believe we should devote more. But a realistic level forces us to make choices about which areas get the world’s attention.

Here is another truth: Climate change is a major threat to human welfare. So are food insecurity, malnutrition, and infectious diseases.

Each of these threats is connected to one another. For example, extreme weather is making it harder to grow crops in some parts of the world—which puts more children at risk of malnutrition and makes them more vulnerable to disease.

In a world with limited resources, it may seem like we cannot make progress on climate, health, and development all at once. But nobody would be better off in a world with fewer carbon emissions but more illness, starvation, and death. So, we have to find a way to tackle all three at the same time.

Fortunately, innovation allows us to magnify the impact of our efforts. Just as innovation will get us to zero emissions, it will also allow us to continue the remarkable progress made over the last century to improve human welfare around the world.

Consider the progress we have made in reducing childhood deaths.

In the year 1990, 12 million children died. By 2000, the number had dropped to fewer than 10 million. By 2019, it was below 5 million.

How did we do it? In part, by spending some of the world’s limited resources on a key innovation: Vaccines.

Scientists found new ways to make vaccines that were faster and cheaper but just as safe. They developed new vaccines to tackle deadly diseases like rotavirus. And the world created an organization called Gavi, which has vaccinated nearly a billion children in low- and middle-income countries—and is already working on climate-sensitive diseases like cholera, whose spread is closely linked with heavy rains and floods.

We can choose to keep this progress going. We can cut childhood deaths in half again by continuing to invest in organizations like Gavi—alongside funding for climate mitigation and adaptation.  

Every discussion about allocating scarce resources should begin with a simple question: How can this money save and improve the most lives, now and in the future?

With this question as our guide, in the decades ahead, I believe we can improve human welfare faster than any of us have seen in our lifetimes—and avoid a climate disaster. The work that we have gathered here to discuss will play a huge part in getting us there, and I am inspired by all the commitments being made.

By investing in innovation that works for everyone, we won’t just keep the planet livable. We will make it a better place to live.

Thank you.

If you follow the news on climate change (and maybe even if you don’t), your news feed has probably been filled with the acronym COP lately. That’s the Conference of Parties, the United Nations’ annual meeting on climate change. This year’s event, COP28, which starts at the end of this week, is an especially important one, and I’ll be traveling to Dubai in a few days to attend.

In all of my speeches, panels, and meetings, I’ll share the same messages:

1. Because of a boom in climate-related innovation that started at the Paris COP in 2015, there’s more reason to be optimistic than most people realize.
2. But it’s still a big challenge, and since the world has finite resources for fighting it, we need to focus on the efforts that will save and improve the most lives.
3. That means funding more innovations that reduce carbon emissions while making clean energy affordable for everyone, help people (especially in poor countries) survive and thrive in a warming world, and continue the world’s progress on fighting disease and poverty.

The point about disease and poverty is especially important. As the world commits more money to dealing with climate change, we need to maintain our efforts to improve health and spark economic growth in poor countries. The people who are dying from malaria or stuck in poverty today are just as important as the grandchildren we’re trying to preserve the climate for. So it’s great that this COP includes a summit on food systems and a day specifically focused on health.

If you want to know more about why I’m optimistic about climate, how it’s connected to health and development, and what we should do next, you can read my Gates Notes post from a couple of weeks ago.

At every COP, a good question is raised about carbon offsets. What are the attendees doing to compensate for all the emissions generated by flying to the United Arab Emirates for this meeting?

It’s great that so much attention is being paid to offsets. They’re a complicated subject, and it’s important to have a conversation about the most effective ways to do offsets. I approach this subject, as I do most tough ones, by using science and data to guide my thinking: What steps will prevent or remove the most emissions for every dollar spent?

Personally, I know I have a high carbon footprint, and I’m taking several steps to reduce my own emissions and offset the ones I can’t eliminate. When I fly, I buy low-carbon sustainable air fuel that’s made from alternatives to fossil fuels. I’ve installed solar panels in my homes and drive an electric vehicle. I’ve paid ClimeWorks several million dollars in the past few years to remove enough carbon from the air to offset the remaining emissions.

Also, although this isn’t related to offsets or reducing emissions, in 2019 I started selling my direct holdings in oil and gas companies because I didn't want to profit from them as the world transitions to clean energy.

I’m lucky that I can afford to pay for offsets. Many of the best approaches, especially the air fuel and carbon removal, are far too expensive to be used widely. I do it because I can and should, and because I want to help these new technologies build a customer base that will drive down the prices and help them reach a broad scale. I expect that my approach will continue to evolve so this funding can have the most impact.

Regardless, none of this reduces the need to develop clean technologies across every sector of the economy. I’ve funded $2 billion in clean-energy technology and plan to fund that much again in the next few years. (I’ll give any profits from these investments back to society through philanthropy.) I’m excited to get to COP, share my optimism about the future, and talk about how we can both avoid a climate disaster and improve life for people today and in the generations to come.

I’m headed back to India next week. Although I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years—doing everything from checking out toilets to visiting a village that’s home to the one poorest, most underserved castes in India—I haven’t been back since before the pandemic. I can’t wait to see how much progress has been made in that time.

This essay originally ran in the Times of India and Dainik Jagaran. You can read it here:

More than two decades ago, I set out to give the vast majority of my resources back to society. My goal from the beginning was to help reduce the awful inequities I saw around the world.

When I started this work, my biggest focus was global health, because it’s the worst inequity in the world and it’s a solvable problem. That’s still the case today. But as time went on—and as the disastrous consequences of a warming world became more evident—it became clear that you can’t improve life for the world’s poorest without also tackling climate change.

Climate change and global health are inextricably linked. Hotter temperatures will make poverty reduction harder by increasing food insecurity and the prevalence of infectious diseases and diverting resources away from those who need them the most. It’s a vicious cycle. The poorer a community is, the more vulnerable it is to climate change. And the more impacted a community is by extreme weather events, the more entrenched in poverty it becomes. To break the cycle, we need to make progress on both problems at the same time.

When I talk to people about this, I often hear the same response: “There isn’t enough time or money to solve both at the same time.” But this idea that we can only tackle one thing at a time is just wrong. I’m stubborn in my belief that with the right innovations and delivery channels to get them to the vulnerable, we’re capable of making progress on lots of big problems at once—even at a time when the world faces multiple crises. There is no better proof than the remarkable progress that India has accomplished.

Consider the field of next-generation chickpea plants currently growing at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, or IARI, in Pusa. Chickpeas are a staple crop in India. They provide an important source of income for many smallholder farmers, and families across the country rely on them for nutrition. But the chickpea harvest is threatened by climate change. Higher temperatures could reduce yields by as much as 70 percent, putting lives and livelihoods at risk.

So, the Gates Foundation joined hands with India’s public sector and CGIAR institutions to support the work of researchers at IARI. They found a new solution: chickpea varieties that have more than 10% higher yields and are more drought-resistant. One variety is already available to farmers, and others are currently in development at the institute. As a result, India is better prepared to keep feeding its people and supporting its farmers even in a warming world. It’s no exaggeration to say that India’s agricultural future is growing right now in a field in Pusa.

One of the reasons why challenges like climate, hunger, and health seem insurmountable is that we don’t yet have all the tools to solve them. But I’m optimistic that one day soon we will, thanks in part to innovators like researchers at IARI.

India as a whole gives me hope for the future. It’s about to become the world’s most populous country—which means you can’t solve most problems there without solving them at scale. And yet, India has proven it can tackle big challenges. The country eradicated polio, lowered HIV transmission, reduced poverty, cut infant mortality, and increased access to sanitation and financial services.

How did they do it? India has developed a world-leading approach to innovation that ensures solutions reach those who need them. When the rotavirus vaccine—which prevents the virus that causes many fatal cases of diarrhea—was too expensive to reach every child, India decided to make the vaccine themselves. They worked with experts and funders (including the Gates Foundation) to build factories and create large-scale delivery channels to distribute the vaccines. By 2021, 83 percent of 1-year-olds had been inoculated against rotavirus—and these low-cost vaccines are now being used in other countries around the world.

There is no question today’s challenges will test the limits of that ingenuity and cooperation. India is on the frontlines of climate change. But the progress it has made on health will make its people more resilient and provide helpful insights for how to tackle other major challenges. And the pace of its development, its skill in rolling out large-scale programs, and its people’s innovative expertise mean that India can be a key part of making progress on today’s biggest challenges.

I’m going to India next week to see firsthand the work being done by innovators and entrepreneurs. Some are working on breakthroughs that will help us mitigate the effects of climate change, like the work being done by Breakthrough Energy Fellow Vidyut Mohan and his team to turn waste into biofuels and fertilizers in remote agricultural communities. Others are finding new ways to help people adapt to a warmer world, such as IARI’s efforts to create more drought-tolerant crops. I’m looking forward to seeing the progress that’s already underway by both the Gates Foundation’s and Breakthrough Energy’s amazing partners.

Like every other country on the planet, India has limited resources. But it has shown us how the world can still make progress in spite of that constraint. By collaborating and trying novel approaches, the public, private, and philanthropic sectors can turn limited resources into big pools of funding and knowledge that lead to progress. If we work together, I believe we can fight climate change and improve global health at the same time.

When I first started learning about climate change 15 years ago, I came to three conclusions. First, avoiding a climate disaster would be the hardest challenge people had ever faced. Second, the only way to do it was to invest aggressively in clean-energy innovation and deployment. And third, we needed to get going.

Since then, an influx of private and public investment has accelerated innovation faster than I dared hope. This progress makes me optimistic about the future.

But I am also realistic about the present. The world still needs to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions from 51 billion tons to zero, but global emissions continue to increase every year. If you follow the annual IPCC reports, you’ve watched as the scenarios for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius become increasingly remote. And some of the clean technologies we need are still very far from becoming practical, cost-effective solutions we can deploy at scale.

In the past decade, we finally got going. Over the next three, we need to go much further, much faster. I still believe we can avoid a climate disaster—if we devote the next generation to mobilizing the largest crisis response in human history.

Why the energy transition is so hard

To understand what it will take to get to zero, we need to start by asking where the 51 billion tons of emissions come from. Unfortunately, the answer is everything and everywhere.

Everything: Virtually every human activity produces greenhouse gas emissions. People automatically think of electricity, where there’s a path to zero because wind and solar are now cheaper than fossil fuels. But electricity accounts for only 26 percent of global emissions. Similarly, lithium-ion batteries have made it possible to see a net-zero future for car travel. But cars account for less than half of the transportation sector’s 16 percent of emissions. Lithium-ion batteries don’t do much about the emissions from long-distance travel in airplanes, cargo ships, and heavy-duty trucks.

Agriculture and buildings account for 21 and 7 percent of emissions, respectively. The sector with the most emissions, 30 percent of the total, is manufacturing—making the things that modern life depends on, like cement, plastic, and steel. There are currently no cement plants in the world, and exactly one steel plant, that don’t produce CO₂.

So, if you are reading this over lunch on a plastic device in your climate-controlled concrete-and-steel office building that you took a bus to get to, you begin to see how more or less every aspect of our lives contributes to the problem.

Everywhere: More than 70 countries have committed to reaching net zero, including big polluters like the United States and the European Union. Even if the US and Europe get there, however, we won’t have solved the problem. Three-quarters of the global population lives in emerging economies like Brazil, China, India, and South Africa, and although historically they played a very small role in causing climate change, they are now responsible for two-thirds of total greenhouse-gas emissions. China by itself emits more than one quarter. So solutions can’t be dependent on unique conditions in a single country or region. They have to work in all countries, or the temperature will continue to rise.

Thinking globally instead of nationally reveals why we can’t solve climate change simply by using less energy. Low- and middle-income countries are building aggressively to achieve the standard of living their people aspire to—and they should be. Many countries in Europe and North America filled the atmosphere with carbon to achieve prosperity, and it is both unrealistic and unfair to expect everyone else to forgo a more comfortable life because that carbon turned out to change the climate.

The solution to the everything, everywhere challenge is three-fold. First, we have to invent clean technologies to replace every emissions-intensive process we use today: a new way to make steel, to power airplanes, to fertilize fields.

Second, we have to drive the cost of new clean technologies down so they can compete, not just in rich countries but in all countries. I call the difference in price between any current technology and the clean alternative the “Green Premium,” and it’s the key to how I see the world avoiding a climate disaster. Green Premiums need to be near, at, or below zero. As long as clean cement costs twice as much as traditionally manufactured cement, for example, the vast majority of buyers simply won’t choose it.

The third part of the solution is deploying these cost-competitive technologies, fast. We have to replace every single piece of infrastructure dedicated to doing things the old way with infrastructure dedicated to doing things in a new way—and that doesn’t happen instantly, especially considering the mind-boggling scale of the job.

For example, there are currently 2,412 coal-fired power plants in the world, and that number is still going up. Every single one of those plants will have to be replaced. Or zoom in and consider just a single oil field, Hebron-Ben Nevis off the coast of Newfoundland. It will operate continuously for 30 years, employ hundreds of people, and cost $7 billion—and all that time, labor, and money will produce enough oil to last the world just eight days.

We use so much energy, and we have invested so much in the machinery to generate it. Now, in the span of about 30 years, we have to decommission it all and start over again with clean technologies. I have more confidence in markets than many other people, but even I don’t think the market by itself can press reset on an entire economy in just a few decades. We need a plan to speed the process up.

How the world is doing so far

A lot has changed since the COP 21 meeting in 2015 in Paris, where 22 governments launched an initiative called Mission Innovation. Since then, public funding for climate-related research and development (R&D) has increased by almost a third.

The private sector is investing in climate more than ever
At that same event, I was part of a group of investors that launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate-focused venture capital fund that now has more than 100 clean-energy companies in its portfolio. Meanwhile, other venture funds are making more investments in the sector. In the past two years, VCs have put approximately $70 billion into more than 1,300 clean-energy start-ups.

As a result of this activity, R&D pipelines are finally filling up. Take long-duration energy storage. Many renewable sources of energy—specifically solar and wind—are intermittent: not always on. But we still need to be able to generate power on demand, so we need to store it when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and use it even when they aren’t.

BEV is funding multiple companies developing different approaches to long-duration energy storage, because we don’t know which one will work best. For example, Ramya Swaminathan’s start-up, Malta, converts electricity into heat, which is stored in molten salts, and cold, which is stored in an anti-freeze solution—and converts them back into electricity when needed. Form Energy, founded by Mateo Jaramillo, stores electricity in what is known as an iron-air battery that converts iron into rust and then reverses the process on demand. The pipeline in other key sectors is similarly diverse.

Established companies have also recently started shifting investment and expertise dramatically to meet net-zero commitments. In 2016, only 21 companies had issued climate targets. Now, that number is 3,671. Breakthrough Energy’s Catalyst program is partnering with airlines, carmakers, and steel companies committed to deploying clean technologies and banks and investment funds interested in financing them.

The public sector is stepping up with impactful policies
One reason for this burst of innovation is public policies that have grown more ambitious in recent years.

In the past 12 months, the U.S. Congress has passed and President Biden has signed three climate-relevant laws: the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act. Together, they provide more than $500 billion in tax credits, loan guarantees, and other investments in the energy transition. More importantly, they will spur hundreds of new clean energy projects and mobilize trillions more in private investment, including—crucially—in what are known as demonstration projects.

Demonstration is the key to getting the Green Premiums down. The only way to optimize new technology is to take it out of the lab, build it out in the real world, and continuously improve it. This legislation not only provides funding for doing so but also creates an Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations to manage the process going forward.

For its part, the European Union enshrined net zero by 2050 into law in 2021. In the same year, it stepped up its 2030 target from a 40 percent to a 55 percent reduction (compared to the 1990 level). The specific plan to reach those targets is still making its way through the legislative process.

Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis it caused are putting pressure on the growing climate consensus on the continent. Some countries have recently invested in new fossil fuel projects, which only trades one major problem for another. Ultimately, net zero and energy security are two sides of the same coin. Clean-energy innovations are the only way to achieve either one.

What the world needs to do now

Humanity has never had all these raw materials in front of us before: the investment, the policy, the pipeline of innovations, the overall public awareness that climate change is a priority. In recent polling, more people around the world see climate as a major threat than any other issue. And more individuals than ever are taking productive steps to reduce their own carbon footprints, which when viewed collectively sends a powerful signal to business and government leaders that more must be done. But even with all these tools and momentum, we still have to fashion them into a comprehensive solution.

That means three things: more research, development, and demonstration; developing a fair, workable process for scaling up; and helping people adapt to the climate change that is going to happen no matter what we do now.

Research, development, and demonstration: There are still many critical clean technologies that aren’t anywhere near cheap enough to compete. We need sustainable liquid fuels for long-haul transportation; affordable ways to capture CO₂ directly from the atmosphere; additional sources of renewable energy to keep up with global demand that will double or triple as we electrify more and more processes. And to fill these gaps, we need to keep doing what we’ve done well since 2015: we need to ratchet up investment in clean-energy innovation even more.

Develop a fair, workable process for scaling up: We cannot pretend an energy transition won’t be disruptive. Although new industries and jobs will appear, some old ones will disappear. New infrastructure will affect the communities where it’s built. In the past, low-income communities and communities of color have suffered disproportionately from decisions about where big infrastructure projects should go, and we cannot let that happen this time. Public policies need to ensure a just transition so that we never pit a livable planet in opposition to people’s livelihoods. Those who could experience disruption need a voice in the process.

At the same time, there must be a transition. Last year, voters in Maine blocked the construction of transmission lines needed to bring low-carbon electricity to the Northeast. Some of those transmission lines were slated to cut through farms and forests, but nevertheless we need to be able to make responsible tradeoffs in fair and transparent ways so we can go faster. The unimaginable disruptions caused by a 4-degree rise in temperature will outweigh the downsides of most clean energy solutions—and a strong community engagement process will result in better design and siting of projects.

Help people adapt: The climate has already changed dramatically, and it will continue to do so. To minimize the damage these changes cause, we also need to invest in helping people adapt to a warmer climate, rising sea levels, and less predictable weather. That means investing in crop science so that farmers can plant seeds that are more tolerant of heat, an area our foundation has been working in for years. It also means figuring out technologies like desalination to guarantee that communities will have access to clean water, and upgrading port facilities around the world to make them resilient to floods and storms. The world must use the same strategies that have incentivized innovation in mitigation technologies to start getting serious about adaptation, too. We’re expanding our approach at Breakthrough Energy to reflect this perspective.

Toward net zero

The ultimate measure of success is global greenhouse gas emissions: we need to go from 51 billion tons a year to zero in the next three decades. But there’s also a lag when it comes to that metric. Investment in the development, demonstration, and deployment of clean technologies comes first. The drop in emissions comes second, after the Green Premium for any given clean technology gets low enough to scale up.

That is why my interim measure of success is Green Premiums. We need to get those near, at, or even below zero by 2040 for the full range of products and processes we need to replace. Progress won’t go in a straight line. There will be setbacks along the way. But if we can approach the elimination of Green Premiums, I will feel good about the long-term prognosis for the climate.

That leaves us 18 years to get from here to there. Europe and the United States, which have historically produced the vast majority of CO₂ emissions, owe it to the world not only to eliminate our own emissions but to invest aggressively and get Green Premiums down. This will give other countries that didn’t have much to do with causing climate change a chance to stop emitting greenhouse gases while growing their economies and raising their standard of living.

As a father of three children, I know that 18 years is not a long time. That’s why I am asking the team at Breakthrough Energy to work with innovators and other experts in the climate community to map out rigorous 10-, 15-, and 20-year plans to drive Green Premiums down to zero. We cannot merely hope for the best. We need to design for it, together.

This is the hardest challenge people have ever faced. There has never been a mobilization of this scope, at this scale, at this speed, for this long. But humanity has also never faced an existential crisis like climate change.

I am optimistic about what people are capable of in a crisis, and in the long run, I wouldn’t bet against us. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of a long run. We have already achieved many energy breakthroughs. We need to achieve more, faster, to avoid a climate disaster.

Many people look at the environmental challenges our planet faces and see little reason for hope. But I can’t help feeling optimistic that the world has much of what we need to prevent a climate disaster—and we can invent the things we need but don’t have yet.

While our fight against climate change is far from over, I continue to be inspired by the innovative spirit that’s been unleashed across the world to invent the tools we need to stop global warming and avoid the worse effects of climate change.

My optimism got another big boost during my recent visit to Stanford University’s new Doerr School of Sustainability. The school was made possible through the generosity of John and Ann Doerr, who are supporting the school with a $1.1 billion gift, the largest contribution in Stanford’s history.

Touring research labs and meeting with professors and students at this one-of-a-kind school, I was blown away by the creativity and ingenuity at work to meet the energy and sustainability challenges of today and the future.

I stepped into the lab of Professor Thomas Jaramillo and learned about exciting research underway to convert water and carbon dioxide into fuels and fertilizer. Nearby, I visited with Professor William Tarpeh and heard about his surprising effort to minimize the environmental impact of our liquid waste, primarily urine, by recovering valuable resources from it, including nitrogen, phosphorous, lithium and even gold!

The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which opened its doors last month, was founded with the goal of accelerating solutions to address the global climate crisis. Given the urgency of its mission, the school has pulled together many academic disciplines under one roof, including Earth and planetary sciences, energy technology, sustainable cities, the natural environment, food and water security, human society and behavior, and human health and the environment. This approach will not only allow more collaboration among researchers, but it also lets students pursue double degrees, bridging science and business, law, and humanities. The world’s challenges cross many different disciplines, and the next generation of leaders should be able to do the same.

Getting to net zero emissions is one of the hardest tasks that humanity has ever faced. We need to change the way we make almost everything in the next 30 years to get to net zero emissions by 2050. That will require many new innovations. It will also require all of us—activists, elected officials, business leaders, philanthropists, and citizens—to be engaged in fighting climate change. Working together toward this common goal, as I saw students and researchers doing at this new school, I’m optimistic we can develop the breakthroughs that could transform our global economy, our lives, and our planet for the better.

When most people picture greenhouse gas emissions, they think about cars and electricity. That’s because they turn keys, press buttons, and flip switches every day. The good news is, we already have ways to decarbonize these types of emissions (solar, wind, and nuclear power and lithium ion batteries). The bad news is, they add up to only about one third of the total.

The other two thirds—almost 35 billion tons—are much harder for most people to see. For example, we all use products made of cement, plastic, and steel, but most of us don’t manufacture them or load them onto cargo ships. To zero out emissions on these products, we need new technologies. Enter clean hydrogen. It has so many potential uses that some people refer to it as the Swiss Army Knife of decarbonization.

What hydrogen can do

The world already uses 70 million tons of hydrogen each year as a chemical in some manufacturing processes like making fertilizer. Today, nearly all that hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels. If we make that hydrogen clean, we eliminate the 1.6 percent of global emissions that it is responsible for now.

But that’s just the beginning. Hydrogen is pure, reactive chemical energy. If we can bring the cost down far enough and make enough of it, we can also start using clean hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in all sorts of other industrial processes, including important ones like making plastic and steel, liquid fuels, and even food. (It’s called the Swiss Army Knife for a reason.)

In addition, clean hydrogen opens the door to all sorts of possibilities beyond industry. For example, as more and more electricity comes from variable sources, the world will have to get better at balancing energy supply and demand so we don’t go dark when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Electricity can be converted into hydrogen through a process called electrolysis, then stored for months at a time, and finally converted back into electricity when it’s needed.

Another potential use for hydrogen lies in heavy-duty transport. Battery-electric vehicles work great for passenger transportation and trucking over shorter distances, but aviation, shipping, and long-distance trucking remain a challenge. And together they account for 8 percent of global emissions. Clean hydrogen has the potential to provide a net-zero solution for moving cargo around the world.

So in theory, clean hydrogen can do a lot of things we need to do urgently. And governments in many European countries, Australia, Japan, and the United States have ambitious plans for using it to decarbonize their economies. But how do we make hydrogen clean in practice?

How to make hydrogen clean

Innovators are working on several different technologies, some of which are more mature than others.

One option is to use solar, wind, or nuclear power to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen. This process, known as electrolysis, was invented in 1800 using the first-ever battery that had just been invented by Alessandro Volta. More than two centuries later, the same basic principle may be the key to massive clean hydrogen production. There are four different electrolyzer technologies being developed, and the price of each one needs to go down to make electrolyzed hydrogen cost-competitive.

Another option is to produce hydrogen using the current methods that burn fossil fuels and then capture the CO2 produced in the process before it’s released in the atmosphere. It may never be economical to capture 100 percent of the carbon released using incumbent technologies, but while we’re waiting for thousands of industrial facilities to retrofit their infrastructure, carbon capture can help drive emissions way down.

Other clean hydrogen technologies are further away.

Methane (CH4) is the primary fossil fuel used to produce hydrogen now. When it reacts with water (H2O) at a high temperature, both H2 and CO2 are produced. However, through a different heating process that happens in the absence of oxygen, called pyrolysis, it’s possible to separate the hydrogen atoms and leave just solid carbon—think of the lead in a pencil.

Finally, there are reserves of hydrogen in geologic formations around the world, and in theory geologic hydrogen has the potential to provide a vast supply of affordable, zero-emissions hydrogen. Scientists are still in the early stages of researching ways to find and extract geologic hydrogen from natural reserves.

Making clean hydrogen cheap

So the potential of clean hydrogen is tantalizing, and its necessity is becoming clearer every day. Take Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has made hydrogen not just a climate change issue but also an energy security issue. The EU has already announced its intention to produce and import 20 million tons of green hydrogen by 2030, enough to reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas imports by at least a third.

But hydrogen faces the same challenge as just about every other clean technology: Can we get the price down far enough, fast enough? If people have to pay too much to be green, change will happen too slowly. But if we get the Green Premiums down near zero, there is a chance to build a prosperous net-zero economy. It’s going to take a big push for collaboration between business and governments, which, together, can make innovation happen much faster than usual by being aggressive with investments and policies.

Breakthrough Energy, the climate initiative I helped start, is supporting the commercialization of clean hydrogen in many ways. The Breakthrough Energy Fellows program funds innovators working on early stage ideas. Breakthrough Energy Ventures invests in companies working on clean hydrogen. And the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program speeds up the time to market for clean hydrogen, among other climate technologies.

The more everyone gets excited about the many benefits of clean hydrogen, the faster businesses and governments will put in the work to make it a real alternative to fossil fuels. That’s how we avoid a climate disaster.

I got hooked on video lectures back in the Stone Ages—when you had to order them on DVD. Now that they’ve moved to streaming, I’ve watched courses on many different sites, but I’ve probably spent the most time on Wondrium. (It used to be known as the Great Courses.) Like a lot of people who love online learning, I have my list of all-time favorite professors and classes. Timothy Taylor’s lectures on economics and John Renton’s geology talks are near the top. I’ve also enjoyed three series on the history of the Bible and one on birdwatching, among others.

So when I was asked to participate in a new Wondrium documentary and series that were focused on one of the most urgent issues the world faces today, I was eager to do it. It’s called Solving for Zero, and it explores both the challenge of climate change and some of the most promising solutions. (It is based on the book about climate change that I published last year.) I’m hardly impartial about it, but I think the project, which launched this week, is an excellent overview of this complex issue.

Most people now accept that to avoid a climate disaster, the world has to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In the series, which consists of ten half-hour episodes, you learn why that’s true and what it will take to get there. You get a framework for understanding the main sources of carbon emissions, and you meet some of the brilliant people who are working on breakthroughs that could make it possible to get to zero.

That’s actually one of my favorite parts of my job—getting to learn from super-smart innovators and entrepreneurs—and Solving for Zero does a good job of introducing you to a few of them. You’ll meet the team at EcoCem, a French company with an intriguing way to reduce the massive emissions from cement—about 4 billion tons of CO2 each year—using byproducts from the production of cast iron. And in the episode on food, you’ll hear from scientists from the amazing nonprofit CGIAR, which has done more to feed the world than any other organization and has turned its attention to lowering emissions from growing crops.

What I like most about this project is that it leaves you with a sense of optimism about the world’s ability to solve this problem. The people profiled are inspiring on their own—and they’re just a few of the many innovators around the world who are trying to make it possible to decarbonize the world’s economy and prevent the very worst effects of climate change. The series also covers the ways that policy and finance need to support getting to zero, and it’s quite practical too: In the final episode, you get useful advice about how you can contribute meaningfully to the solution. I’m glad I got to be a part of this project and encourage you to take a look.

Last week I spent three fantastic days at the global climate summit (known as COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland. My main impression is how much things have changed since the last summit, back in 2015—and I don’t mean because of COVID. The climate conversation has shifted dramatically, and for the better.

One big shift is that clean-energy innovation is higher on the agenda than ever. The world needs to get to zero carbon emissions by 2050. As I argue in the book I published this year, accomplishing that will require a green Industrial Revolution in which we decarbonize virtually the entire physical economy: how we make things, generate electricity, move around, grow food, and cool and heat buildings. The world already has some of the tools we’ll need to do that, but we need a huge number of new inventions too.

So at an event like this, one way I measure progress is by the way people are thinking about what it’ll take to reach zero emissions. Do they think we already have all the tools we need to get there? Or is there a nuanced view of the complexity of this problem, and the need for new, affordable clean technology that helps people in low- and middle-income countries raise their standard of living without making climate change worse?

Six years ago, there were more people on the we-have-what-we-need side than on the innovation side. This year, though, innovation was literally on center stage. One session of the World Leaders Summit, where I got to speak, was exclusively about developing and deploying clean technologies faster.

I also helped launch the Net Zero World Initiative, a commitment from the U.S. government to help other countries get to zero by providing funding and—even more important—access to experts throughout the government, including the top minds at America’s world-class national laboratories. These countries will get support with planning the transition to a green economy, piloting new technologies, working with investors, and more.

The second major shift is that the private sector is now playing a central role alongside governments and nonprofits. In Glasgow, I met with leaders in various industries that need to be part of the transition—including shipping, mining, and financial services—who had practical plans to decarbonize and to support innovation. I saw CEOs of international banks really engaging with these issues, whereas many of them wouldn’t even have shown up a few years ago. (It made me wish we could get the same kind of turnout and excitement for conferences on global health!)

I announced that three new partners—Citi, the IKEA Foundation, and State Farm—will be working with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a program designed to get the most promising climate technologies to scale much faster than would happen naturally. They’re joining the first round of seven partners we announced in September. It’s amazing to see how much momentum Catalyst has generated in just a few months.

I was also honored to join President Biden and his climate envoy, John Kerry, to announce that Breakthrough Energy will be the primary implementation partner for the First Movers Coalition. It’s a new initiative from the U.S. State Department and the World Economic Forum that will boost demand for emerging climate solutions in some of the sectors where it’ll be especially hard to eliminate emissions: aviation, concrete and steel production, shipping, and more.

The third shift I’m seeing is that there’s even more visibility for climate adaptation. The worst tragedy of rising temperatures is that they will do the most harm to the people who have done the least to cause them. And if we don’t help people in low- and middle-income countries thrive despite the warming that is already under way, the world will lose the fight against extreme poverty.

So it was great to hear President Biden and other leaders repeatedly raising the importance of adaptation. I got to join the president, along with officials from the United Arab Emirates, to launch a program called Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate. It’s designed to focus some of the world’s innovative IQ on ways to help the poorest people adapt, such as new varieties of crops that can withstand more droughts and floods. More than 30 other countries, as well as dozens of companies and nonprofits (including the Gates Foundation), are already supporting it.

As part of that effort, I joined a coalition of donors that pledged more than half a billion dollars to support the CGIAR’s work to advance climate-smart innovations for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Some people look at the problems that still need to be solved and see the glass as half-empty. I don’t share that view, but this is what I would tell anyone who does: The glass is being filled up faster than ever. If we keep this up—if the world puts even more effort into innovations that reduce the cost of getting to zero and help the poorest people adapt to climate change—then we’ll be able to look back on this summit as an important milestone in avoiding a climate disaster.

Hello from Glasgow, Scotland. I’m here to attend the COP26 climate conference, and it’s been a whirlwind couple of days so far. As I wrote in the Financial Times, one of my top priorities here at COP is making sure that the world prioritizes scaling clean technology innovation. If we’re going to avoid the worst effects of a climate disaster, it’s not enough to invent zero-carbon alternatives—we need to make sure they’re affordable and accessible enough for people all over the world to use them.

I’m also spending a lot of time this week talking about climate adaptation. It’s deeply unfair that the world’s poorest people, who contribute the least to climate change, will suffer from its effects the most. Rich and middle-income countries are causing the vast majority of climate change, and we need to be the ones to step up and invest more in adaptation.

Earlier today, I had the opportunity to address COP26 delegates at the World Leaders Summit. The session was all about accelerating clean energy innovation and deployment, and I was honored to share the stage with leaders from across government, the private sector, and philanthropy. You can read the full text of my remarks below.

I’m honored to share this stage with Prime Minister Johnson, President Biden, and other distinguished leaders.

Six years ago in Paris, I joined many of you to announce historic commitments to developing the technologies we need to stop climate change. Today, I am thrilled to report that effort is going well.

I started Breakthrough Energy Ventures to complement the commitment from 22 countries to increase R&D through Mission Innovation. BEV has raised over $2 billion so far and invested in more than 80 companies from 11 countries across four continents.

This progress has been incredibly exciting. It’s given me the confidence to expand the work Breakthrough Energy is doing, especially in the area of technology deployment.

If we’re going to scale the innovations that get us to zero, we need to reduce the cost difference between things that emit and things that don’t—a difference I call the Green Premium. The cost of the transition must be low enough that the whole world can afford it.

To help make this happen, Breakthrough Energy recently announced the creation of Catalyst.

Catalyst is a first-of-its-kind effort to build the big projects we need to lower Green Premiums and expand the market for critical climate technologies.

Together with the incredible partners listed here, Catalyst will do four things.

One: Harness technical expertise to scale the innovations we need.

Two: Connect government resources with business expertise.

Three: Organize philanthropic grants and equity with a low expectation of return to be the last-mile financing.

Four: Create certainty for investors by guaranteeing that projects will have customers.

Our private sector partners have committed over $1.5 billion that we expect will leverage more than 10 times that much in total public and private financing. This will support projects in four areas.

And we are just getting started. We expect to raise $3 billion in private capital with the same multiplier. 

But even if the world hits its goal of net-zero by 2050, our work will not be complete. People are already being affected by a warmer planet. Those impacts will only get worse, especially for the world’s poorest.

We will lose the global fight against poverty if we don’t help vulnerable farmers adapt to climate change—which is why the Gates Foundation is proud to be a partner in the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate.

This new coalition was launched by the United States and United Arab Emirates and now has more than 30 member countries.

As part of our work with AIM4C, I am announcing today that the foundation will provide an additional $315 million over the next three years to an amazing organization called CGIAR.

CGIAR supports climate-smart agricultural research to help smallholder farmers in the developing world.

All of us here today have the responsibility and opportunity to help deliver the solutions our world needs.

Together, we must build a green industrial revolution—one that stops climate change, protects vulnerable communities, and puts the world on a path to progress.

Thank you.

Before the last major COP meeting, in Paris in 2015, innovation was barely on the climate agenda. This year in Glasgow it will take centre stage. Shifting the world’s focus to inventing clean technologies was among the greatest successes of the Paris COP.  Continuing that trajectory is, perhaps, its biggest opportunity this year, because innovation is the only way the world can cut greenhouse gas emissions from roughly 51bn tonnes per year to zero by 2050.

There is now significantly more money for basic research and development and more venture capital for clean startups in hard-to-decarbonise sectors than ever before. As a result, some important clean technologies—like sustainable airplane fuel, green steel and extra-powerful batteries—now exist and are ready to scale. 

If the world is really committed to climate innovation, however, then these breakthroughs must be only the beginning of the story, not the end. At COP we need to think about how to turn lab-proven concepts into ubiquitous products that people want and can afford to buy. This will require a massive effort to fund hundreds of commercial demonstration projects of early-stage climate technologies.

It is incredibly challenging for any startup to commercialise its product, but it is uniquely so for energy companies. When I was starting Microsoft, we didn’t need much infrastructure to write code and, once we’d written it, we could make nearly infinite copies with perfect fidelity for very little money. 

Climate-smart technologies are much more difficult to navigate. Once you can make green hydrogen in a lab, you have to prove that that it works—safely and reliably—at scale. That means building an enormous physical plant, ironing out engineering, supply chain and distribution issues, repeating them over and over again and steadily cutting costs. Demonstration projects like this are hugely complicated, extremely risky, and extraordinarily expensive—and it’s very hard to finance them.

In clean technology, there is yet another complication. When all that complicated, risky, expensive work is finished, you end up with a product that does more or less the same thing as the one it’s intended to replace—green steel has pretty much the same functionality as today’s steel—but costs more, at least for a while.

Naturally, it’s hard to find buyers, which means banks charge more for loans. The high cost of capital, in turn, increases the price of the products. Because financing is so hard to come by, commercial demonstration can be an excruciatingly slow process. Right now, the key to the climate innovation agenda is making it go faster.

I believe we can do this. Hundreds of governments and companies have made net zero commitments, and they have billions of dollars to invest. If we create systems that incentivise them to finance these projects and to commit to buying products such as sustainable aviation fuel and green steel, then we stand a chance of speeding up the innovation cycle. By committing a lot more money to build demonstration projects, recognising these contributions as one of the best ways to meet net zero commitments, and creating a system to measure the impact of these investments, we will give ourselves our best chance to avoid a climate disaster.

When I think about getting to zero, I ask three questions. First, can the world maintain public support for climate action? That depends on making sure the energy transition doesn’t cost so much that people lose patience. Second, can emerging economies like India, Brazil, and South Africa—which have done much less to contribute to climate change than in rich countries but are affected the most—continue to drive down poverty without emitting greenhouse gases? That depends on bringing down the price of green materials, so they don’t face a trade-off between growth and a liveable climate.

And third, what happens in the meantime? Just about everyone alive today will have to adapt to a warmer climate. The effects of higher temperatures—more frequent droughts and floods, the desiccation of farmland, the spread of crop-eating pests—will hit farmers especially hard. These changes will be problematic for farmers in rich countries, but potentially deadly for those in low-income ones. So, in addition to making clean energy cheaper, we need to double down on innovations like improved seeds that will help the world’s poorest farmers grow more food.

At COP, the world should put scaling clean technology innovation—both for mitigating the worst impacts of climate and for adapting to the impacts that we will already feel—on the agenda in the same way it put R&D on it in 2015. 

For a more insights on this subject, see “This is how we build a zero emissions economy.”

This article originally appeared in the Financial Times.

If we’re going to avoid a climate disaster, we need to find better ways to do pretty much everything. Almost every part of modern life—from the food we eat to the buildings we live in—releases greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. We need to zero out those emissions in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

I’m optimistic we can do it, but we have to overcome a serious obstacle: Green technologies are at a competitive disadvantage with the approaches they need to replace. Typically, innovations that represent a significant improvement over what came before are widely adopted. The Internet is a great example. When I was a kid, I had to spend an afternoon in the library if I wanted to research a new topic. Today, I can just pull my smartphone out of my pocket and find what I want to know in seconds.

But green technologies don’t work that way. Their improvements are mostly invisible. The electrons from a wind turbine don't run your lights any better than electrons from a coal plant, and a house built with zero-carbon cement won’t feel any bigger to you. Plus, most green alternatives right now are more expensive than their carbon-emitting counterparts. I don’t think a lot of people are willing or able to pay more for the exact same product they can buy now for less.

The solution is to lower the Green Premiums, make net-zero technologies just as affordable as the carbon-emitting versions available today, and create incentives for adoption. I recently wrote a white paper about the investments and policies we need to make that happen as quickly as possible. I hope you’ll check it out.

Read my white paper here.

When the first microwave oven hit the market in 1955, it cost roughly $12,000 in today’s dollars. These days you can pick one up at Walmart for $50

It’s not hard to figure out why the cost dropped so dramatically. Microwaves had new features that customers liked, and they did some things better than gas or electric ovens. As demand for them rose, more companies got into the game, finding ways to make them more efficiently, building supply chains, and driving the price down. As microwaves got cheaper, more people bought them, which attracted more innovation, and so on in a virtuous cycle.

Some clean-energy products work the same way—solar power has become dramatically cheaper over the past few decades—but many don’t. At least, not yet.

Most green technologies are still more expensive than whatever they’re trying to replace, a cost difference I call Green Premiums. They don’t do the job better (other than contributing less to climate change, of course)—and in many cases, they do the job worse.

This is bad news for the fight against climate change. The world needs to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and reaching that point will take inventing and deploying many more clean-energy products. Although it’s great that governments are putting more money into green recovery programs and people are becoming more willing to pay the Green Premium for, say, building materials, innovation isn’t coming fast enough. Products aren’t getting cheaper or better fast enough, and the market isn’t growing as fast as it could—or needs to.

Climate change isn’t the only reason we should speed things up. Research shows that U.S. voters understand how developing clean technologies will spark new industries, creating blue-collar jobs in fields like American manufacturing that have seen big declines in the past few decades.

To accelerate the virtuous cycle of innovation, we need a new model for financing, producing, and buying new clean-energy technology.

One new model is being created by Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a coalition of philanthropists, companies, and governments. The goal is to make the other green products follow the same cycle of early adoption, innovation, and cost reductions that made solar power and microwave ovens so much cheaper.

Catalyst has identified four areas that are ripe for this approach. In each area, there are some new technologies that are out of the research and development phase and ready to be deployed, but they’re not yet mature enough to draw major investors. So a relatively modest infusion of cash can make a big difference.

The four areas are:

• Long-duration energy storage to allow energy to be stored for months at a time, versus the handful of days that today’s best batteries are capable of. A breakthrough in this area would make solar and wind power more practical in more places.
• Sustainable aviation fuels that can power cargo planes and large passenger jets, which are far too large and heavy to ever be powered by batteries.
• Direct air capture to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We won’t be able to get rid of all carbon this way, but a cheaper way of doing it would put us much closer to the zero-by-2050 goal.
• Inexpensive green hydrogen. Hydrogen fuels are really promising—they can provide more power than batteries and so could be used to run large planes and industrial processes. Unfortunately, they’re very expensive when made in ways that don’t emit more greenhouse gases.

How will Catalyst work in practice? Let’s say an airline wants to contribute meaningfully to fighting climate change. Its most obvious option is to buy sustainable fuel—but that fuel is in short supply, because so little of it is made, and it’s very expensive.

Through BE Catalyst, the airline will be able to invest in a large refinery that produces a high volume of sustainable fuel. As the refinery gets going, the airline can start buying fuel there. Even better, once the plant’s design is proven to work, the cost of building subsequent plants will drop. With more refineries in operation, the volume of available fuel will go up and the price will come down, which will make it more attractive to buyers, which will draw more innovative companies into the market. The virtuous cycle will accelerate.

You may be wondering: What’s in it for the airline? This is not some vague feel-good gesture. Catalyst and its nonprofit partner CDP are creating a tool that will allow everyone who invests in Catalyst to calculate how much their funding will drive down future emissions. In short, the tool will say: Invest $1 and this is the impact you’ll have in the years ahead. In that way, investing in clean-energy projects can become a competitive advantage.

And aviation is just one example. Catalyst is also relevant for utility companies that need long-duration storage, steel manufacturers that need green hydrogen, and companies that need direct air capture to meet their commitments on emissions.

Just like any investment that grows in value over time, the earlier a company gets in, the more impact they’ll have. They’ll be able to tell potential investors: “We know how much we’re contributing to the world’s zero-emissions goal. If this is something you value, invest in us.”

CDP will publish a report in September explaining how the tool will work, and we expect to launch an interactive version at the COP26 in Glasgow.

Catalyst will fund its first projects next year, and we’ve already announced its first major funding partnership. Over the next five years, the European Commission and Catalyst will mobilize a total of $1 billion (€820 million), in partnership with the European Investment Bank, to build large-scale, commercial demonstration projects in Europe that fit within the four areas I mentioned earlier. Our goal is to reduce the costs of these approaches, get them deployed faster, and help deliver on the EU’s ambitious climate goals. I hope to be announcing more partnerships like this one later this year.

I’m excited about Catalyst and think it can help make clean-energy innovations more available and affordable for everyone.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last month talking about climate change. Whether it’s on my book tour, in media interviews, or just during conversations with colleagues, it’s been great to have so many thoughtful conversations with people about how we prevent the worst effects of climate change.

Most of the questions I’ve gotten are about how we get to zero greenhouse gas emissions. Mitigation is the biggest climate problem we need to solve, and it’s been great to see it get so much attention. But I’ve noticed there’s one key topic that people don’t ask about as much: how we can help the world adapt to climate change.

I understand why. I dedicated five chapters of the book to mitigation and only one to adaptation. (In retrospect, I wish I had written more about the subject.) But there’s a reason I named my book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” and not “How to Stop Climate Change:” Our climate is already changing.

You just need to look at last month’s freeze in Texas and last year’s wildfires in California to see that extreme weather events are becoming more common. The scary thing is that these events aren’t the only (or even the most devastating) way a warming world is making life more difficult for people. The biggest damage is happening too gradually to make headline news, mostly in places near the Equator—and no one is more at risk than the world’s poorest people. 

About two-thirds of those living in poverty work in agriculture, often relying on the food they grow to feed their families. A warmer world will be problematic for relatively well-off farmers in America and Europe, but potentially deadly for low-income farmers in Africa and Asia.

The closer you live to the Equator, the worse the effects of climate change will be. Droughts and floods will become more frequent, wiping out harvests more often. Livestock will eat less and produce less meat and milk. The air and soil start to lose moisture, leaving less water available for plants; in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, tens of millions of acres of farmland will become substantially drier.

When you’re already living on the edge, any one of these changes could be disastrous. We’re likely going to see a situation for these farmers where, instead of your crop getting wiped out every ten years, it gets wiped out every four years. If you don’t have money saved up to buy imported food—which is the case for most smallholder farmers—your children will likely become malnourished and more susceptible to disease.

The worst impact of climate change in poor countries will be to make health worse—which is yet another reason why we need to help the poorest improve their health. This starts with raising the odds that malnourished children will survive by improving primary healthcare systems, doubling down on malaria prevention, and continuing to provide vaccines for conditions like diarrhea and pneumonia. We also need to ensure that fewer children are malnourished in the first place by helping poor farmers grow more food.

This is a problem we can help solve with innovation. We need better methods and tools to grow food, just like we need to find zero-carbon ways to move around and generate electricity. No other organization is in a better position to create the innovations that will help poor farmers adapt to climate change in the years ahead than CGIAR, a global partnership that helps make plants and animals more resilient and productive. (I’ve written about how amazing CGIAR is before.)

Our foundation first got involved with CGIAR more than a decade ago, when we supported their work to develop drought- and flood-tolerant varieties of staple crops like maize. We’re already seeing big improvements in places like Zimbabwe. Farmers in drought-stricken areas there who used drought-tolerant maize were able to harvest up to 500 more pounds per acre than farmers who used conventional varieties—producing enough to feed a family of six for nine months.

CGIAR and other organizations are also creating tools to help farmers adapt to unpredictable weather, like sensors that tell you when to plant seeds and phone apps that help identify pests. Poor farmers need more advances like these, but to provide them, we need to invest more money in agricultural R&D. Doubling CGIAR’s funding so it can reach more farmers is one of the main recommendations by the Global Commission on Adaptation, which I led along with former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and former World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva. (Other recommendations include shoring up water infrastructure and building a stronger safety net to help farmers recover faster.)

If we don’t take steps now to help farmers adapt, we’re setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster. The U.S. military predicts that climate change will become a huge driver of global instability. When people can’t grow enough food to feed themselves, they often leave those areas for places that can better support their families. We’re going to see more “climate refugees” move to cooler regions as the world gets warmer. The Department of Defense is already thinking about where a warmer climate could cause conflicts that they would be asked to intervene in.

It’s deeply unfair that the people who contribute the least to climate change will suffer the worst from its effects. Extreme poverty has plummeted in the past quarter century, from 36 percent of the world’s population in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015 (although COVID-19 is a huge setback that is undoing a great deal of progress). Climate change could erase even more of these gains, increasing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 13 percent.

Rich and middle-income countries are causing the vast majority of climate change, and we need to be the ones to step up and invest more in adaptation. The world’s poorest deserve our help, and they need more of it than they’re getting.

So far, I’ve participated in 11 virtual events to discuss my new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, with a few more to come. At each one, I’ve talked about how the world needs to transform its entire physical economy so we can stop emitting greenhouse gases by 2050, and at nearly every event, I’ve been asked some version of this question: “What about the people who will lose jobs in this transition?”

It’s a great question. People are right to be concerned about it. Unfortunately, the way we talk about this issue can be polarizing, and the arguments end up falling into one of two extreme camps.

For those who are worried about climate change, it’s easy to dismiss anyone who calls out lost jobs in the fossil-fuel industry as a climate denier. And for those who are worried about losing jobs, it’s easy to conclude that environmentalists don’t understand the impact this transition will have on workers, their families, and their communities.

The truth is, everyone has legitimate concerns here. The world does need to transition to a zero-carbon economy over the next 30 years. Yet it’s also true that many communities rely on an economic engine—like oil refineries—that’s powered by fossil fuels. If the only job you’ve ever had relies on fossil fuels, it must be gut-wrenching to imagine it going away. Knowing that the transition is necessary to avoid a climate disaster doesn’t make it any easier.

So I want to share some thoughts about how to strike the right balance.

To begin with, it’s crucial to recognize that this transition will happen in an economy that is already incredibly dynamic. The demand for workers can shift quickly from one sector to another, and from one geographic area to another. And these changes aren’t just driven by clean energy—other factors like automation and robotics play an essential role too.

By and large, this dynamism is good for the economy. I think that’s going to be true in the clean-energy transition too, because it will create so many new opportunities for workers. In some cases, their skills will transfer directly. For example, if green hydrogen fuels turn out to be a big business, we’ll still need pipelines and trucks to move them around—just as we move around oil and gas today. Mining skills could also be useful in sourcing minerals, like lithium and copper, that are used in the production of clean technologies and will be in increasingly high demand.

There will also be jobs involved in constructing and running all the infrastructure for the green economy: wind and solar farms, modernized power grids, battery factories, refineries for sustainable fuels, facilities for long-duration storage of electricity, direct-air capture facilities, and more.

But you don’t have to be a climate skeptic to see the challenges with all this. These new, clean solutions may not use the same workforce or be located in the same regions as their conventional counterparts. (Most of America’s wind power is in the middle of the continent, not in coal country.) Some new jobs may not be as good as the ones that are lost. And some new technologies may need fewer workers than the ones they’re replacing.

For example, electric vehicles need less maintenance because they have fewer moving parts than cars with internal combustion engines. In a future with lots of EVs on the road, fewer people will be needed to repair them and to work at gas stations. Whether the shift to EVs ends up being good or bad for America’s automotive industry will depend on whether governments act now to encourage manufacturing—in existing and new plants alike—throughout the entire supply chain, from parts to assembly.

Over time, dozens of industries will go through their own evolutions as they reduce and eliminate their emissions. Workers and communities across the country will be affected: coal miners in West Virginia, factory workers in Ohio and North Carolina, automakers in Detroit, cement makers in Seattle. And it’s not just in the United States—the same changes will affect workers around the world.

What can be done about it?

Unfortunately, there’s no single solution that will work in every industry or every community. The federal government can provide guidance and funding, help connect regions that are facing common challenges, and create incentives to make good clean-energy jobs accessible to everyone. But in the end, it’s really state and local leaders—from the public and private sectors, labor groups, and community groups—who will be crucial.

There are four principles that should guide the transition:

Think big and start now. The deadly power outages in Texas are a painful reminder that unpredictable weather is going to be more common, and there’ll be times when it affects the ability of entire regions of the country to function effectively. Governments should invest now in upgrades to make the power grid and all U.S. infrastructure more resilient. That process is an example of how this transition can make the country better prepared to prevent a climate disaster while significantly increasing opportunities for good jobs.

The sooner this transition starts, the better off everyone will be. New technologies like clean cement and sustainable aviation fuel will need manufacturing facilities, supply chains, and distribution networks—all of which will employ many people in construction and operations. Whoever builds the first of these will have a leg up on building the next ones, and whoever figures out the operations side first will able to scale faster than their competitors. Each of these pieces of infrastructure should be thought of as large construction projects requiring a significant amount of labor. They’ll also be long-term investments—these plants and refineries will remain in these communities for decades. 

There’s also tremendous economic opportunity in research and development funding. R&D money creates immediate jobs in the communities where it’s spent, and it also gives them a head start on growth—since the places where that money is invested are often the places where new companies take root. Meanwhile, the federal government can adopt policies that encourage innovators to demonstrate and deploy their new ideas in the communities where they discover them.

In choosing where to make these investments, equity needs to be a driving factor. Polluting industries are disproportionately located in communities of color, to the detriment of their health and well-being. And these communities tend to be more economically vulnerable and have fewer safeguards, so they will often be hit harder than others. In the transition to clean energy, people in disadvantaged communities deserve opportunities for good jobs that won’t put their health or the environment at risk.

Learn from promising examples. Toledo, Ohio, has been a hub for the glass-making industry for so long that its nickname is “the Glass City.” After its manufacturing base hit hard times, local leaders identified a new area where the city’s glass roots were especially relevant: making solar panels. This work has become a key part of the local economy.

In Pueblo, Colorado, business and government leaders are transforming a historic iron mill—once the only steel-making company west of the Mississippi—into the world’s first electric arc furnace powered primarily by solar energy. That project will ensure that at least 1,000 steelworkers keep their jobs and create hundreds of construction jobs.

And in New York state, all offshore wind projects are now required to pay prevailing wages to the workers who are installing wind turbines. Local unions played a crucial role in pushing for the agreement.

Commit the resources to make it work. Making sure the transition is just and fair won’t be cheap. Germany, for example, is planning to spend more on this than on research and development into clean-energy innovation.

But it’s not simply about spending more. If it wants to compete with Europe and China in the green economy, the U.S. will need a generation of engineers and scientists who focus on these new areas—so the energy transition is another compelling argument for improving America’s education system. Even relatively small improvements in schools would help graduates be more adaptable as they move from one job or career to another.

Innovators at universities also need to be connected with entrepreneurs and investors so their ideas can get from the lab into the market—which will spark the creation of new companies that create jobs and opportunity. The University of Toledo, for example, has been an important partner in the transition that city has undergone.

Stay on track. Nearly every political party in Europe is committed to avoiding a climate disaster. So when they make 10- or 20-year commitments to funding innovation or building infrastructure, the private sector can take them seriously. But in the U.S., when there’s a change in leadership in Congress or the White House, it can mean that priorities and policies change too—which makes it hard for companies to raise the capital for, say, retooling steel and cement factories. A serious long-term commitment to fighting climate change by all leaders would make a big difference.

Moving to a green economy is the biggest challenge the world has ever faced. I’m optimistic we can do it, for all the reasons I explain in my book. But it needs to benefit everyone—including those workers and communities who depend on the fossil fuels that we need to get rid of.

My new climate book is out this week. I hope that it gives everyone who reads it a better understanding of what we need to do to avoid a climate disaster. But if there is only one idea I want people to take away from the book, it’s this: We need to lower the Green Premiums.

I’ve written about the Green Premiums on this blog before. The term refers to the difference in cost between a product that involves emitting carbon and an alternative that doesn’t. For example, the current average price of jet fuel is $2.22 per gallon. If an airline wanted to swap that out for a zero-carbon advanced biofuel alternative, you’d have to pay $5.35 per gallon—a whopping 140 percent increase. That difference is the Green Premium for gasoline.

Green Premiums let us see which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now—like solar power, which has a low premium in some places—and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren’t cheap enough. The bigger the Green Premium is for a particular product, the more expensive it will be to eliminate that product’s emissions—and the harder it will be to accomplish. Lowering these premiums is the only way to zero out emissions without making things significantly more expensive.

When I talk to presidents and prime ministers about their countries’ plans to fight climate change, I always urge them to focus their innovation efforts on the biggest Green Premiums. Lowering those premiums is going to take time, so we need to accelerate work on them right away. It’s tempting to focus on low-hanging fruit—like switching to electric vehicles—and we should. But easy wins aren’t enough if we’re going to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. We need to work on the hard parts too, like cement and steel.

So, how exactly do we lower the Green Premiums? There are two levers that governments can pull: reduce the cost of zero-carbon alternatives or charge for the hidden costs of pollution. Ideally, any plan to address climate change does both.

Reduce the cost of zero-carbon alternatives

The world needs to get to zero emissions by 2050 if we’re going to avoid a climate disaster. To do that, we need to find ways to generate and store clean electricity, grow food, make things, move around, and heat and cool our buildings without releasing greenhouse gases. Some of these clean alternatives are already out there, but we need breakthroughs to lower their Green Premiums. Others don’t exist at all, let alone at a low enough cost for middle-income countries to afford.

If we’re going to reduce the cost of zero-carbon alternatives, we need a ton of innovation. Governments need to lead the way on a lot of this innovation, because they can invest in new ideas that might be too risky to be funded by the private sector. That’s why, in my book, I call on governments to quintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. The discoveries that come out of that R&D will feed innovative work in private companies around the world. Philanthropic funding can help, too, by supporting early-stage innovators who could take great ideas from the lab and turn them into new products and services.

It won’t be enough to just supply more innovation, though—we also need to create demand so these new products and services can get a foothold in the competitive marketplace. Companies can work with governments to fund the first few projects demonstrating a new technology or system works safely, which can prove to investors that the next projects are ready for them to fund.

Once a product is ready to buy, companies can then use their own buying power to increase the clean products they consume in their supply chains. Federal and state governments have this same power, too—they can do things like require the use of clean steel and cement in the infrastructure projects they fund.

The real value of government leadership in this space is that it can take chances on bold ideas that might fail or might not pay off right away. When an idea is in its earliest stages, the right policies and financing can make sure it gets fully explored. That’s especially important for zero-carbon alternatives that don’t exist yet. We need to try out lots of different ideas to find the ones that work.

Charge for the hidden costs of pollution

Today, when businesses make products or consumers buy things, they don’t bear any extra cost for the carbon involved. That carbon imposes a very real cost on society, though. Just think about all the money cities and towns are spending—and will spend in the future—to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Governments have the power to ensure that at least some of these external costs are paid by whoever is responsible for them. This would, in turn, create an incentive for companies to come up with carbon-free alternatives. By addressing the hidden costs of fossil fuels, it tells the market that there will be extra costs associated with products that emit greenhouse gas. And by slowly increasing the price of carbon to reflect its true cost, we can nudge producers and consumers toward more efficient decisions and encourage innovation that reduces Green Premiums. You’re more likely to try to invent a new type of clean fuel if you’re confident you won’t be undercut by cheap gasoline.

We could make pollution more expensive through either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, where companies can buy and sell the right to emit carbon. Where the revenue generated by these programs goes is not as important as the market signal sent by the price itself. Many economists argue that the money should be returned to consumers or businesses to cover the resulting increase in prices, although others believe it should be reinvested in R&D and other incentives to help solve climate change.

The biggest impact will come from putting a price on carbon on the national level, although state and local governments can play a big role too. States can test policies like carbon pricing before we implement them across the country. And they can join together in regional alliances, the way some states in the northeastern U.S. have done with a cap-and-trade program to lower emissions.

Governments must take the lead if we’re going to lower the Green Premiums, but there are things you can do as an individual to help too. You can use your purchasing power as a consumer to buy green alternatives, which sends a signal to companies that there is a market for these products. You can also use your voice as a citizen to urge your elected officials to take the steps I outlined above. (You can read more about what you can do to fight climate change here.)

You’re going to hear me talk about Green Premiums a lot in the months and years to come, because addressing them is the single most important thing we can do to avoid a climate disaster. And I’ll be doing more than talking: this will be a central part of the work we do at Breakthrough Energy, my organization dedicated to accelerating the clean energy transition. So, the next time someone asks you what they can do to fight climate change, I hope you tell them: Do whatever you can to lower the Green Premiums.

When I worked at Microsoft, it was always a thrill to see a product we’d been working on for years finally get released to the public. I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation today. My new book on climate change is available now online and in bookstores.

I wrote How to Avoid a Climate Disaster because I think we’re at a crucial moment. I’ve seen exciting progress in the more than 15 years that I’ve been learning about energy and climate change. The cost of renewable energy from the sun and wind has dropped dramatically. There’s more public support for taking big steps to avoid a climate disaster than ever before. And governments and companies around the world are setting ambitious goals for reducing emissions.

What we need now is a plan that turns all this momentum into practical steps to achieve our big goals. That’s what How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is: a plan for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions.

I kept the jargon to a minimum because I wanted the book to be accessible to everyone who cares about this issue. I didn’t assume that readers know anything about energy or climate change, though if you do, I hope it will deepen your understanding of this incredibly complex topic. I also included ways in which everyone can contribute—whether you’re a political leader, an entrepreneur, an inventor, a voter, or an individual who wants to know how you can help.

The effort I founded called Breakthrough Energy, which started with a venture fund to invest in promising clean energy companies, has expanded to a network of philanthropic programs, investment funds, and advocacy efforts to accelerate energy innovation at every step. We’ll be supporting great thinkers and cutting-edge technologies and businesses, as well as pushing for public- and private-sector policies that will speed up the clean energy transition. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be turning the ideas in my book into action and trying to turn this plan into reality.

Below is an excerpt from the introduction, which gives you a sense of what the book is about and how I came to write it. I hope you’ll check out the book, but much more important, I hope you’ll do what you can to help us keep the planet livable for generations to come.

Excerpt from How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Two decades ago, I would never have predicted that one day I would be talking in public about climate change, much less writing a book about it. My background is in software, not climate science, and these days my full-time job is working with my wife, Melinda, at the Gates Foundation, where we are super-focused on global health, development, and U.S. education.

I came to focus on climate change in an indirect way—through the problem of energy poverty.

In the early 2000s, when our foundation was just starting out, I began traveling to low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia so I could learn more about child mortality, HIV, and the other big problems we were working on. But my mind was not always on diseases. I would fly into major cities, look out the win­dow, and think, Why is it so dark out there? Where are all the lights I’d see if this were New York, Paris, or Beijing?

I learned that about a billion people didn’t have reliable access to electricity and that half of them lived in sub-Saharan Africa. (The picture has improved a bit since then; today roughly 860 million people don’t have electricity.) I began to think about how the world could make energy affordable and reliable for the poor. It didn’t make sense for our foundation to take on this huge problem—we needed it to stay focused on its core mission—but I started kick­ing around ideas with some inventor friends of mine.

In late 2006 I met with two former Microsoft colleagues who were starting nonprofits focused on energy and climate. They brought along two climate scientists who were well versed in the issues, and the four of them showed me the data connecting greenhouse gas emissions to climate change.

I knew that greenhouse gases were making the temperature rise, but I had assumed that there were cyclical variations or other fac­tors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster. And it was hard to accept that as long as humans kept emitting any amount of greenhouse gases, temperatures would keep going up.

I went back to the group several 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.

Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things:

1. To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions.
2. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter.
3. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.

The case for zero was, and is, rock solid. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it. The only sensible goal is zero.

This book suggests a way forward, a series of steps we can take to give ourselves the best chance to avoid a climate disaster. It breaks down into five parts:

Why zero? In chapter 1, I’ll explain more about why we need to get to zero, including what we know (and what we don’t) about how rising temperatures will affect people around the world.

The bad news: Getting to zero will be really hard. Because every plan to achieve anything starts with a realistic assessment of the barriers that stand in your way, in chapter 2 we’ll take a moment to consider the challenges we’re up against.

How to have an informed conversation about climate change. In chapter 3, I’ll cut through some of the confusing statistics you might have heard and share the handful of questions I keep in mind in every conversation I have about climate change. They have kept me from going wrong more times than I can count, and I hope they will do the same for you.

The good news: We can do it. In chapters 4 through 9, I’ll break down the areas where today’s technology can help and where we need breakthroughs. This will be the longest part of the book, because there’s so much to cover. We have some solutions we need to deploy in a big way now, and we also need a lot of innovations to be developed and spread around the world in the next few decades.

Steps we can take now. I wrote this book because I see not just the problem of climate change; I also see an opportunity to solve it. That’s not pie-in-the-sky optimism. We already have two of the three things you need to accomplish any major undertaking. First, we have ambition, thanks to the passion of a growing global move­ment led by young people who are deeply concerned about climate change. Second, we have big goals for solving the problem as more national and local leaders around the world commit to doing their part.

Now we need the third component: a concrete plan to achieve our goals.

Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more. So in the final chap­ters of this book, I’ll propose a plan based on guidance I’ve gotten from experts in all these disciplines. In chapters 10 and 11, I’ll focus on policies that governments can adopt; in chapter 12, I’ll suggest steps that each of us can take to help the world get to zero. Whether you’re a government leader, an entrepreneur, or a voter with a busy life and too little free time (or all of the above), there are things you can do to help avoid a climate disaster.

That’s it. Let’s get started.

When I talk to people about climate change, I almost always get asked the same question: What can I do to help? So, when I sat down to write my new book, I knew I wanted to include a chapter about what actions individuals can take to move us closer to a zero-carbon future.

It’s human nature to want to do something when you’re confronted with a problem—especially one as big as climate change. The good news is that there are things everyone can do. Although the most impactful steps we can take to avoid a climate disaster must happen at the governmental level, you have power to effect change as a citizen, a consumer, and an employee or employer.

Below is a book excerpt that covers the citizen and consumer categories. I hope it gives you some ideas for how you can help solve this urgent problem. (There will also be ways to partner with me through my work with Breakthrough Energy, my organization dedicated to putting the ideas in this book into action.)

Excerpt from How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

As a Citizen

When you ask yourself what you can do to limit climate change, it’s natural to think of things like driving an electric car or eating less meat. This sort of personal action is important for the signals it sends to the marketplace—see the next section for more on that point—but the bulk of our emissions comes from the larger systems in which we live our daily lives.

When somebody wants toast for breakfast, we need to make sure there’s a system in place that can deliver the bread, the toaster, and the electricity to run the toaster without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We aren’t going to solve the climate problem by telling people not to eat toast.

But putting this new energy system in place requires concerted political action. That’s why engaging in the political process is the most important single step that people from every walk of life can take to help avoid a climate disaster.

In my own meetings with politicians, I’ve found that it helps to remember that climate change isn’t the only thing on their plate. Government leaders are also thinking about education, jobs, health care, foreign policy, and more recently, COVID-19. And they should: All those things demand attention.

But policy makers can take on only so many problems at once. And they decide what to do, what to prioritize, based on what they’re hearing from their constituents.

In other words, elected officials will adopt specific plans for cli­mate change if their voters demand it. Thanks to activists around the world, we don’t need to generate demand: Millions of people are already calling for action. What we do need to do, though, is to translate these calls for action into pressure that encourages politi­cians to make the tough choices and trade-offs necessary to deliver on their promises to reduce emissions.

Whatever other resources you may have, you can always use your voice and your vote to effect change.

Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. What you can help your leaders understand is that it’s just as important for them to think about the long-term problem of climate change as it is for them to think about jobs or education or health care.

It may sound old-fashioned, but letters and phone calls to your elected officials can have a real impact. Senators and representatives get frequent reports on what their offices are hearing from constitu­ents. But don’t simply say, “Do something about climate change.” Know where they stand, ask them questions, and make clear that this is an issue that will help determine how you vote. Demand more funding for clean energy R&D, a clean energy standard, or a price on carbon, for example.

Look locally as well as nationally. A lot of the relevant decisions are made at the state and local levels by governors, mayors, state legislatures, and city councils—places where individual citizens can have an even bigger impact than at the federal level. In the United States, for example, electricity is primarily regulated by statewide public utility commissions, made up of either elected or appointed commissioners. Know who your representatives are and keep in touch with them.

Run for office. Running for the U.S. Congress is a tall order. But you don’t have to start there. You can run for state or local office, where you’ll probably have more impact anyway. We need all the policy smarts, courage, and creativity in public office that we can get.

As a Consumer

The market is ruled by supply and demand, and as a consumer you can have a huge impact on the demand side of the equation. If all of us make individual changes in what we buy and use, it can add up to a lot—as long as we focus on changes that are meaningful. For example, if you can afford to install a smart thermostat to reduce your energy consumption when you’re not at home, by all means do it. You’ll cut your utility bill and your greenhouse gas emissions.

But reducing your own carbon emissions isn’t the most powerful thing you can do. You can also send a signal to the market that people want zero-carbon alternatives and are willing to pay for them. When you pay more for an electric car, a heat pump, or a plant-based burger, you’re saying, “There’s a market for this stuff. We’ll buy it.” If enough people send the same signal, companies will respond—quite quickly, in my experience. They’ll put more money and time into making low-emissions products, which will drive down the prices of those products, which will help them get adopted in big numbers. It will make investors more confident about funding new companies that are making the breakthroughs that will help us get to zero.

Without that demand signal, the innovations that governments and businesses invest in will stay on the shelf. Or they won’t get developed in the first place, because there’s no economic incentive to make them.

Here are some specific steps you can take:

Sign up for a green pricing program with your electric utility. Some utility companies allow homes and businesses to pay extra for power from clean sources. In 13 states, utilities are required to offer this option. Customers in these programs pay a premium on their electric bill to cover the extra cost of renewable energy, an average of one to two cents per kilowatt-hour, or $9 to $18 a month for the typical American home. When you participate in these pro­grams, you’re telling your utility company that you’re willing to pay more to address climate change. That’s an important market signal.

But what these programs don’t do is cancel out emissions or lead to meaningful increases in the amount of renewable power on the grid. Only government policies and increased investments can do that.

Reduce your home’s emissions. Depending on how much money and time you can spare, you can replace your incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs, install a smart thermostat, insulate your win­dows, buy efficient appliances, or replace your heating and cooling system with a heat pump (as long as you live in a climate where they can operate). If you rent your home, you can make the changes within your control—such as replacing lightbulbs—and encour­age your landlord to do the rest. If you’re building a new home or renovating an old one, you can opt for recycled steel and make the home more efficient by using structural insulated panels, insulating concrete forms, attic or roof radiant barriers, reflective insulation, and foundation insulation.

Buy an electric vehicle. EVs have come a long way in terms of cost and performance. Although they might not be right for everyone (they’re not great for lots of long-distance road trips, and charging at home isn’t convenient for everyone), they’re becoming more affordable for many consumers. This is one of the places where consumer behavior can have a huge impact: If people buy lots of them, companies will make lots of them.

Try a plant-based burger. I’ll admit that veggie burgers haven’t always tasted great, but the new generation of plant-based protein alternatives is better and closer to the taste and texture of meat than their predecessors. You can find them in many restaurants, grocery stores, and even fast-food joints. Buying these products sends a clear message that making them is a wise investment. In addition, eating a meat substitute (or simply not eating meat) just once or twice a week will cut down on the emissions you’re responsible for. The same goes for dairy products.

I have a higher-than-average carbon footprint, so I’m taking extra steps to do my part. In the book I briefly mention how I’m offsetting my own emissions. I spend about $5 million every year to offset my family’s carbon footprint. As of now, the standard calculation for carbon footprints is based on an estimate of $400 per ton of emissions. But since the way we calculate carbon footprints is still in its infancy, I take our family’s carbon footprint and double it to make sure we are fully covering our footprint and then some.

I also like to think of my investments in zero-carbon technologies as another kind of offset for my emissions. Investing in companies doesn’t make my carbon footprint smaller. But if I’ve picked any winners, they’ll be responsible for removing much more carbon than I am responsible for creating. I have given more than $1 billion toward innovations and ideas that I hope will help the world get to zero—including affordable and reliable clean energy, low-emissions cement, steel, meat, and more.

Although heavy emitters like me should use less energy, the world overall should be using more energy because that’s a key element to moving countries out of poverty and expanding our global economy. There is nothing wrong with using more energy as long as it’s carbon-free. The key to addressing climate change is to make clean energy just as cheap and reliable as what we get from fossil fuels.

During last year’s campaign, President Joe Biden argued that the “United States must lead the world to take on the existential threat we face—climate change.” I agree. Although COVID-19 will rightfully continue to dominate the agenda, the President and Congress also have the opportunity to lead the world in avoiding a climate disaster.

I’ve learned from my work at Microsoft and in philanthropy that the best way to encourage others to take action is to start by doing it yourself. President Biden has already taken an important first step by rejoining the Paris climate accord. Now the United States can build on that step by adopting a concrete plan that checks several boxes at once: eliminating emissions while adapting to the warming that is already happening, spurring innovative industries, creating jobs for the post-pandemic recovery, and ensuring that everyone benefits from the transition to a green economy. (This plan is a key part of my upcoming book about climate change. And I’ll be writing about the last point—the transition to a green economy—here on the Gates Notes in the next few months.)

In the 15 years that I’ve been learning about and investing in clean energy, I’ve benefited from many discussions with scientists, policy experts, and elected leaders from across the political spectrum, in the United States and around the world. Drawing on those conversations, here are four ways that America and other countries can advance their leadership on climate change this year and put the world on a path to zero emissions by 2050.

1.  Increase the supply of innovation.

We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean electricity, grow food, make things, move around, and heat and cool our buildings, so we can do all these things without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We have some of the tools we need, like solar and wind power, but far from all of them. And we won’t develop new tools without a dramatic infusion of investment and focus from the federal government.

Just how dramatic? I estimate that federal spending on clean-energy research and development needs to go up fivefold—an increase that would put it on equal footing with health research. And it would be a key first step in creating more than 370,000 jobs as well.

But this is not simply about throwing more money at the problem. We also need to make sure the government is set up to avoid duplication and make the best use of these resources. That’s why we should create the National Institutes of Energy Innovation.

This NIEI should be modeled on the phenomenally successful National Institutes for Health. For example, just like NIH, it would consist of various institutes focused on specific areas. An Institute of Transportation Decarbonization would be responsible for work on low-carbon fuels. Other institutes would have similar responsibilities and authority for research on energy storage, renewables, and so on.

If I could pick just one thing that the U.S. could do to lead the world in technological innovations for clean energy, this would be it.

2.  Increase the demand for innovation.

I learned the hard way at Microsoft that simply making a great product doesn’t guarantee that you will beat the competition. Sometimes there’s just not enough demand for what you’re selling.

The lesson for climate change is that we can’t avoid a climate disaster through technological innovation alone. We also need policy innovations to make sure that scientists’ breakthroughs make it from the lab to the market, and that they’re affordable enough for developing countries as well as rich ones.

That means doing things like setting standards for how much electricity or fuel must come from zero-carbon options. Governments can also use their procurement power to create demand for cleaner options—for example, buying only electric buses, as the city of Shenzhen, China has done. They can build the infrastructure that allows for green options: charging stations for electric vehicles, or new transmission lines to deliver clean energy from the places where it’s generated to the places where it’s consumed.

Finally, governments can level the playing field so it’s easier for clean alternatives to compete on price.

The problem is that right now, products that cause emissions aren’t priced to reflect the environmental damage they cause. They should be. Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs are two ways to solve this problem.

The idea isn’t to punish people for their greenhouse gases. It’s to create incentives for inventors to create competitive carbon-free alternatives and for consumers to buy them.

3.  Work globally.

Climate change is the definition of a global issue. Temperatures won’t stop going up in Texas unless emissions stop going up in India (and temperatures in India won’t stop going up until emissions stop going up in Texas).

That is why governments need to work together to develop common goals, share knowledge, and make sure that clean technologies developed in one country will spread quickly to others. This cooperation can happen on a bilateral basis—between two countries talking directly to each other—as well as among many governments through venues like the United Nations and Mission Innovation.

To see why this is so important, look at the global growth of the nuclear energy industry. Today, most of the world’s nuclear reactors are based on American technology. Why? Because after World War II, the United States led an international effort to develop and deploy this breakthrough energy source. It collaborated on R&D with a range of international partners, making it possible for American firms to license technology to them, export equipment to them, and sell them nuclear fuel. And today, policymakers across the federal government—from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the State Department—work together to advance the global deployment of nuclear energy.

We need a similar approach to clean-energy breakthroughs.

4.  Prepare for a warming world.

We’re already seeing the impact of climate change. So even as we develop and deploy ways to prevent future warming, we also need to adapt to the effects that higher temperatures are having around the world.

Countries will need to invest in climate-proofing infrastructure to cope with more severe weather and rising sea levels. This includes upgrading electrical grids, expanding storm water drainage systems, and building or expanding seawalls. And two of the best ways for wealthy countries to help low- and middle-income ones is to invest in primary health care and make sure smallholder farmers can grow enough food to feed everyone.

The Global Commission on Adaptation, which I co-chair along with Ban Ki-Moon and Kristalina Georgieva, has published a number of evidence-based recommendations. I encourage you to check out the commission’s work.

To be sure, governments aren’t the only ones who need to act across all four areas. Businesses, philanthropists, and individuals can also play a pivotal role by advocating for these policies, investing in low-emissions solutions, paying the Green Premiums when they can, and more. I’ll be writing more about these areas in future posts, and they’re covered in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster as well.

I see promise in 2021. The next major U.N. Summit on climate change—to be hosted by the United Kingdom in November—is an opportunity for countries around the world, including the U.S., to showcase their leadership on this urgent problem. If they want to lead by doing, the four steps laid out here are a good place to start.

This year has been a tragic reminder that we need to do a better job of preparing for global threats. The world wasn’t ready for COVID-19. In Melinda’s and my Annual Letter, coming out next month, I’ll write about what we can learn from this pandemic to help us prepare for the next one.

There’s another global disaster we also need to try to prevent: climate change. As I have tried to make clear on this blog over the past two years, we have only some of the tools we need to eliminate the world’s greenhouse gases. We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean electricity, grow food, make things, move around, and heat and cool our buildings, so we can do all these things without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

In short, we need to revolutionize the world’s physical economy—and that will take, among other things, a dramatic infusion of ingenuity, funding, and focus from the federal government. No one else has the resources to drive the research we need.

On the funding side, we need a fivefold increase—but the increase is only so substantial because we’d be starting from such a low level. The federal government puts around $7 billion a year into clean-energy research, versus more than $35 billion a year into medical research. Putting energy on equal footing with health would be a key first step that would create more than 370,000 jobs while also advancing a clean-energy agenda.

To be fair, the U.S. isn’t the only country that underfunds clean energy research. All the governments in the world spend about $22 billion a year on it, or around 0.02 percent of the global economy. Americans spend more than that on gasoline in a single month.

But merely funneling more money into research won’t be enough. We also need to make sure the government is set up to make the best use of these resources, and right now, it isn’t. There’s no central office that’s responsible for evaluating and nurturing great ideas. For example, research on clean fuels is managed by offices in the departments of Energy, Transportation, and Defense—and even NASA. Similarly, responsibility for research on energy storage is spread across at least four offices in the Department of Energy.

There is a better way. To reduce duplication, focus the government’s efforts, and get the most innovation out of every dollar of funding, we should create a new organization: the National Institutes of Energy Innovation. This the most important thing the U.S. can do to lead the world in innovations that will solve climate change.

Creating these institutes wouldn’t be an exercise in simply moving boxes around an organizational chart and hoping for a better outcome. We actually have a model for setting things up in a better way, and evidence that it produces results. That model is the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH is the largest single funder of biomedical research in the world, and its impact is simply mind-blowing. Scientists supported by the NIH have mapped the human genome, resulting in tests or treatments for dozens of genetic diseases. They have helped cut deaths from heart disease by two thirds in the past 50 years. Since 1980, NIH-supported research has contributed to the discovery of more than 150 new drugs, vaccines, and novel uses for existing drugs. The Gates Foundation’s work in global health simply would not be possible without the countless advances made by the NIH.

Why is the NIH so successful? It has a clear and specific mission. It has apolitical leaders who let independent researchers follow the science, rather than political staff who change priorities every few years. It’s organized in a way that empowers each of its separate institutes and research centers. And it has strong bipartisan support from policymakers and the public.

Those lessons should guide the creation of the National Institutes of Energy Innovation. Specifically:

• It should be made up of separate institutes that focus on specific areas. An Institute of Transportation Decarbonization, for example, would have a mandate and budget to invent low-carbon fuels for hard-to-decarbonize activities such as aviation and maritime shipping. Unlike the current structure, there would be a single chain of command responsible for meeting this goal. Other institutes would have similar responsibilities and authority for research on energy storage, renewables, carbon capture and management, and so on.
• Each institute should be tasked with working on every aspect of getting new products to market, from basic research to commercialization. It’s not enough to develop a new way to store electricity that works in the lab—to have any impact, it has to be practical and affordable in real-world settings. The best way to ensure that is to encourage scientists to start their research with an end-use in mind, and that there’s a system in place to make sure the best ideas make it to market and reach scale.
• The institutes should be located all around the country, the way the DOE’s national labs are now. There’s no good reason to limit the benefits of the innovation economy to Washington, D.C., or major research hubs like Boston and San Francisco.

To be sure, creating the National Institutes of Energy Innovation is not the only step we should take. We also need to increase the demand for new clean-energy tools and lower their prices. As I argued recently, we can accomplish both through innovation and through public policies like tax incentives and clean energy standards. (This is one of the core ideas in my book on climate change.)

There are also shorter-term steps we can take while plans for the National Institutes come together. For example, the U.S. House and Senate have taken up legislation (the Clean Energy Innovation and Jobs Act and the American Energy Innovation Act) that would help the federal government move toward a more nimble and focused setup. Neither act has become law yet, but I’m hopeful that in the coming months and years we will see progress on these and other efforts.

I do believe we can avoid a climate disaster—if we deploy the clean-energy tools we have now wisely, and if we make big breakthroughs that touch every aspect of our physical economy. Creating the National Institutes of Energy Innovation would put us on the right path.

Over the past several years, I’ve been making the case that we have to eliminate global carbon emissions. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need new zero-carbon ways to generate electricity, grow food, make things, move around, and keep warm and cool.

But knowing what we need to accomplish is very different from knowing how to do it—or even whether we can.

Do we have everything we need to deliver enough affordable electricity for the world, or do we need more innovation? What about things like clean fuels, steel, and cement—are they viable options yet? In short, which clean sources are effective enough and cheap enough now, and which ones aren’t yet?

Understanding the answers to these questions will help us make sure we’re putting our best minds and resources on the toughest problems in climate and energy. In my view it boils down to one issue: What is the difference in cost between a product that involves emitting carbon and an alternative that doesn’t? This difference in cost is what I call the Green Premium, and understanding it is key to making progress on climate change. (It is also a central idea in my book about climate change, which will come out in February.)

Here’s an example of a Green Premium: The average retail price for a gallon of jet fuel in the United States over the past few years has been around $2.22, while advanced biofuels for jets cost around $5.35 per gallon. The Green Premium is the difference between the two, which is $3.13, or an increase of more than 140 percent.

Since airlines would not be willing to pay more than twice as much to fuel their planes—and many customers would balk at the resulting increase in air fares—the Green Premium on biofuels suggests that we need to find ways to either make them cheaper or make jet fuel more expensive. Or a combination of the two.

Unfortunately, calculating Green Premiums is not an exact science. It involves making assumptions about the cost of emerging technologies, for example, that well-informed people can disagree about. It is also important to note that one reason the Green Premiums exist is that the prices of fossil fuels don’t factor in the damage they inflict by making the planet warmer. In many cases, clean alternatives appear more expensive because fossil fuels are artificially cheap.

So even though Green Premiums are an imperfect measure, they are better than no measure at all.

For one thing, they help us measure our progress toward eliminating carbon emissions. The bigger a Green Premium is—especially for lower-income countries like India and Nigeria whose energy needs are growing—the further we are from a zero-carbon future.

They also serve as a guide to action. In cases where the Green Premiums are big, we know we need innovations that will close the price gap. In cases where they’re small—or where clean products are actually cheaper than the polluting version—it suggests that something other than the cost is keeping zero-carbon products from being deployed, and we need to understand why.

I’ll give you two examples that show why I find Green Premiums so useful.

First, electricity. The Green Premium for electricity amounts to the additional cost of getting all power in our grid from non-emitting sources like wind, solar, nuclear power, and fossil fuel plants equipped with carbon-capture technology. For the reasons I explained in this post, there’s a high Green Premium for electricity in most parts of the world, and we need innovation to drive it closer to zero.

But clean alternatives are within striking distance in the U.S. and Europe. One study suggested that decarbonizing Europe’s power grid by 90 to 95 percent would cause rates to go up roughly 14 euros per month for a typical household in the European Union. In the United States, it would cost an extra $18 a month for the average home. While that is still a substantial premium, especially for low-income people, it’s encouraging that Europeans and Americans may be able to generate most of their electricity carbon-free for the cost of a few cups of coffee each month.

Once we know what’s driving a given Green Premium, it acts like a roadmap—it tells us the route we need to take to get to zero. In the case of electricity, one step is to keep deploying renewables where they make sense. Another is to invest more in developing technologies like long-term electricity storage, carbon capture, and advanced nuclear. And we need to modernize and expand the grids that deliver clean electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s needed—often a distance of thousands of miles.

Electricity is a relatively straightforward case. A much more complicated one is manufacturing.

Consider the process of making cement. It’s responsible for releasing carbon dioxide in two ways: when fossil fuels are burned to generate heat for cement production, and during the chemical reactions involved in the manufacturing process.

We don't yet know how to make cement without releasing this carbon. The best we can do is to capture it once it has been released and stash it away permanently, a process that adds between 75 percent and 140 percent to the cost of cement. Few construction firms would be up for absorbing such a price increase in any competitive market.

Other Green Premiums in manufacturing—for steel, for example—are also quite high. This tells us that we don’t have the tools we need to make clean manufacturing anywhere near economical enough that everyone will adopt it. We need more innovation.

As a rule, there are three levers we can pull to reduce Green Premiums:

• Governments can use policies to either make the carbon-based version of something more expensive, or make the clean version cheaper—or, ideally, some of both. This could include requiring a certain amount of electricity or fuel to be generated in zero-carbon ways.
• Companies and investors can commit to buying and using cleaner alternatives, investing in research and development, supporting clean-energy entrepreneurs and startups, and advocating for helpful government policies.
• Individuals can help create markets for better, cleaner alternatives. When you buy an electric vehicle or a plant-based burger even though it costs more than the alternative, you’re saying to the companies that make these products: “There’s demand for these items. Make more and we’ll buy them.” That will drive investment in research, which helps decrease the price and ultimately makes clean products more affordable and available for everyone.

Not everyone can afford these premiums, but if you can, it’s a productive way to contribute.

I’m convinced that the Green Premium concept can bring clarity to a debate where it is badly needed right now. I hope more people embrace it and help improve the idea. Understanding the Green Premiums will help the world make the most of its efforts and funding as we work together to avoid a climate disaster.

Earlier this month, I wrote about how COVID-19 is a cautionary tale for climate change. There’s no doubt that we have experienced terrible suffering and economic hardship over the last several months. But as hard as it is to imagine right now when we’re still in the middle of the pandemic, climate change has the potential to be even more devastating.

The pandemic has also reminded us how much innovation is needed to prevent a climate disaster. The best numbers I have seen estimate that the economic slowdown due to COVID-19 reduced global emissions by around 8 percent. That’s not nothing, but the austerity that got us there obviously isn’t sustainable. If we’re going to address climate change, we need to find new ways to do things that don’t release greenhouse gases, including how we move around.

When most people picture what contributes to climate change, vehicles are one of the first things that come to mind. Here in the United States, transportation is the number one contributor to emissions. But you might be surprised to learn that it only contributes 16 percent of global emissions. That’s a smaller percentage than how we plug in, grow things, and make things. Still, decarbonizing how we move around is essential if we’re going to get to zero net emissions.

Our goal here isn’t necessarily to make people move around less (although we should look for ways to cut back on driving, flying, and shipping where possible). As we’ve seen over the last several months, economies suffer when people are forced to stay close to home.

We want more people and goods to be able to travel. For some of the world’s poorest people—like smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa—the ability to move goods from rural areas to city markets can make the difference between life and death. To do that, we need to make sure transportation remains affordable to everyone. Products like gasoline, diesel, and even jet fuel are the standard for a reason: they can send you a long way for a low cost per gallon.

So, how exactly do we fuel our need to move around without emitting greenhouse gases? The answer is simple, even if making it happen won’t be: use clean electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for everything else.

Let’s start with the former. The good news is that we’ve made lots of progress on electric vehicles, or EVs. Unlike many of the green alternatives I’ve written about before on this blog, you can go out and buy one right now if you want. The batteries that power them have seen an 85 percent price drop since 2010, so they’re getting more affordable to purchase (although they’re still more expensive than gas-based options). Plus, increased competition in the market means there are more choices available to customers than ever before, from compact sedans to sleek sports cars. You’ll even be able to buy an all-electric pick-up truck soon thanks to legacy companies like GM and Ford and new carmakers like Rivian and Bollinger.

Several companies are developing better and cheaper batteries that will hopefully make EVs a realistic option for every car owner. This video features QuantumScape, a manufacturer working to commercialize the next generation of battery technology. (I’m invested in their work both on my own and through Breakthrough Energy Ventures.)

EVs excel at short-haul travel. That means they’re great options for personal cars and even medium-duty vehicles, like city buses and garbage trucks. But even if we develop cheap, long-range EVs that are powered by zero-carbon sources, electrification isn’t an option for many types of transportation.

The problem is that batteries are big and heavy. The more weight you’re trying to move, the more batteries you need to power the vehicle. But the more batteries you use, the more weight you add—and the more power you need. Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles.

This is where cheap alternative fuels come in. There are several different kinds of these fuels, but the one you’re probably most familiar with is biofuels.

Today’s advanced biofuels are a lot different from the first-gen ones you’ve heard about, such as ethanol. Some are made from plants that aren’t grown for food, so they need little to no fertilizer (which you might remember is a big emitter of greenhouse gases). Others are made from agricultural byproducts, like corn stalks and the pulp that’s left over from making paper. Some of these fuels can even be dropped into existing engines without any modifications needed.

I’m optimistic about these biofuels, but it’s too soon to think about replacing gasoline and other fossil fuels with them. Research on advanced biofuels is still underfunded, and they aren’t ready to be deployed at the scale we need. We need a lot more innovation before they become a realistic, cost-effective option for long-haul transportation.

Another type of alternative fuel is electrofuels. By using electricity to combine the hydrogen molecules in water with the carbon in carbon dioxide, we can create a liquid fuel that works in existing engines. The carbon dioxide this process uses is captured directly from the atmosphere, so burning electrofuels doesn’t add to overall emissions. They’re very expensive, though. Depending on what fuel you're replacing, electrofuels can cost anywhere from 3 times to 7 times as much as fossil fuels. And like with EVs, the electricity used to create them needs to be from zero-carbon sources to be a real solution.

Switching to electric vehicles and alternative fuels is the most effective way we can move toward zero emissions from the transportation sector. Although there are some other measures we can take to reduce emissions—like using less carbon-intensive materials to make cars, using fuels more efficiently, and moving around less—zeroing out all transportation emissions is going to require massive breakthroughs in these two areas.

These technologies need to get much cheaper than they are today. That means finding ways to manufacture them at scale and to make sure they perform comparably to their fossil fuel counterparts.

I’m inspired by the progress we’ve made so far, but we have a long road ahead of us (no pun intended). To prevent the worst effects of climate change, we need to get to zero net greenhouse gas emissions in every sector of the economy within 50 years. Decarbonizing how we move around is going to require lots and lots of innovation, just as in the other areas I’ve written about. I’m eager to see what role today’s technologies will play in a zero-carbon future and to discover what new breakthroughs will emerge in the years to come.

A global crisis has shocked the world. It is causing a tragic number of deaths, making people afraid to leave home, and leading to economic hardship not seen in many generations. Its effects are rippling across the world.

Obviously, I am talking about COVID-19. But in just a few decades, the same description will fit another global crisis: climate change. As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse.

I realize that it’s hard to think about a problem like climate change right now. When disaster strikes, it is human nature to worry only about meeting our most immediate needs, especially when the disaster is as bad as COVID-19. But the fact that dramatically higher temperatures seem far off in the future does not make them any less of a problem—and the only way to avoid the worst possible climate outcomes is to accelerate our efforts now. Even as the world works to stop the novel coronavirus and begin recovering from it, we also need to act now to avoid a climate disaster by building and deploying innovations that will let us eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions.

You may have seen projections that, because economic activity has slowed down so much, the world will emit fewer greenhouse gases this year than last year. Although these projections are certainly true, their importance for the fight against climate change has been overstated.

Analysts disagree about how much emissions will go down this year, but the International Energy Agency puts the reduction around 8 percent. In real terms, that means we will release the equivalent of around 47 billion tons of carbon, instead of 51 billion.

That’s a meaningful reduction, and we would be in great shape if we could continue that rate of decrease every year. Unfortunately, we can’t.

Consider what it’s taking to achieve this 8 percent reduction. More than 600,000 people have died, and tens of millions are out of work. This April, car traffic was half what it was in April 2019. For months, air traffic virtually came to a halt.

To put it mildly, this is not a situation that anyone would want to continue. And yet we are still on track to emit 92 percent as much carbon as we did last year. What’s remarkable is not how much emissions will go down because of the pandemic, but how little.

In addition, these reductions are being achieved at, literally, the greatest possible cost.

To see why, let’s look at what it costs to avert a single ton of greenhouse gases. This figure—the cost per ton of carbon averted—is a tool that economists use to compare the expense of different carbon-reduction strategies. For example, if you have a technology that costs $1 million, and using it lets you avert the release of 10,000 tons of gas, you’re paying $100 per ton of carbon averted. In reality, $100 per ton would still be pretty expensive. But many economists think this price reflects the true cost of greenhouse gases to society, and it also happens to be a memorable round number that makes a good benchmark for discussions.

Now let’s treat the shutdown caused by COVID-19 as if it were a carbon-reduction strategy. Has closing off major parts of the economy avoided emissions at anything close to $100 per ton?

No. In the United States, according to data from the Rhodium Group, it comes to between $3,200 and $5,400 per ton. In the European Union, it’s roughly the same amount. In other words, the shutdown is reducing emissions at a cost between 32 and 54 times the $100 per ton that economists consider a reasonable price.

If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and spread the pain out over a much longer period of time. The loss of life and economic misery caused by this pandemic are on par with what will happen regularly if we do not eliminate the world’s carbon emissions.

Let’s look first at the loss of life. How many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus by climate change? Because we want to compare events that happen at different points in time—the pandemic in 2020 and climate change in, say, 2060—and the global population will change in that time, we can’t compare the absolute numbers of deaths. Instead we will use the death rate: that is, the number of deaths per 100,000 people.

As of last week, more than 600,000 people are known to have died from COVID-19 worldwide. On an annualized basis, that is a death rate of 14 per 100,000 people.

How does that compare to climate change? Within the next 40 years, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount—14 deaths per 100,000. By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 73 extra deaths per 100,000 people. In a lower emissions scenario, the death rate drops to 10 per 100,000.

In other words, by 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.

The economic picture is also stark. The range of likely impacts from climate change and from COVID-19 varies quite a bit, depending on which economic model you use. But the conclusion is unmistakable: In the next decade or two, the economic damage caused by climate change will likely be as bad as having a COVID-sized pandemic every ten years. And by the end of the century, it will be much worse if the world remains on its current emissions path.

(If you’re curious, here is the math. Recent models suggest that the cost of climate change in 2030 will likely be roughly 1 percent of America's GDP per year. Meanwhile, current estimates for the cost of COVID-19 to the United States this year range between 7 percent and 10 percent of GDP. If we assume that a similar disruption happens once every ten years, that's an average annual cost of 0.7 percent to 1 percent of GDP—roughly equivalent to the damage from climate change.)

The key point is not that climate change will be disastrous. The key point is that, if we learn the lessons of COVID-19, we can approach climate change more informed about the consequences of inaction, and more prepared to save lives and prevent the worst possible outcome. The current global crisis can inform our response to the next one.

In particular, we should:

1. Let science and innovation lead the way. The relatively small decline in emissions this year makes one thing clear: We cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less.
   
   Of course, cutting back is a good thing for those who can afford to do it, as I can. And I believe that many people will use teleconferencing to replace some business travel even after the pandemic is over. But overall, the world should be using more energy, not less—as long as it is clean. So just as we need new tests, treatments, and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, we need new tools for fighting climate change: zero-carbon ways to produce electricity, make things, grow food, keep our buildings cool and warm, and move people and goods around the world. And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people—many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a less predictable climate. Any comprehensive response to climate change will have to tap into many different disciplines. Climate science tells us why we need to deal with this problem, but not how to deal with it. For that, we’ll need biology, chemistry, physics, political science, economics, engineering, and other sciences.
2. Make sure solutions work for poor countries too. We don’t yet know exactly what impact COVID-19 will have on the world’s poorest people, but I am concerned that by the time this is over, they will have had the worst of it. The same goes for climate change. It will hurt the poorest people in the world the most.
   
   Consider climate’s impact on death rates. According to a recent study published by Climate Impact Lab, although climate change will push the overall death rate up globally, the overall average will obscure an enormous disparity between rich and poor countries. More than anywhere else, climate change will dramatically increase death rates in poor countries near or below the Equator, where the weather will get even hotter and more unpredictable. The economic pattern will probably be similar: a modest drop in global GDP, but massive declines in poorer, hotter countries.
   
   In other words, the effects of climate change will almost certainly be harsher than COVID-19's, and they will be the worst for the people who did the least to cause them. The countries that are contributing the most to this problem have a responsibility to try to solve it. In addition, clean sources of energy need to be cheap enough so that low- and middle-income countries can buy them. These nations are looking to grow their economies by building factories and call centers; if this growth is powered by fossil fuels—which are now the most economical option by far—it will be even harder to get to zero emissions. When there’s a vaccine for the coronavirus, organizations like GAVI will be ready to make sure it reaches the poorest people in the world. But there is no GAVI for clean energy. So governments, inventors, and entrepreneurs around the world need to focus on making green technologies cheap enough that developing countries will not only want them, but be able to afford them.
3. Start now. Unlike the novel coronavirus, for which I think we’ll have a vaccine next year, there is no two-year fix for climate change. It will take decades to develop and deploy all the clean-energy inventions we need.
   
   We need to create a plan to avoid a climate disaster—to use the zero-carbon tools we have now, develop and deploy the many innovations we still need, and help the poorest adapt to the temperature increase that is already locked in. Although I am spending most of my time these days on COVID-19, I am still investing in promising new clean energy technologies, building programs that will help innovations scale around the world, and making the case that we need to invest in solutions that will limit the worst impacts of climate change. Some governments and private investors are committing the funding and the policies that will help us get to zero emissions, but we need even more to join in. And we need to act with the same sense of urgency that we have for COVID-19.

Health advocates said for years that a pandemic was virtually inevitable. The world did not do enough to prepare, and now we are trying to make up for lost time. This is a cautionary tale for climate change, and it points us toward a better approach. If we start now, tap into the power of science and innovation, and ensure that solutions work for the poorest, we can avoid making the same mistake with climate change.

Besides the traffic and the weather, we Seattleites love to talk about all the construction going on in our city. The downtown skyline is full of cranes, and it seems like the building never stops. By the end of the year, 39 new projects will have been completed in downtown Seattle alone, and there are plans for more than 100 others to be finished in the next two years.

Seattle is hardly alone. As the global population rises, urban areas around the world are booming, and that means more and more buildings are going up. By one estimate, the world will add 2 trillion square feet of buildings by 2060—the equivalent of putting up another New York City every month for the next 40 years.

There’s good and bad news in that statistic. The good news is that living in the city generally equates to a higher quality of life—you have access to better schools, health care, and job opportunities. The bad news is that the buildings themselves are a big contributor to climate change, and one of the five areas where we need to drive a lot of innovation if we’re going to avoid a climate disaster.

There are two ways in which buildings are responsible for greenhouse gases. The first is the construction phase: Buildings are made of concrete and steel, both of which produce a lot of emissions when they’re being made. In fact, these two materials account for around 10 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gases. And right now, we don’t have practical ways to make either one without releasing carbon dioxide.

This summer I wrote about a company called Boston Metal (which I’ve helped fund through Breakthrough Energy Ventures) that’s trying to change that, by developing a way to make zero-carbon steel using electricity instead of coal. The video below features a company called CarbonCure, which BEV has also invested in. CarbonCure has a clever approach to injecting carbon dioxide into concrete.

The other way buildings contribute to climate change is with their ongoing operations. It’s natural to think of lights and appliances like TVs as the biggest energy hogs, but they’re not: It’s actually heating and cooling. If you live in a typical American home, your air conditioner is the biggest consumer of electricity you own—more than your lights or refrigerator.

Worldwide, there are 1.6 billion A/C units in use. And that number will skyrocket as the world gets richer, more populous, and hotter; by 2050, there will be more than 5 billion A/Cs in operation. That could put us in a vicious cycle, where temperatures go up, so we run more air conditioners, which only makes it hotter, and on and on. This is another reason why it’s so urgent for us to decarbonize the world’s power grids.

But energy use isn’t the only problem with air conditioners. They also contain refrigerants called F-gases, which molecule for molecule, cause much more global warming than carbon dioxide. In 2016, representatives from 197 countries committed to reducing the production and use of certain F-gases by more than 80 percent by 2045. (I’m funding some work to help developing countries meet this commitment, and various companies are now working on alternatives to F-gases.)

Heating is a different issue. Some heaters run on electricity, and others run on fossil fuels like oil and natural gas. The best solution—from a climate point of view—is to electrify as much as we can (again, while decarbonizing the power grid) and supply the rest with zero-carbon fuels, like hydrogen fuels or advanced biofuels. Right now, though, these alternatives cost two to three times more than conventional fuels, so we’ll need a lot of innovation to make them more affordable.

I’m aware of some promising technologies that could help buildings use energy more efficiently. I’m intrigued by windows that use so-called smart glass, which automatically turns darker when the room needs to be cooler, and lighter when it needs to be warmer. And BEV has invested in a company called 75F, which uses wireless sensors to measure temperature, humidity, darkness, and other factors and then uses the information to adjust heating, cooling, and lights. They’ve found that this system can cut a building’s energy use by 50 percent.

Reducing building emissions isn’t just a problem for technology to solve. Government and corporate polices can also help a lot.

Governments have already promoted energy efficiency by setting high standards for buildings; we know a lot about how to make buildings greener, and the right policies encourage more people to do it. Governments have also helped get efficient heaters and A/C units to market by certifying them through programs like the Energy Star ratings you might’ve seen on various products.

But what if labels didn’t just reveal how energy-efficient something is, but how many greenhouse gas emissions it’s responsible for? That’s the idea behind the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator, which tells you how much carbon was used to produce steel, cement, and other materials made by companies that volunteer the information. This data will be even more important in the years ahead; right now, 80 to 90 percent of emissions come from running the building over its lifetime, but as we use cleaner sources of electricity and make buildings more efficient, the emissions from construction materials will represent a larger share of the total.

Another step that will help is for companies and governments to commit to buying lower carbon materials for their building projects. California, for example, has a new “Buy Clean” policy, and Microsoft has a goal of reducing embedded carbon by 15 to 30 percent as it rebuilds part of its headquarters in Redmond, WA.

Finally, we can strengthen our building codes to ensure that buildings are designed to be not only energy efficient, but built with low-carbon materials. Unfortunately, some rules actually make it hard to use these materials. For example, if you want to put concrete in a building, the building code might define the precise chemical composition of the cement you can use in it. But that standard may rule out low-emissions cement, even if it performs just as well as the conventional kind.

Obviously, no one wants to see buildings and bridges collapsing because we relaxed our codes too much. But we can make sure the standards reflect the latest advances in technology, and the urgency of getting to zero emissions.

I get to learn about lots of different plans for dealing with climate change. It’s part of my job—climate change is the focus of my work with the investment fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures—but it’s just as likely to come up over dinner with friends or at a backyard barbecue. (In Seattle, we get outside as often as we can during the summer, since we know how often it’ll be raining once fall comes.)

Whenever I hear an idea for what we can do to keep global warming in check—whether it’s over a conference table or a cheeseburger—I always ask this question: “What’s your plan for steel?”

I know it sounds like an odd thing to say, but it opens the door to an important subject that deserves a lot more attention in any conversation about climate change. Making steel and other materials—such as cement, plastic, glass, aluminum, and paper—is the third biggest contributor of greenhouse gases, behind agriculture and making electricity. It’s responsible for a fifth of all emissions. And these emissions will be some of the hardest to get rid of: these materials are everywhere in our lives, and we don’t yet have any proven breakthroughs that will give us affordable zero-carbon versions of them. If we’re going to get to zero carbon emissions overall, we have a lot of inventing to do.

This video features one company with an idea about how to make steel without coal. (I’m an investor in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which in turn has invested in this company.)

Steel, cement, and plastic are so pervasive in modern life that it can be easy to take them for granted. The first two are the main reason our buildings and bridges are so sturdy and last so long. Steel—cheap, strong, and infinitely recyclable—also goes into shingles, household appliances, canned goods, and computers. Concrete—rust-resistant, rot-proof, and non-flammable—can be made dense enough to absorb radiation or light enough to float on water.

The 520 floating bridge near my house sits on 77 concrete pontoons, each weighing thousands of pounds. In his book Making the Modern World, Vaclav Smil estimates that America’s interstate highway system contains about 730 million tons of concrete in the driving lanes alone. (People sometimes use the terms cement and concrete interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. You make cement first, and then you mix it with sand, water, and gravel to make concrete.)

As for plastics, they have a bad reputation these days—and it’s true that the amount piling up in the oceans is problematic. But they also do a lot of good. For example, you can thank plastics for making that fuel-efficient car you drive so light; they account for as much as half of the car’s total volume, but only 10 percent of its weight!

So how do we cut down on emissions from all the steel, cement, and plastic we’re making? One way is to use less of all these materials. There are definitely steps we should take to use less by recycling more and increasing efficiency. But that won’t be enough to offset the fact that the world’s population is growing and getting richer; as the middle class expands, so will our use of materials.

In a sense, that’s good news, because it means more people will be living in sturdy houses and apartment buildings and driving on paved roads. But it’s bad news for the climate. Take Africa, for example: Its emissions from making concrete are projected to quadruple by 2050. Emissions from steel could go up even more, because the continent uses so little now.

If using less isn’t really a viable option, could we make things without emitting carbon in the first place? That is, in fact, what we’ll need to do—but there are several challenges. First, these industries require a lot of electricity, which today is often generated using fossil fuels. Second, the processes also require a lot of heat (as in thousands of degrees Fahrenheit) and fossil fuels are often the cheapest way to create that heat.

Finally—and this might be the toughest challenge of all—manufacturing some of these products involves chemical reactions that emit greenhouse gases. For example, to make cement, you start with limestone, which contains calcium, carbon, and oxygen. You only want the calcium, so you burn the limestone in a furnace along with some other materials. You end up with the calcium you want, plus a byproduct you don’t want: carbon dioxide. It’s a chemical reaction, and there’s no way around it.

All three are tough challenges, but don’t despair. Scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to solve these problems and help make zero-carbon materials that will be affordable around the world. Here are a few of the innovative approaches that I’m especially excited about (note that I have investments in two of these companies, Boston Metal and TerraPower):

• Carbon capture. The idea here is to suck greenhouse gases out of the air. I think this is probably the approach we’ll have to take with cement; rather than making it without emissions, we’ll remove the emissions before they can do any damage. There are two basic approaches: One is to grab the greenhouse gases right where they’re created, such as at a cement plant (that’s called carbon capture); the other is to pull them from the atmosphere, after they’ve dispersed. That’s called direct-air capture, and it’s a big technical challenge that various companies are trying to solve. Mosaic Materials, for example, is developing new nano-materials that could make direct-air capture much more efficient and cost-effective. And government policies that create financial incentives to use carbon-removal technology—like federal tax credits that were passed in 2018—will help us deploy it faster.
• Electrification. We may be able to replace fossil fuels with electricity in some industrial processes. For example, as you saw if you watched the video above, Boston Metal is working on a way to make steel using electricity instead of coal, and to make it just as strong and cheap. Of course, electrification only helps reduce emissions if it uses clean power, which is another reason why it’s so important to get zero-carbon electricity.
• Fuel switching. Some industrial processes can’t easily be electrified because they require too much heat. One possible alternative is to get the heat from a next-generation nuclear plant. (As I’ve mentioned before, a company that I helped start, TerraPower, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and creates very little waste.) We also might be able to get the heat using hydrogen fuels, which can be made using clean electricity and don’t emit any carbon when they’re burned. Hydrogen fuels exist today, but they’re expensive to make and transport, so companies are trying to drive the cost down and make hydrogen fuels available at scale. The Swedish steelmaker SSAB plans to build the world’s first fossil fuel-free steel plant powered by hydrogen, which will be running as a pilot project next year. ThyssenKrupp and ArcelorMittal also recently announced projects in this area.
• Recycling. On its own, recycling steel, cement, and plastic won’t be nearly enough to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, but it will help. The best book I’ve read on recycling—yes, I’ve read more than one!—is called Sustainable Materials With Both Eyes Open, and I highly recommend it.

I’m optimistic about all these areas of innovation—especially if we couple progress in these areas with smart public policies. Companies need the right incentives to phase out old polluting factories and adopt these new approaches. If all of these pieces come together, we will have a climate-friendly plan for steel, as well as cement, plastic, and the other materials that make modern life possible.

Think back to the last time you experienced a power outage.

It probably wasn’t a great memory. Maybe it involved spending the evening in the dark without anything to do or spending a hot day without air conditioning. If the power was out for a long time, maybe even the food in your fridge began to spoil.

Your power probably came back within a couple minutes or hours. But for the nearly 1 billion people around the world who don’t have access to electricity—or whose access is so unreliable that they can never count on having power—an outage can go on for days or even weeks. And these outages are more than just an inconvenience. They can be deadly.

Many people without reliable access to electricity live in rural villages where even health clinics can’t count on having power. After an outage, doctors sometimes have no way of telling whether the life-saving vaccines in their refrigerators have spoiled. It can be even more stressful if a power outage occurs at night. Sometimes health workers have no choice but to treat patients by candlelight, or by the light of a mobile phone.

Even recharging a mobile phone is tricky when there isn’t electricity at home. It requires walking to a local store and paying 25 cents or more to plug the phone into a solar-powered outlet. That cost adds up fast. It’s actually hundreds of times more expensive to use charging stations than it is to charge a phone at home. But those without electricity don’t have an alternative. Mobile phones enable families to access services and business opportunities that improve their lives, so many pay whatever they have to in order to use their phones.

These hidden expenses are a daily reality for the nearly 1 billion people who live in energy poverty. That’s one reason why increasing access to electricity is critical to lifting the world’s poor out of poverty. The good news is that, since 2016, the number of people living without reliable electricity has dropped by more than 200 million. That’s two hundred million more people who can now study after sundown, use electronic appliances, and charge their phones at home.

At the same time, increased energy consumption means increased greenhouse gas emissions. Methods of generating electricity like coal and natural gas generate carbon dioxide, so unless we decarbonize the way we produce energy, emissions will continue to increase—and climate change will get worse—as energy consumption goes up.

The problem is that many of today’s low carbon energy technologies aren’t a viable alternative yet. While deploying wind and solar in many places around the world is going to be hugely important for tackling climate change, we need innovation in things like storage to make them realistic solutions for the world’s poorest. Plus, many people experiencing energy poverty live in areas without access to the kind of grids that are needed to make those technologies cheap and reliable enough to replace fossil fuels.

It’s important to remember that, even with an uptick in energy usage, people living in level 1 and 2 countries are responsible for a pretty modest share of the world’s emissions. If we’re going to stop climate change, the biggest changes will need to come from level 3 and 4 countries. But I believe we can tackle energy poverty and climate change at the same time by developing ways to make clean energy cheaper to produce, store, and transport. I recently wrote about several promising new solutions.

We want everyone—including the world’s poorest—to have access to cheap, reliable energy. I’m hopeful that innovations in energy technology will help us achieve that while paving the way to a zero-carbon future.

I’m done with cow farts.

I’ve written about them several times over the last six months, and I bring them up in polite conversation more than I should. In my defense, I have a legitimate reason: cows, with their burps and farts, are a good example of something that contributes to climate change but isn’t related to generating electricity.

Most discussions about fighting climate change focus on electricity and the need for renewable energy. De-carbonizing the way we generate electricity would be a huge step, but it won’t be enough if we don’t reach zero net emissions from every sector of the economy within 50 years (and make a serious dent in the next ten). That includes the agriculture, forestry, and land use sector, which is responsible for 24 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions—just one percentage point less than electricity.

Gassy cattle are a memorable and significant example of emissions—but they’re not the only major contributor to agriculture, forestry, and land use’s slice of the emissions pie. We’re just as well-off picking on soil.

Here’s a mind-blowing fact: there’s more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined. That’s not a big deal when left to its own devices. But when soil gets disturbed—like it does when you convert a forest into cropland—all that stored carbon gets released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That’s one reason why deforestation alone is responsible for 11 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. (Another reason is that forests and grasslands are natural carbon sinks. Clearing them reduces the planet’s capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the air.)

The microbes in soil can also create greenhouse gases when they come into contact with fertilizer. Synthetic fertilizers revolutionized how we feed the world, but they release a powerful greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide when broken down by those microbes. Natural fertilizers like manure aren’t any better, because they release greenhouse gases as they decompose.

So how do we fight climate change caused by agriculture? We can’t simply get rid of soil—or stop growing crops, using fertilizer, and raising livestock. There are some changes that societies can make—people in level 1 and 2 countries will eat more meat as they move up the income ladder, so people in level 3 and 4 countries could consume less to compensate, for example—but at the end of the day, people need to eat.

That’s why the goal with agriculture is not to reduce the amount created, but to reduce emissions per product. I’m involved with a group called Breakthrough Energy Ventures that is backing a number of creative solutions to tackle the problem. Because every country and every culture approaches food production differently, there are a lot of different ways to do that. Here are some of the ones I find most interesting:

• Microscopic nitrogen factories that replace fertilizer: What if we could fertilize plants without releasing so much harmful nitrous oxide into the air? BEV is invested in a company called Pivot Bio that has genetically modified microbes to provide plants with the nitrogen they need without the excess greenhouse gases that synthetic alternatives produce. Watch this video to learn more about how it works:

• Longer roots that store more carbon: Kernza has developed a new strain of wheat with longer and denser roots, so it can absorb more carbon dioxide from soil. Since traditional wheat is an annual plant and only lasts for one growing season, it has short and relatively fragile roots. Kernza’s seeds produce a perennial wheat with roots that are twice as long as traditional wheat. Plus, its hardier structure creates higher yields for farmers—which in turn leads to less water use, greater climate resiliency, and healthier soils.
• Lab-grown palm oil brewed from microbes: Palm oil has earned its bad environmental reputation: the destruction of Borneo’s forests to build new palm oil plantations resulted in the largest single-year increase in emissions in over two hundred years. But it’s a fixture of modern society, found in everything from food to shampoo. C16 Biosciences has created an alternative to natural palm oil by using fermentation to brew a synthetic version.
• An invisible barrier that helps food stay fresh longer: Approximately one-third of all food produced gets lost or wasted every year. That’s bad for people who don’t have enough to eat, bad for farmers, and bad for the environment. Two companies—Apeel and Cambridge Crops—are working on protective skins that keep food fresh longer. The coating is invisible and doesn’t affect the taste at all.
• Collective crop storage: Not all innovations are technological: Babban Gona is a novel business model in Nigeria that helps farmers hold onto their crops longer. Many Nigerian farmers don’t have facilities to store their crops. They can only move their products right after harvest when the market is flooded with goods, so they sell for a rock-bottom price, or sometimes not at all (Nigeria loses 50 to 60 percent of its food before it even gets to the consumers). Babban Gona farmers go in together to purchase a grain silo. This means they can wait to sell their crops at a more advantageous time—reducing emissions from waste and increasing income at the same time.

There will never be one silver bullet that stops climate change—but I’m hopeful that these innovations and others will chip away at agricultural emissions enough to prevent the worst from happening. (Unfortunately, farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa are already experiencing the effects of climate change, so we also have to help them adapt).

I wish agricultural innovation got as much attention as the impact on climate change from electricity, because its success is just as critical to stopping climate change. Future changes in income and population may come close to doubling the current environmental impacts of the food system. I believe creative, scalable solutions to this challenge are out there, and now is the time to invest in their R&D.

Quick: Think of some inventions that help fight climate change.

What came to mind first? I bet you thought of solar panels and wind turbines. In my experience, that’s what people point to when they think about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

They’re not wrong. Renewables are getting cheaper and many countries are committing to rely more on them and less on fossil fuels for their electricity needs. That’s good news, at least in places that get a lot of sunlight or wind. Everyone who cares about climate change should hope we continue to de-carbonize the way we generate electricity.

I wish that were enough to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Making electricity is responsible for only 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions each year. So even if we could generate all the electricity we need without emitting a single molecule of greenhouse gases (which we’re a long way from doing), we would cut total emissions by just a quarter.

To prevent the worst effects of climate change, we need to get to zero net greenhouse gas emissions in every sector of the economy within 50 years—and as the IPCC recently found, we need to be on a path to doing it in the next 10 years. That means dealing with electricity, and the other 75% too.

Where do greenhouse gas emissions come from? I like to break it down into five main categories—what I call the grand challenges in stopping climate change:

• Electricity (25%). Although there’s been progress in the renewable energy market, we still need more breakthroughs. For example, wind and solar need zero-carbon backup sources for windless days, long periods of cloudy weather, and nighttime. We also need to make the electric grid a lot more efficient so clean energy can be delivered where it’s needed, when it’s needed.
• Agriculture (24%). Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases! In addition, deforestation—clearing land for crops, for instance—removes trees that pull CO2 out of the air, and when the trees are burned, they release all their carbon back into the atmosphere.

• Manufacturing (21%). Look at the plastic, steel, and cement around you. All of it contributed to climate change. Making cement and steel requires lots of energy from fossil fuels, and it involves chemical reactions that release carbon as a byproduct. So even if we could make all the stuff we need with zero-carbon energy, we’d still need to deal with the byproducts.
• Transportation (14%). Low-emission cars are great, but cars account for a little less than half of transportation-related emissions today—and that share will shrink in the future. More emissions come from airplanes, cargo ships, and trucks. Right now we don’t have practical zero-carbon options for any of these.
• Buildings (6%). Do you live or work in a place with air conditioning? The refrigerant inside your AC unit is a greenhouse gas. In addition, it takes a lot of energy to run air conditioners, heaters, lights, and other appliances. Things like more-efficient windows and insulation would help. This area will be more important over the next few decades as the global population moves to cities. The world’s building stock will double in area by 2060. That’s like adding another New York City every month for 40 years.

(The final 10% is a sixth, miscellaneous category that includes things like the energy it takes to extract oil and gas.)

I think these grand challenges are a helpful way to think about climate change. They show how energy isn’t just what runs your house and your car. It’s core to nearly every part of your life: the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the home you live in, the products you use. To stop the planet from getting substantially warmer, we need breakthroughs in how we make things, grow food, and move people and goods—not just how we power our homes and cars.

These challenges are only getting more urgent. The world’s middle class has been growing at an unprecedented rate, and as you move up the income ladder, your carbon footprint expands. Instead of walking everywhere, you can afford a bicycle (which doesn’t use gas but is likely made with energy-intensive metal and gets to you via cargo ships and trucks that run on fossil fuels). Eventually you get a motorbike so you can travel farther from home to work a better job and afford to send your kids to school. Your family eats more eggs, meat, and dairy, so they get better nutrition. You’re in the market for a refrigerator, electric lights so your kids can study at night, and a sturdy home built with metal and concrete.

All of that new consumption translates into tangible improvements in people’s lives. It is good for the world overall—but it will be very bad for the climate, unless we find ways to do it without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

This is undoubtedly a tough problem. It is not obvious what the big breakthroughs will look like. Most likely we will need several solutions to each challenge. That is why we need to invest in lots of research and development, across all five areas, now.

Fortunately, governments and the private sector are stepping up. Since the 2015 launch of Mission Innovation—two dozen governments that committed to doubling their spending on clean-energy R&D—the amount of funding available has gone up by more than $3 billion a year.

Personally, I’m part of a group of investors in a private fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), which is putting more than $1 billion into helping promising companies take great ideas from the lab to market at scale. We’re using the five grand challenges I mentioned above as the framework for our investments. Every idea we’re supporting is designed to solve one of them—and our mission is about to get a big boost from a new partnership in Europe.

We’re still working out the details, but here’s what I can tell you today: I’ll be in Brussels this week to sign an agreement between Breakthrough Energy and the European Commission. Our goal is to create a joint investment vehicle called Breakthrough Energy Europe, which will serve as a pilot fund investing in European companies working on the grand challenges. The partners will commit €100 million, half from the European Commission and half from BEV.

But this isn’t only about funding. We’re creating a new way of putting that money to work.

Because energy research can take years—even decades—to come to fruition, companies need patient investors who are willing to work with them over the long term. Governments could in theory provide that kind of investing, but in reality, they aren’t great at identifying promising companies and staying nimble to help those companies grow.

That’s where this partnership can shine. It allows the European Commission, which is funding cutting-edge research and development, to partner with investors who know how to build companies well. Because the fund will be privately managed, it can avoid some of the bureaucracy that slows things down and makes it hard to support new companies. We’ll have the resources to make a meaningful difference, and the flexibility to move quickly. That’s a rare combination.

I hope this partnership is just the beginning. We need many more like this one around the world.

Over the next year, I will be writing a series of TGN posts about each of the five challenges, focusing on some of the promising solutions I’m learning about. (In the meantime, I’ve posted a short, fun quiz about energy and climate. See if you can beat my score.) I’m inspired by the ingenious inventors who are tackling climate change and all the partners who are supporting their work. I can’t wait to share their progress with you.

I’m in Paris for the big meeting on climate change hosted by President Macron. Leaders from around the world are here to take stock of the progress the world is making on this urgent challenge.

This is a pivotal moment. We need to adapt to the climate change that is already affecting the planet, and develop new tools that will keep the problem from getting worse. Innovation is key to doing both. Scientific advances in crop science, for example, will help farmers deal with changing weather patterns. And energy research will make it possible to power modern life—the way we live, work, travel, and make things—without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

The good news is that there’s a lot of progress to report on both fronts. Here’s an overview of the developments I’ll be highlighting in Paris.

More partners are chipping in on clean energy. The world needs to invest much more in energy research than it has been. Two years ago, 20 countries launched an effort called Mission Innovation in which they committed to doubling their spending on energy R&D by 2020. Today, Mission Innovation has grown to 23 members, raising the group’s total commitment to more than $30 billion.

The growing list of partners also includes the private sector. In 2015 we started the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of investors who are supporting entrepreneurs working on new sources of clean energy. Today the BEC is adding 15 companies, banks, funds, and institutional investors. The members of the BEC have committed billions of dollars to creating new energy companies and commercializing new energy products.

Just as important, we’ll also be working to speed up the pace of progress. The world can’t afford to wait the decades that it usually takes to develop promising technology, find investors, connect with governments willing to roll it out, and reach customers. Our goal is to bring ideas out of the lab and into the market much faster.

That’s why I’m excited that these partners are working together like never before. Public and private funding for energy research often isn’t coordinated, which is one reason some promising technologies never make it to market. The members of Mission Innovation and the BEC will bridge that gap. They’ll work together to match cutting-edge scientists in government labs with investors who can help turn their ideas into products. They’ll also partner with governments to make it easier to create and deploy new tools. As a first step, the BEC will work with four countries—Canada, Mexico, France, and the United Kingdom—as well as the European Commission on ways to coordinate public and private efforts.

Our $1 billion clean-energy investment fund is up and running. Breakthrough Energy Ventures has hired a staff of accomplished investors, company builders, scientists, and technologists. They have identified five areas that are especially promising but also underfunded. This is where we will focus our investments:

• Grid-scale storage. One reason renewables haven’t been more widely adopted is that storing energy for later use—for example, when it’s dark or the wind isn’t blowing—is expensive. Breakthroughs in storage—for example, storing energy as heat or in flywheels—would make today’s renewable technology more practical and affordable.
• Liquid fuels. We might be able to use sunlight to create fuels that could power airplanes, trucks, and other big polluters without adding more carbon to the atmosphere. (Earlier this year I wrote about my visit to one lab that’s doing exciting work in this area.)
• Mini-grids. These networks can deliver electricity locally—say, to a neighborhood or village—without being connected to a centralized grid. That would make them especially useful in poor regions, like parts of Africa and India, where larger grids aren’t practical.
• Alternative building materials. Making concrete and steel produces a lot of greenhouse gases. To construct all the buildings we’ll need by 2050, we need new carbon-neutral building materials for homes and offices.
• Geothermal power. There is a phenomenal amount of energy stored up as heat under the Earth’s surface—many times more than we could get from all the known coal and oil reserves in the world. Tapping this source involves pumping steam or hot water from underground to drive turbines.

Small farmers are getting more help. Roughly 800 million poor people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia rely on agriculture for their food and income. As the climate warms and the weather becomes more unpredictable, their crops will become dramatically less productive—and could be wiped out altogether. As many as 200 million people may be forced to migrate to regions where they can grow enough to survive.

Innovation can help prevent that kind of catastrophe. For our part, the Gates Foundation is investing in three areas that developing countries have said are especially crucial. One is improving crops—for example, developing varieties that yield more food, so farmers can get more for the work they put in. The second is protecting crops by making them able to resist diseases and tolerate the droughts and floods that will become more frequent. The third area is giving farmers more advanced ways to manage crops in a changing climate—helping them analyze their soil, for example, or use water more efficiently. And because progress depends on brilliant researchers contributing their talents, we’re also co-funding a fellowship program that will train 600 African and European scientists. All told, we will spend more than $300 million in these areas over the next three years.

Of course, our work is only part of the effort to spark innovation that helps farmers adapt to a changing climate. The European Commission is also committing more than $300 million over the next three years, bringing the total to over $600 million in new money through 2020.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on. I’m optimistic that if we keep up this momentum, we can stop climate change and help those who are being hurt the most by it—all while meeting the world’s growing energy needs.

ARPA-E might be my favorite obscure government agency. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I felt confident about being part of a $1 billion investment fund last year.

The fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, builds companies that will deliver affordable, reliable clean energy around the world. Ultimately, we want to help people escape poverty, promote energy independence, reduce pollution, and avoid the worst effects of climate change. The idea is to invest the private capital that helps entrepreneurs take promising zero-emissions energy technologies out of the lab and into the market.

From BEV’s earliest days, we knew that delivering on the promise of energy innovation would depend on great laboratory research funded by governments. The crucial connection between private companies and public research is something I know well from my own experience with Microsoft. Consider how central the Internet is to the business strategy of virtually every technology company today, including Microsoft. But the Internet only exists because the Defense Department agency DARPA created the foundation for it with groundbreaking research into computer networking. No single business would ever have taken on a project of that scope.

The energy industry works the same way. Private companies depend on public research. In the United States, most energy research is funded by the Department of Energy, which supports basic science at labs and universities across the country. In 2008 the DOE launched ARPA-E with the goal of doing for energy what DARPA did for the Internet: provide a foundation on which the private sector can build, de-risking and proving new approaches so they attract private capital. (ARPA-E’s name stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy.) The goal is to bridge the gap between scientists in the lab and entrepreneurs in the marketplace.

ARPA-E is bringing private investors to the table, and it is delivering results. So far, its projects have resulted in the creation of 56 new companies.

I’ve gone twice to the annual meeting where ARPA-E and its partners talk about what’s going well and what isn’t. It’s an impressive group of experts, and they’re working on some exciting ideas. For example, I’ve written before about the promise of creating carbon-neutral liquid fuels to power cars, trucks, ships and planes. ARPA-E has a program called REFUEL that’s supporting important work in this area. One REFUEL partner is developing a way to convert carbon dioxide directly to ethanol. Others are working on using ammonia to create hydrogen, which could be compressed into a liquid and burned as a fuel.

DARPA isn’t the only model for ARPA-E. It also reminds me of the National Institutes of Health, which has saved millions of lives by finding innovative approaches to fighting cancer, strokes, heart attacks, and other killers. If ARPA-E does for energy what DARPA did for computing and the NIH does for health, it will be one of the smartest public investments I can imagine.

The sun was out in full force the fall morning I arrived at Caltech to visit Professor Nate Lewis’s research laboratory. Temperatures in southern California had soared to 20 degrees above normal, prompting the National Weather Service to issue warnings for extreme fire danger and heat-related illnesses.

The weather was a fitting introduction to what I had come to see inside Nate’s lab—how we might be able to tap the sun’s tremendous energy to make fuels to power cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes.

Stepping into the lab cluttered with computer screens, jars of chemicals, beakers, and other equipment, Nate handed me a pair of safety goggles and offered some advice for what I was about to see. “Everything we do is simple in the end, even though there’s lots of complicated stuff,” he said.

What’s simple is the idea behind all of his team’s research: The sun is the most reliable, plentiful source of renewable energy we have. In fact, more energy from the sun hits the Earth in one hour than humans use in an entire year. If we can find cheap and efficient ways to tap just a fraction of its power, we will go a long way toward finding a clean, affordable, and reliable energy source for the future.

We are all familiar with solar panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.  As solar panel costs continue to fall, it’s been encouraging to see how they are becoming a growing source of clean energy around the world. Of course, there’s one major challenge of solar power. The sun sets each night and there are cloudy days. That’s why we need to find efficient ways to store the energy from sunlight so it’s available on demand. 

Batteries are one solution. Even better would be a solar fuel. Fuels have a much higher energy density than batteries, making it far easier to use for storage and transportation. For example, one ton of gasoline stores the same amount of energy as 60 tons of batteries. That’s why, barring a major breakthrough in battery technology, it’s hard to imagine flying from Seattle to Tokyo on a plug-in airplane.

I’ve written before about the need for an energy miracle to halt climate change and provide access to electricity to millions of the poorest families who live without it. Making solar fuel would be one of those miracles. It would solve the energy storage problem for when the sun isn’t shining. And it would provide an easy-to-use power source for our existing transportation infrastructure. We could continue to drive the cars we have now. Instead of running on fossil fuels from the ground, they would be powered by fuel made from sunlight. And because it wouldn’t contribute additional greenhouses gases to the atmosphere, it would be carbon neutral. 

Imagining such a future is tantalizing. Realizing it will require a lot of hard work. No one knows if there’s a practical way to turn sunlight into fuel. Thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy, Nate and a group of other researchers around the U.S. are receiving research support to find out if it is possible.

We live in a time when new discoveries and innovations are so commonplace that it’s easy to take the cutting-edge research I saw at Caltech for granted. But most breakthroughs that improve our lives—from new health interventions to new clean energy ideas—get their start as government-sponsored research like Nate’s. If successful, that research leads to new innovations, that spawn new industries, that create new jobs, that spur economic growth. It’s impossible to overemphasize the importance of government support in this process. Without it, human progress would not come as far as it has.  

Nate and his team are still at the first stage of this process. But they have reason to be optimistic about what lies ahead. After all, turning sunlight into chemical energy is what plants do every day. Through the process of photosynthesis, plants combine sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to store solar energy in chemical bonds. At Nate’s lab, his team is working with the same ingredients. The difference is that they need to figure out how to do it even better and beat nature at its own game.

“We want to create a solar fuel inspired by what nature does, in the same way that man built 

aircraft inspired by birds that fly,” Nate said. “But you don’t build an airplane out of feathers. And we’re not going to build an artificial photosynthetic system out of chlorophylls and living systems, because we can do better than that.”

One of Nate’s students showed me how light can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen—a critical first step in the path to solar fuels. The next step would involve combining hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make fuels. Using current technologies, however, it is too costly to produce a fuel from sunlight. To make it cheaper, much more research needs to be done to understand the materials and systems that could create a dependable source of solar fuel.

One idea his team is working on is a kind of artificial turf made of plastic cells that could be easily rolled out to capture sunlight to make fuel. Each plastic cell would contain water, light absorbers, and a catalyst. The catalyst helps accelerate the chemical reactions so each cell can produce hydrogen or carbon-based fuels more efficiently. Unfortunately, the best catalysts are among the rarest and most expensive elements, like platinum.  A key focus of Nate’s research is finding other catalysts that are not only effective and durable, but also economical.

Nate’s interest in clean energy research started during the oil crisis in the 1970s, when he waited for hours in gas lines with his dad. He says he knew then that he wanted to dedicate his life to energy research. Now, he is helping to train a new generation of scientists to help solve our world’s energy challenge. Seeing the number of young people working in Nate’s lab was inspiring. The pace of innovation for them is now much faster than ever before. “We do experiments now in a day that would once take a year or an entire Ph.D. thesis to do,” Nate said.

Still, I believe we should be doing a lot more. We need thousands of scientists following all paths that might lead us to a clean energy future. That’s why a group of investors and I recently launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that will invest more than $1 billion in scientific discoveries that have the potential to deliver cheap and reliable clean energy to the world.

While we won’t be filling up our cars with solar fuels next week or next year, Nate’s team has already made valuable contributions to our understanding of how we might achieve this bold goal. With increased government and private sector support, we will make it possible for them to move ahead with their research at full speed. 

By the middle of this century, the world will use twice as much energy as we use today.

There’s good news in this: more energy means better lives and stronger economies.

But it also means the world needs a new energy supply—one that doesn’t contribute to climate change. Climate change is a serious threat, especially in the poorest parts of the world. 

We need affordable and reliable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gas to power the future—and to get it, we need a different model for investing in good ideas and moving them from the lab to the market.

That is why today, I, along with an incredible group of people who care a lot about energy innovation, am announcing the launch of Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), a fund that will invest more than $1 billion in scientific breakthroughs that have the potential to deliver cheap and reliable clean energy to the world.

It’s the next step in an effort that began last December, when we brought together private investors from around the globe who were passionate about solving this problem. We formed the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and institutional investors committed to help bring promising new zero-emissions energy technologies to market.

The Coalition partnered with Mission Innovation, an initiative of more than 20 countries and the European Union to double their investment in clean energy research and development in the next five years.  

As I’ve argued before, an investment in a true energy transformation requires governments, research institutions, businesses, and private investors to work together. And it’s hard to overstate how important this public commitment is. Government funding gives scientists the freedom to come up with bold new ideas and try to prove they will work. But government research is not enough. The world needs the skills and resources of investors with experience driving innovation from a lab to the marketplace. The private sector knows how to take great research, turn it into a great product, and ultimately create a great company to bring a transformative technology to market.

It’s this type of public-private collaboration that’s given rise to advances in defense, space, medicine, and information technology. In fact, it’s what brought these words to your screen right now. During the Cold War, the Department of Defense developed a network of computers that could survive a nuclear attack, and private companies saw an opportunity to expand this technology to the public. Together, they created the Internet.

When it comes to energy, though, this transition—from idea to product to company—is often complicated by the challenges of the market. Unlike a software start up, getting a new energy technology from a lab to market takes a lot of infrastructure, a lot of upfront capital, and a lot of time.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition created BEV to address some of those challenges in the energy market. We are willing to wait a longer time for returns than other funds. We have a higher tolerance for technical risk, because we know it’s tough to determine which technologies will succeed in a complicated energy market. We are led by our investors, who are a unique group of global business leaders, entrepreneurs, energy experts, and company builders who can help new companies navigate the challenges of building a business while developing partnerships with the companies and institutional investors who will help bring those products to scale.

The fund is also driven by science. Because of the technical nature of succeeding in an energy market, we will build a team that knows as much about the science behind energy breakthroughs as the investment strategies necessary to build those businesses.

Finally, the fund is committed to discovering breakthroughs, wherever they are. The world has made remarkable progress in wind and solar over the past decade, and these technologies will continue to play an important role in our zero-carbon energy mix. I have argued before that innovative industries deploy the technology they have while developing the technology they need. But because the scale of the challenge of providing reliable and affordable power without contributing to climate change is so vast, and the future energy needs are so great, we need to explore as many viable solutions as possible. As I’ve learned through my work in business and philanthropy: to be successful, you have to get the most out of the technology you already have while developing the technology you still need.

After talking with some of the world’s greatest scientists, energy experts, and energy investors, the Coalition has developed a list of scientific priorities that will set us on the path toward the energy future we need. We see this list as a “landscape of innovation”—essentially, a roadmap that Breakthrough Energy Ventures and others can use to focus their attention and guide their investment decisions over the next two decades.

In this landscape, we’ve outlined five grand challenges, corresponding to the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions around the world:

• Electricity: How can we deliver reliable, affordable zero-carbon electricity to the world?
• Buildings: How can we eliminate emissions from our homes, offices, hospitals, and schools?
• Manufacturing: How can we make everything we use without emitting greenhouse gases?
• Transportation: How can we get around our communities and the world without emitting carbon?
• Food: How can we feed the planet without contributing to climate change?

Of course, no investor can answer these questions alone. That’s why, in addition to funding new ventures, Breakthrough Energy investors will help build a broader clean energy ecosystem. We’ll explore new partnerships with governments, businesses, and institutional investors who want to be part of the global energy transition. Through these partnerships, we will not only help organize more investments, but we will also help research new solutions. One of the Coalition’s partners is the University of California, which has an amazing capacity to innovate through their labs and universities. In the coming years, we’ll work with them to expand our research partnerships and identify the best ways to pull great inventions out of the lab and turn them into companies.

Even though $1 billion is a significant step, it is just one of many steps on the path to a sustainable energy future.

With patience, flexibility, collaboration, and a clear vision backed by meaningful investment, we, the fund’s investors, are confident the world can meet its energy needs in a way that is fair, safe, and sustainable. And we’re excited about the role that Breakthrough Energy Ventures will play in that effort.

As the U.S. presidential candidates lay out competing visions for the country, I have been thinking about a topic they have not yet discussed in detail: what political leadership can do to accelerate innovation. Innovation is the reason our lives have improved over the last century. From electricity and cars to medicine and planes, innovation has made the world better. Today, we are far more productive because of the IT revolution. The most successful economies are driven by innovative industries that evolve to meet the needs of a changing world. From the advances that put a computer on every desk to the discoveries that led to lifesaving vaccines, major innovations are the result of both government investments in basic research and the private-sector creativity and investments that turn them into transformative products. 

I’ve heard some people argue that life-changing innovations come exclusively from the private sector. But innovation starts with government support for the research labs and universities working on new insights that entrepreneurs can turn into companies that change the world. The public sector’s investments unlock the private sector’s ingenuity.   

I was lucky enough to be a student when computers came along in the 1960s. At first they were very expensive, so it was hard to get access to them. But the twin miracles of the microchip revolution and the internet—both made possible by U.S. government research—completely changed that. It’s no wonder that today most of the leading hardware and software companies are based in the U.S.

Accelerating innovation requires both political leadership and private sector leadership. As U.S. voters decide which candidates they want to elect to fill national, state, and local offices, and as many countries around the world undergo similar political transitions, I think we should consider what kind of leaders can drive the innovations we need.

The best leaders have the ability to do both the urgent things that demand attention today and at the same time lay the groundwork for innovation that will pay dividends for decades.

As a country and around the world, we confront a wide array of urgent issues that our leaders must address—from terrorism to job creation to migration. Our next president will be part of a new group of global leaders who will wrestle with these urgent problems. Those leaders can either prioritize alleviating poverty, making everyone healthier, and accelerating economic growth—or they can let progress stall. The key to prioritizing progress is support for innovation.

When we innovate, we create millions of jobs, we build the companies that lead the world, we are healthier, and we make our lives more productive. And these benefits transcend borders, powering improvements in lives around the world. Our global culture of innovation has been most successful at those moments when science, technology, and great leadership come together to create miracles that improve modern life. I believe we are in one of those moments.

One of the most indelible examples of a world leader unleashing innovation from both public and private sectors came in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy spoke to the U.S. Congress and challenged the country to put a man on the moon within the decade. That speech came at a time of cultural and political turmoil, when national and economic security dominated the headlines. President Kennedy believed looking to the skies would inspire the country to dream big and accomplish huge things.

That speech didn’t just launch humankind on a successful journey to the moon. It also inspired America to build a satellite network that changed the way we communicate across the globe and produced new forms of weather mapping which made farmers far more productive. In the face of fear, President Kennedy successfully summoned our country to harness American ingenuity and advance human progress.

It’s important to remember what made the moonshot the moonshot—that is, what transforms political rhetoric into game-changing breakthroughs. A moonshot challenge requires a clear, measurable objective that captures the imagination of the nation and fundamentally changes how we view what’s possible. And it requires marshaling the resources and intellect of both the public and private sectors. When we do that, we chart a course for a future that is safer, healthier, and stronger.

Because we are at a pivotal moment when the conditions are ripe for transformative innovations, there are many important things this new group of national leaders—including whoever is elected in the U.S. in November—can accomplish over the next decade. There are four objectives I think we should prioritize:

1. Provide everyone on earth with affordable energy without contributing to climate change.
2. Develop a vaccine for HIV and a cure for neurodegenerative diseases.
3. Protect the world from future health epidemics, which might be more infectious than Ebola and more deadly than Zika.
4. Give every student and teacher new tools so all students get a world-class education.

Provide everyone on earth with affordable energy without contributing to climate change

There is enormous potential to develop technologies that will make energy cheaper and reduce our energy imports without contributing to climate change or air pollution. In the next eight years, we could start the transition to a new type of clean fuel that doesn’t emit carbon, deploy batteries that let electric cars run far longer on a single charge, and produce dramatic drops in the total cost of renewables.

Last year, the U.S. and 20 other countries committed to doubling their energy R&D budgets, and 28 investors pledged to invest in the output of that research. This is only the start. By increasing government support for clean-energy research, presidents and prime ministers could attract more private investors to the field. As early-stage ideas progress, private capital will pour in to build the companies that will deliver those ideas to market.

Develop a vaccine for HIV and a cure for neurodegenerative diseases

With the right leadership and investments over the next decade, we can discover and deliver a vaccine for HIV. Many have forgotten about the scourge of AIDS, treating it like a disease that can be managed instead of the deadly virus that kills more than 1 million people worldwide every year. Based on recent progress, I believe world leaders could help make an effective AIDS vaccine a reality within the next decade. And with a vaccine, we would be on the path to ending the disease altogether.

We can also make tremendous progress on ending neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. These diseases are devastating for the people and families that they affect. They are also huge drivers of out-of-control health care costs, which deplete government budgets that could be used for other critical functions. New digital tools and the rapid advancement of science are providing new momentum and hope in the search for cures.

Protect the world from future health epidemics

Global leaders should be proud of their role in bringing the Ebola crisis to an end and helping the affected countries recover. Many agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. military, did exemplary work in the face of significant risks to their own safety. Other leaders around the world mobilized their infrastructures as well. But the Ebola epidemic and the rise of the Zika virus also highlight the need for new advances. There is a significant chance that a substantially more infectious epidemic will come along during the next decade. If one does, we will need to be able to detect it, develop a test for it, and produce cures very quickly. Using advances in biology, scientists are developing these capabilities. With vision and support, we will be able to identify and prevent epidemics before they devastate families, communities, and economies.

Give every student and teacher new tools so all students get a world-class education

Education is one of the areas in R&D that is often overlooked and can have immediate payoff. The world can develop technologies that can help students learn in ways that are more tailored to their needs. But that is just one part of the equation for educational success. High-quality online courses are still in their infancy. So is personalized learning, which combines classroom time with digital tools to let students move at their own pace. Technology can make teachers’ jobs easier and their work more effective by letting them upload videos of themselves in the classroom, connect with other teachers, watch the best educators at work, and get real-time feedback from their students. The private sector has started work on these ideas, but funding for government research budgets would boost the market and help identify the most effective approaches, giving teachers and students new tools that empower them to do their best work.

I hope our leaders seize these world-changing opportunities by investing in great research institutions, which translate into big opportunities for innovators.

When these ideas help shape a future that is healthier, more productive, and more powerful, it will be because world leaders stepped up to do the urgent and the important at the same time.

If you can read this, you probably have access to affordable and reliable electricity all day, every day. 1.4 billion people around the world don’t.

We need to address the impacts of climate change by investing in innovations that will help power the world with carbon-free energy. At the same time, we must find ways to deliver affordable energy to people who don’t have access to electricity today so they can live healthier lives, build stronger communities, and find a path out of poverty.

In my travels, I’ve seen how lacking access to energy has impacted people’s lives, sometimes in surprising ways. But I’ve also seen how innovative and resourceful people can be in the toughest circumstances.

This composite of satellite images shows us how much of the world spends the night in total darkness.

This is a powerful image for me, because you can see the inequalities so clearly. Notice how bright North America and Europe are, while sub-Saharan Africa—which has just as many people—is almost entirely dark.

Without electricity, people cook by burning dirty fuels like charcoal, cardboard or dung. This pollutes the air and causes respiratory problems, particularly in children.

Indoor air pollution contributes to 1 out of every 14 deaths in the developing world. Here in Thailand, outdoor smoke from cooking creates environmental health risks that are often compounded by the effects of climate change.

Without reliable electricity, medical procedures are often performed by flashlight, or even candlelight.

Here, medical staff care for a newly-delivered baby in Sierra Leone, a country with the world’s third-highest infant mortality rate.

You wouldn’t think that something like electricity makes a difference in a newborn’s life, but it does.

Vaccines need to be stored at a stable temperature, or they spoil and become ineffective. It’s not easy to tell when a vaccine goes bad, so it’s crucial to keep the “cold chain” intact.

This clinic in Nigeria has enough power to run a refrigerator, but many in the world don’t. It’s frustrating to visit areas that have access to life-saving medicine, but lack the ability to know for sure that it will work.

Having light to read by at night may not seem like a luxury, but it is for millions of families in poor countries living without electricity. Light is essential when you’re trying to get an education. These students don’t have electricity at home, so they come here every night to do their homework under streetlamps.

Instead of going to school, these children in Manila are making charcoal, a dirty fuel that is the livelihood for many poor families.

I believe that if we can deliver cleaner, cheaper energy to the developing world, children like these will be healthier, with more time to learn and a better chance at advancing in life.

In underserved areas, power outages are frequent and sometimes last for a very long time. These children in Syria have not had any electricity for 10 months—they keep the lights on using a battery they charge by pedaling this bicycle.

I like this image because it shows how innovative and resourceful people can be, even in very difficult conditions.

I’m optimistic that we can invent clever new ways to generate safe, affordable and reliable energy for everyone. This family in China uses a biogas digester, which converts pig excrement into methane gas. The digester traps the gas and converts it into energy for cooking and light, while reducing pollution.

People in the developing world will be among the first to suffer the effects of climate change, even though they hardly did anything to cause it.

As we invest in ways to achieve zero-carbon energy, I believe we also have a responsibility to help poor countries adapt to the realities of a changing environment.

The world has solved huge problems before, and I’m confident that we can solve this one through commitment, focus and innovation.

You may remember hearing about a big conference in Paris last fall where world leaders came together to make some commitments on climate and energy. I was honored to join 20 of them to announce Mission Innovation and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition—two related efforts to develop new energy sources that are reliable and affordable and do not emit greenhouse gases. 

Paris was an amazing moment, but it was just the start. We knew that the hard work would come in the months after the announcement. That work won’t generate as many headlines as a big event at a global conference in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, but it is just as important if not more so. I want to tell you about what has happened since Paris, because we are making real headway.

This week, energy ministers from around the world are meeting in San Francisco to make some decisions about how Mission Innovation will move forward. Many will announce specific plans to double their R&D budgets. They will also talk about how to coordinate their research and avoid duplicating efforts (so two countries don’t focus on, say, solar fuels if only one needs to).

In the United States, we are making progress on two fronts. One has to do with the federal budget. This year the funding for key research programs at the Department of Energy went up by nearly $300 million—the first significant increase in almost four decades. We are on a path to another increase next year too. That is great to see, because more research will ultimately lead to more clean-energy solutions reaching the market. 

We’re also seeing progress on the political front. In addition to the President’s leadership, a bipartisan group of leaders in both the Senate and House of Representatives has acknowledged that smart, limited investments in R&D build a foundation for innovation, and they have committed to keep increasing R&D funding. So far a lot of that support has come in the form of procedural votes, but it is fantastic that both sides agree that we need investments in energy innovation—that it creates good jobs at home and strengthens America’s leadership around the world.

In addition to these government efforts, I continue to work with my fellow members of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. Our goal is to support companies that can take the inventions coming out of the government-funded R&D pipeline and turn them into large-scale clean-energy solutions. Some of the coalition’s members will participate in a private investment fund we are creating. Others will do it on their own.

We will take a number of steps to speed up the cycle of innovation. For example, the fund will hire a staff that is expert not only in investing, but also in the science of clean energy. This area is a big technical challenge, and investment decisions need to be informed by the underlying science. Second, the coalition is bringing together people who have proven they can build successful companies in very different environments. So in addition to our funding, the investors in the fund will bring business experience and networks built up over decades to help the companies we invest in succeed. Third, we will make the most of unique partnerships. The University of California system is a great example of this. In addition to investing part of its endowment and pension in the fund we’re creating, the UC system will use its ecosystem of labs, universities, and incubators to develop ideas and help identify possible investments. The UC system also uses a lot of energy (though impressively less every year) and will be an important demonstration partner for the companies we invest in. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we have the Mission Innovation network along with us.  They have a renewed commitment not only to fund more energy R&D but to do it better, with even more emphasis on creating an environment for technologies to transfer to the private sector.

This momentum comes as the world is deploying clean energy solutions at a historic pace. Some people argue that deploying today’s technology and developing new ideas are competitors in a zero-sum game—that doing one means you can’t do the other. I disagree.  Successful industries that are built on innovation rely on both deploying the technology they have and developing the technology they need.

The International Energy Agency projects that the world will get twice as much of its energy from clean sources in 2020 as it did in 2012. That’s an exciting prospect and we need to work toward it while making the next generation of carbon-free power even more efficient, affordable, and reliable. That effort may take 15 or 20 years, which is why we need to start now, even as we take advantage of today’s technology. Think about the days when dial-up Internet service seemed like a miracle. We did what we could to make sure as many people as possible benefited from it—but we also kept pushing for broadband access. Both were important. So it’s great that at the San Francisco meeting I mentioned earlier, deployment of existing technologies will be on the agenda alongside breakthrough innovation.

Based on all the progress I see, I am still optimistic that we can build the energy technologies that will lift people out of poverty and stop climate change.

I have learned a lot about energy storage by investing in companies that are making batteries better and more affordable. There is some fantastic research going on and some fantastic companies being built, but we need even more innovation.

Why? Because although solar and wind power are great sources of low-carbon energy, they also have their downsides. One is that they’re not constant sources. With solar, it’s not just that the sun goes away at night; cloudy days also make it hard for some places to use solar year-round. According to NOAA, my hometown of Seattle gets less sun than all but 9 cities in the United States.

When you hear about this problem with wind and solar, it is tempting to ask: Can’t we generate extra energy on days when the sun and wind are strong, and store it for those days when they’re not?

Here’s the problem: Storing energy turns out to be surprisingly hard and expensive.

As I wrote in this year’s Annual Letter: “If you wanted to store enough electricity to run everything in your house for a week, you would need a huge battery—and it would triple your electric bill.” Let’s break that sentence down.

“If you wanted to store enough electricity to run everything in your house for a week, you would need a huge battery …”

According to this U.S. Energy Information Administration fact sheet, in 2014 the typical U.S. household used 911 kilowatt-hours a month, which works out to roughly 210 kilowatt-hours per week (911 per month / 30 days per month x 7 days per week).  The best lithium-ion batteries store less than 0.2 kilowatt-hours per kilogram.

So a lithium-ion battery large enough to store 210 kilowatt-hours would weigh at least 210 / 0.2, or 1050 kg. 1050 kg is about 2314 pounds, or more than one ton.

“…and it would triple your electric bill.”

This figure is based on the capital cost of a lithium-ion battery amortized over the useful life of the battery. For example, a battery that costs $150 per kilowatt-hour of capacity with a life cycle of 500 charges would, over its lifetime, cost $150 / 500, or $0.30 per kilowatt-hour.

So if a consumer tried to store enough electricity in this lithium-ion battery to run her house, she would be paying at least $0.30 per kilowatt-hour for the battery.

According to the EIA, the average price of electricity for consumers in the United States is around $0.10 per kilowatt-hour. The European Union, where prices average 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, and India, where they range from 2 to 15 cents, would see similarly dramatic increases.

This is one of the reasons why we need new inventions that improve our ability to store energy cheaply and efficiently. Getting them will make it easier for solar and wind to be a big part of our zero-carbon future.

It’s been barely two months since I got to be part of some exciting announcements about energy innovation, but there’s already some excellent progress to tell you about. Here’s a quick update.

Just weeks before the announcement, Senator Lisa Murkowski went to the floor of the Senate to make a crucial point: If we’re going to make energy more affordable and reliable while solving the problems created by climate change, we need innovative new approaches. She called on her colleagues to work together to speed up the cycle of innovation. 

Since then, her call has been clearly answered. Senator Murkowski and Senator Maria Cantwell joined with colleagues from Tennessee, South Carolina, Illinois, and Hawaii to lead a series of votes in the Senate that laid the groundwork for expanding the federal government’s investments in energy R&D. This weekend, the President highlighted their leadership when he announced that his 2017 budget will call for significant increases in this funding.

This is all very promising, because government investments in early R&D are an essential foundation for successful, innovative industries. The digital revolution was built on government investments in the Internet and the semiconductor. Our thriving biotech industry relies on government investments in basic and applied research into drugs and other therapies. Energy is actually one area where we have historically invested far too little, so it is fantastic to see leaders changing course.

I’m also excited about what’s happened since the announcement of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition last November. We are ready to bring together private investors who will support the most promising energy breakthroughs. We are also working with the top American research institutions to make it easier to take the innovations that come out of their labs—which are supported by government investments in R&D—and turn them into products that change the way we generate energy.

I’m sure I’ll have more to report in the coming months. I’m feeling quite optimistic about the progress we’ll see in 2016 and the years ahead.

I’m in Paris today with several world leaders for a big announcement on energy and climate change. It is deeply moving to be in this city just two weeks after the horrific attacks here, and I am inspired by the way the French people have persevered in such a difficult time.

Two related initiatives are being announced at today’s event. One is Mission Innovation, a commitment by more than ten countries to invest more in research on clean energy. The other is the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a global group of private investors who will support companies that are taking innovative clean-energy ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace. Our primary goal with the Coalition is as much to accelerate progress on clean energy as it is to make a profit.

Here’s the thinking behind these two efforts.

The world is going to be using 50 percent more energy by mid-century than it does today. That should be good news, especially for the world’s poorest, because right now more than 1 billion people live without access to basic energy services. Affordable and reliable energy makes it easier for them to grow more food, run schools and hospitals and businesses, have refrigerators at home, and take advantage of all the things that make up modern life. Low- and middle-income countries need energy to develop their economies and help more people escape poverty.

But the world’s growing demand for energy is also a big problem, because most of that energy comes from hydrocarbons, which emit greenhouse gases and drive climate change. So we need to move to sources of energy that are affordable and reliable, and don’t produce any carbon.

The renewable technologies we have today, like wind and solar, have made a lot of progress and could be one path to a zero-carbon energy future. But given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths—and that means we also need to invent new approaches. Private companies will ultimately develop these energy breakthroughs, but their work will rely on the kind of basic research that only governments can fund. Both have a role to play.

I have written a paper that makes a more detailed case for investing in energy innovation and explains more about the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. You can download it as a .pdf in English or in French.

I am honored to be a part of this event. It is great to see so many government leaders and investors making these commitments and showing how the public and private sectors can come together to work on big problems. I am optimistic that we can invent the tools we need to generate clean, affordable, reliable energy that will help the poorest improve their lives and also stop climate change. I hope even more governments and investors will join us.

A few years ago Melinda and I visited with a group of rice farmers in Bihar, India, one of the most flood-prone regions of the country. All of them were extremely poor and depended on the rice they grew to feed and support their families. When the monsoon rains arrived each year, the rivers would swell, threatening to flood their farms and ruin their crops. Still, they were willing to bet everything on the chance that their farm would be spared. It was a gamble they often lost. Their crops ruined, they would flee to the cities in search of odd jobs to feed their families. By the next year, however, they would return—often poorer than when they left—ready to plant again.

Our visit was a powerful reminder that for the world’s poorest farmers, life is a high-wire act—without safety nets. They don’t have access to improved seeds, fertilizer, irrigation systems, and other beneficial technologies, as farmers in rich countries do. And no crop insurance either to protect themselves against losses. Just one stroke of bad fortune—a drought, a flood, or an illness—is enough for them to tumble deeper into poverty and hunger.

Now, climate change is set to add a fresh layer of risk to their lives. Rising temperatures in the decades ahead will lead to major disruptions in agriculture, particularly in tropical zones. Crops won’t grow because of too little rain or too much rain. Pests will thrive in the warmer climate and destroy crops.

Farmers in wealthier countries will experience changes too. But they have ways to manage these risks. They can plant drought-tolerant crops, use sophisticated soil analysis to make their land more productive, and protect themselves from losses with crop insurance.

The world’s poorest farmers show up for work each day for the most part empty-handed. That’s why of all the people who will suffer from climate change, they are likely to suffer the most.

Poor farmers will feel the sting of these changes at the same time the world needs their help to feed a growing population. By 2050, global food demand is expected to increase by 60 percent. Declining harvests would strain the global food system, increasing hunger and eroding the tremendous progress the world has made against poverty over the last half century.

I’m optimistic that we can avoid the worst impacts of climate change and feed the world—if we act now. Although the severest impacts of climate change may be several decades away, we have precious little time to find solutions for the world’s most vulnerable farmers. As I wrote in July, there’s an urgent need for governments to invest in new clean-energy innovations that will dramatically reduce greenhouse emissions and halt rising temperatures.

At the same time, we need to recognize that it’s already too late to stop all of the impacts of hotter temperatures. Even if the world discovered a cheap, clean energy source next week, it would take time for the world to kick its fossil fuel-powered habits and shift to a carbon-free future. Some impacts from climate change are inevitable. That’s why it’s critical for the world to invest in efforts to help the poorest adapt.

Here’s the good news. Many of the tools they’ll need to adapt are quite basic—things that they need anyway to grow more food and earn more income: access to financing, better seeds, fertilizer, training and markets where they can sell what they grow.

Other tools are new and tailored to the demands of a changing climate. The Gates Foundation and its partners have worked together to develop new varieties of seeds that grow even during times of drought or flooding. The rice farmers I met in Bihar, for instance, are now growing a new variety of flood-tolerant rice—nicknamed “scuba” rice—that can survive two weeks underwater. If shifts in the weather pattern bring more flooding to their region, they are already prepared for it. Other rice varieties are being developed that can withstand drought, heat, cold, and soil problems like high salt contamination.

All of these efforts have the power to transform lives. It’s quite common to see these farmers double or triple their harvests and their incomes when they have access to the advances farmers in the rich world take for granted. This new prosperity allows them to improve their diets, invest in their farms, and send their children to school. It also pulls their lives back from the razor’s edge, giving them a sense of security even if they have a bad harvest.

Of course, there will also be threats from climate change that we can’t foresee. To be prepared, the world needs to accelerate research into seeds and supports for smallholder farmers. One of the most exciting innovations to help farmers is satellite technology. In Africa, researchers are using satellite images to create detailed soil maps, which can inform farmers about what varieties will thrive on their land.

Still, it’s not enough to develop a better seed or a new technology. None of these innovations can transform the lives of farming families until they’re in their hands. A number of organizations, including a non-profit group called One Acre Fund, are finding ways to ensure farmers take advantage of these solutions. One Acre Fund takes an impressive hands-on approach working closely with African communities to provide financing, tools, and training that will help them increase their productivity. They currently work with more than 200,000 farmers and are looking to scale up to reach one million farmers by 2020.

In this year’s Annual Letter, Melinda and I made a bet that Africa will be able to feed itself in the next 15 years. Even with the risks of climate change, that’s a bet I stand by.

Yes, poor farmers have it tough. Their lives are puzzles with so many pieces to get right—from planting the right seeds and using the correct fertilizer to getting training and having a place to sell their harvest. If just one piece falls out of place, their lives can fall apart.

I know the world has what it takes to help put those pieces in place for both the challenges they face today and the ones they’ll face tomorrow. Most importantly, I know the farmers do too. 

For years, I took energy for granted. There’s no telling how many times I walked into my office, flipped a light switch, and powered up a PC without thinking at all about the magic of getting electricity any time I wanted it. But then I started traveling to poor and middle-income countries, and I had a very different experience.

I remember going to Buenos Aires and seeing where the government had run big wires to distribute electricity. But people couldn’t afford it, so they tapped their own power cables into the government’s and stole the electricity. This is a very common experience—according to the United Nations, more than 1.3 billion people have no access to electricity, and a billion more only have access to unreliable electricity networks. I’ve talked to women in rural Africa who spent hours every day hauling wood so they could cook food and light their homes. Others buy fuel to run a generator, which pumps out pollutants that cause asthma and lung cancer and, at 25 cents per kilowatt-hour, is more than twice as expensive as what the average American homeowner pays for electricity. Another example of the high cost of being poor.

Here is a picture of some students in Conakry, Guinea. They’re studying under street lamps, because they don’t have reliable lights at home. This is one of the most vivid examples of life without electricity at home that I’ve seen.

Think about what it has meant to America to have access to affordable, reliable energy. Electricity powers the streetlights that make our cities far safer than they were a century ago. The American construction industry never would have taken off if we didn’t have lots of affordable energy for making cement and steel. Our farmers became much more productive when they replaced their plows and oxen with tractors—but only because they had fuel to run these new machines. The historian Vaclav Smil found that in the 20^th century the average American’s energy use jumped roughly 60-fold. At the same time, the price we pay for electricity fell by roughly 98 percent.

That’s why I think any anti-poverty agenda has to look at giving more people access to affordable energy. For countries to lift themselves out of poverty, they need lights in schools so students can study when it’s dark out. Refrigerators in health clinics to keep vaccines cold. Pumps to irrigate farmland and provide clean water.

In the rich world, we are right to worry about conserving energy, but in poor places, people need more energy.

There is also a demand side to this equation. As people get richer, they want more energy-consuming goods, like computers and refrigerators, and energy-hungry services like health care. We’ve seen it already in Brazil, India, China, and other countries, and it’s a trend that will continue well into the future. The U.S. government estimates that the world’s energy needs will increase by more than 50 percent by 2040, but I think it could go even higher as the global population grows and incomes continue to rise. We want to provide this energy as efficiently as possible, but that’s no reason to deny the poor access to the services that rich countries enjoy.

What about climate change?

It’s a huge problem, one of the biggest we face today. The more energy we produce with today’s technology, the more carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere. While there is some uncertainty about the exact impact, there is nearly universal scientific agreement that these effects will be bad. And they will be worst for the poorest people on earth, who have done the least to cause the problem. Energy can’t just be affordable—it also has to be clean.

That’s why it’s so important for the United States and other rich countries to invest more in research into clean energy. A few years ago, I shared a few thoughts on this subject in a TED talk about developing energy sources that produce zero carbon. And I’m investing in a number of projects to develop cleaner, more affordable sources of energy. I hope to have more to share about them as they move through the R&D cycle.

These days, I don’t take energy for granted. I know what a difference it can make in the lives of the poorest, and I’m committed to helping them get it.

Everyone should be concerned about climate change but the people who are going to be hit the hardest are the world’s poorest farmers. Read on to learn who they are and what needs to be done to help them.

A few years ago in Tanzania, Melinda and I met Christina Mwinjipe, who was working hard to support her family farming a small plot of land. Like many smallholder farmers, her life was a high-wire act—without safety nets. The year I met Christina her farm was threatened by drought and crop disease.

Many developing countries are turning to coal and other low-cost fossil fuels to generate the electricity they need for powering homes, industry, and agriculture. Some people in rich countries are telling them to cut back on fossil fuels. I understand the concern: After all, human beings are causing our climate to change, and our use of fossil fuels is a huge reason.

But even as we push to get serious about confronting climate change, we should not try to solve the problem on the backs of the poor. For one thing, poor countries represent a small part of the carbon-emissions problem. And they desperately need cheap sources of energy now to fuel the economic growth that lifts families out of poverty. They can’t afford today’s expensive clean energy solutions, and we can’t expect them wait for the technology to get cheaper.  

Instead of putting constraints on poor countries that will hold back their ability to fight poverty, we should be investing dramatically more money in R&D to make fossil fuels cleaner and make clean energy cheaper than any fossil fuel.

These two videos featuring the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg illustrate the connection between energy and poverty. Bjorn created the Copenhagen Consensus meetings, which bring together prominent economists to rank solutions to global challenges. I certainly don’t agree with Bjorn (or the Copenhagen Consensus) on everything, but I always find him worth listening to. He’s not an ideologue. He’s a data-driven guy who cares about using scarce resources in the smartest possible way.

In this video, Bjorn demonstrates how big the energy gap is between rich and poor countries, argues that simply telling poor countries to “get wind turbines and solar panels” is hollow and hypocritical, and calls for making clean energy “so cheap that everyone … will want to buy it.”

In this video, Bjorn argues that before poor countries can move to clean energy, poor families need access to cheap electricity so they don’t have to burn dung, cardboard, or twigs for heating and cooking. These dirty fuels produce indoor air pollution that is terrible for health (especially for children).

Last month, during a trip to Europe, I mentioned that I plan to invest $1 billion in clean energy technology over the next five years. This will be a fairly big increase over the investments I am already making, and I am doing it because I believe that the next half-decade will bring many breakthroughs that will help solve climate change. As I argued in this 2010 TED talk, we need to be able to power all sectors of the economy with sources that do not emit any carbon dioxide.

But when it comes to preventing the worst effects of climate change, the investments I make will matter much less than the choices that governments make. In Europe I got to talk about these choices with several political leaders, and in this post I want to share the steps that I encouraged them to take.

I think this issue is especially important because, of all the people who will be affected by climate change, those in poor countries will suffer the most. Higher temperatures and less-predictable weather would hurt poor farmers, most of whom live on the edge and can be devastated by a single bad crop. Food supplies could decline. Hunger and malnutrition could rise. It would be a terrible injustice to let climate change undo any of the past half-century’s progress against poverty and disease—and doubly unfair because the people who will be hurt the most are the ones doing the least to cause the problem.

In addition to mitigating climate change, affordable clean energy will help fight poverty. Although the Gates Foundation does not fund energy research (my investments are separate), we see through our work with the poorest how the high price of energy affects them by adding to the cost of transportation, electricity, fertilizer, and many other things they need.

I do see some encouraging progress on climate and energy. Environmental advocates deserve credit for getting climate change so high on the world’s agenda. Many countries are committing to put policies in place that reflect the impact of greenhouse gases. The cost of solar photovoltaic cells has dropped by nearly a factor of ten over the past decade, and batteries that store energy created by intermittent sources like solar and wind are getting more powerful and less expensive. Since 2007 the United States has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions nearly 10 percent. Since 1990 Germany has reduced its energy-sector emissions by more than 20 percent.

World leaders will take another critical step this December at a major meeting in Paris called COP21, where they will discuss plans to reduce global CO₂ emissions significantly. COP21 can build a strong foundation for solving the climate crisis—but we will need to go even further.

Scientists generally agree that preventing the worst effects of climate change requires limiting the temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, and that doing so requires the biggest emitters to cut emissions 80 percent by 2050 and all countries to essentially eliminate them by the end of the century. Unfortunately, while we can make progress with today’s tools, they cannot get us to an 80 percent reduction, much less 100 percent. To work at scale, current wind and solar technologies need backup energy sources—which means fossil fuels—for windless days, long periods of cloudy weather, and nighttime. They also require much more space; for example, to provide as much power as a coal-fired plant, a wind farm needs more than 10 times as much land.

These are solvable problems. If we create the right environment for innovation, we can accelerate the pace of progress, develop and deploy new solutions, and eventually provide everyone with reliable, affordable energy that is carbon free. We can avoid the worst climate-change scenarios while also lifting people out of poverty, growing food more efficiently, and saving lives by reducing pollution.  

To create this future we need to take several steps: 

1. Create Incentives for Innovation

One step is to lay the foundation for innovation by drastically increasing government funding for research on clean energy solutions. Right now, the world spends only a few billion dollars a year on researching early-stage ideas for zero-carbon energy. It should be investing two or three times that much.

Why should governments fund basic research? For the same reason that companies tend not to: because it is a public good. The benefits to society are far greater than the amount that the inventor can capture. One of the best examples of this is the creation of the Internet. It has led to innovations that continue to change our lives, but none of the companies who deliver those innovations would ever have built it. Similarly, the government’s research into hydraulic fracturing helped create today’s natural gas boom.

Expanding the government’s support for energy research will lead to another important step: attracting more private investment to the field. As early-stage ideas progress, private capital will pour in to build the companies that will deliver those ideas to market. We need hundreds of companies working on thousands of ideas, including crazy-sounding ones that don’t get enough funding, such as high-altitude wind and solar chemical (using the energy of the sun to make hydrocarbons). No one knows which of these technologies will prove powerful enough and easy to scale, so we should be exploring all of them.

My own personal investments include companies working on new batteries and other storage methods and advances in solar technology. The nuclear design I am investing in would be safer than previous designs and would go a long way toward solving the nuclear waste problem. I spend a lot of time with the CEOs and scientists at all these companies discussing how to build a business around an innovative idea and take a product to market. If government research budgets open up the pipeline of innovation, not only will I expand my investments, but I believe other investors would join me in taking these risks.

Governments need to act quickly, because energy transitions take time. Today, renewables account for less than 5 percent of the world’s energy mix. It took four decades for oil to go from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to 25 percent. Natural gas took even longer. I believe we can make this transition faster—both because the pace of innovation is accelerating, and because we have never had such an urgent reason to move from one source of energy to another. The sooner we start, the more suffering we can prevent.

2. Develop Markets That Help Get to Zero

Another important step will be to ensure that the energy market accurately reflects the full impact of emitting carbon. Today the market is not factoring in what economists call the negative externalities—the health costs, environmental damage, and so on. If the market takes these into account, renewable energy will be more competitive with fossil fuels, which will attract more innovators to the field. Many countries and states are experimenting with different ways to price carbon. Whatever approach we take, it should create incentives to develop new energy solutions while also giving energy companies enough certainty to plan and execute the transition to zero-carbon sources.

We can also be smarter about how we use subsidies. The IMF estimates that direct subsidies for fossil fuels amount to nearly $500 billion a year worldwide, shielding consumers from their true costs. Some subsidies for deploying renewable energy are also very inefficient, creating big incentives to install solar panels where it’s often not sunny or wind turbines where it’s not windy. We should be looking for ways to reduce these subsidies and invest the savings in the basic R&D that will help solve the problem.

3. Treat Poor Countries Fairly

Unfortunately, even if we could roll out the ideal zero-carbon solution tomorrow, some climate change is inevitable, and it will hit the world’s poor the hardest. The countries that have done the most to cause this problem have a responsibility to not only invest in mitigation, but also help poor countries adapt to a changing climate. For our part, the Gates Foundation is concentrating on one key aspect of adaptation: helping small farmers—who make up the majority of the world’s poor—adjust to hotter, more unpredictable weather by raising agricultural productivity. I will be writing more about this work later this year. [Update on 9/8/15: As promised, here’s the post.]

As for next steps, I’m optimistic that the spotlight of the COP meeting in Paris will help motivate governments to step up their research budgets. In my view, innovation is essential to human progress. Some people would say that it is the lens I use to look at every problem, and I have to admit that there is some truth to that. But I believe it is justified by history. In my lifetime innovation has helped eradicate one deadly disease (smallpox) and put us on the brink of a second (polio). We have cut the fraction of children who die every year by a factor of four. Digital technology has revolutionized the way people live. We can create a zero-carbon future too, if we commit to it.

I often talk about the miracle of vaccines: With just a few doses, they protect children from deadly diseases forever.

When it comes to clean energy, we need breakthroughs that are just as miraculous.

Just like vaccines, clean-energy miracles don’t just happen by chance. We have to make them happen, through long-term investments in research and development. Unfortunately, right now neither the private sector nor the U.S. government is making anywhere near the scale of investment it takes to produce these breakthroughs.

Why are clean-energy breakthroughs so important? As I mentioned here, the world is going to need a lot more energy in the coming decades—an increase of 50 percent or more between 2010 and 2040, according to U.S. government estimates. But today our biggest sources of energy are also big sources of carbon dioxide, which is causing climate change.

In other words, the world’s energy sources have to be clean, as well as reliable and affordable.

Today’s technologies are a good start, but not good enough. Some places don’t get enough regular sunlight or reliable wind to depend heavily on these sources. In any case, these and other clean-energy technologies are still too expensive to be rolled out widely in poor countries. They’re getting cheaper, but many developing countries aren’t waiting for these tools to become affordable. They’re building large numbers of coal plants and other fossil-fuel infrastructure now. That’s very unfortunate, but it’s understandable. We can’t expect them to wait decades for cleaner alternatives when their people need energy now.

That’s why we need a massive amount of innovation in research and development on clean energy: new ways to stabilize the intermittent flows from wind and solar; cheaper, more efficient solar panels; better equipment for transmitting and managing energy; next-generation nuclear plants that are even safer than today’s; and more.

Unfortunately, the United States is severely underinvesting in clean-energy R&D. Let’s look at the two main sources of R&D investment. First there’s the private sector. Look at the chart below, which shows the percentage of sales that different industries put into R&D.

Why is energy so low? Because there’s a long lag time—often decades—before an investment in energy research delivers a commercial payoff (if it ever does). In addition, energy research results in a lot of public goods—economic competitiveness, national security, and environmental protection—that private markets don’t care much about.

In theory, when private markets under-invest, government can step in. But in practice, the U.S. government isn’t investing nearly as much as it should either.

The chart below shows you how energy stacks up in terms of the overall federal spending on R&D. You can see that about 60 percent of the federal government’s R&D spending goes to defense. Around 25 percent goes to health. You can barely see energy at all—it’s just 2 percent.

How do we rank among other countries? In terms of the percentage of GDP that goes to energy research, we rank 11th, behind China and Japan as well as Finland, Hungary, and Portugal.

Traditionally, the United States has been at the top in other areas of R&D. That’s why we’re a leader in IT, telecommunications, and other tech fields. By underinvesting in clean-energy research, we’re not only putting our global leadership at risk, we’re depriving researchers of funding that could shape the future of this crucial field.

What We Need to Do

I’m part of a business group called the American Energy Innovation Council, which is focusing intently on these issues. We have published two reports and a number of case studies, including one on how to unleash private sector R&D by doing things like expanding research grants and improving regulations. We’re also arguing that the federal government should adequately fund long-term research, roughly tripling energy R&D to $16 billion a year from the current $5 billion a year. Energy would then represent 6 percent of the total federal R&D budget.

That’s a lot of money, but given the scope of the challenge, I think it’s justified. It would unleash significant new investments in basic energy science, advanced nuclear fission, efficiency, renewables, improvements in the electricity grid, and more. This figure is also in line with recommendations from other groups, including the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the International Energy Agency.

I’m optimistic that science and technology can point the way to big breakthroughs in clean energy and help us meet the world’s growing needs. In this area, like so many, there are no quick fixes, which makes it even more urgent to start work now.

Like most people, I don’t think I can be easily fooled. But that’s just what happened when I was asked to taste a chicken taco and tell whether the meat inside was real or fake.

The meat certainly had the look and the smell of chicken. I took a bite and it had the taste and texture of real chicken, too. But I was surprised to learn that there wasn’t an ounce of real chicken it. The “meat” was made entirely of plants. And yet, I couldn’t tell the difference.

What I was experiencing was more than a clever meat substitute. It was a taste of the future of food.

By 2050, the world’s population will grow to more than 9 billion and our appetite for meat will grow along with it. The demand for meat will have doubled between 2000 and 2050.

This is happening in large part because economies are growing and people can afford more meat. That’s all good news.

But raising meat takes a great deal of land and water and has a substantial environmental impact. Put simply, there’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people. Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. (As much as I like vegetables, I know I wouldn’t want to give up hamburgers – one of my favorite foods).

That’s why we need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.

Some exciting new companies are taking on this challenge. They are creating plant-based alternatives to chicken, ground beef, even eggs, that are produced more sustainably, and taste great.

To see how food scientists are able to use plants to create meat alternatives, watch this video:

To be sure, this pioneering research is still very new, but the meat alternatives available now show great promise.

Companies like Beyond Meat and Hampton Creek Foods are experimenting with new ways to use heat and pressure to turn plants into foods that look and taste just like meat and eggs.

The chicken taco I ate was made using Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative. I wasn’t  the only one fooled by how real it tasted. New York Times food writer Mark Bittman  couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken either. You can read his review here.

Still, taste is subjective. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was not so impressed with the meat alternatives currently available. He told me that while these innovative products have great potential, a lot more work needs to be done to improve the quality.

I also tasted Beyond Eggs, Hampton Creek Foods’ egg substitute, which doesn’t contain the high cholesterol of real eggs.

If you’re interested in tasting these meat alternatives, my friend Nathan Myhrvold asked the chefs at his Modernist Cuisine Cooking Lab to create some recipes with Beyond Meat’s chicken-free product. They cooked Chicken-Free Tikka Masala (watch the video) and Grilled Chicken-Free Strips and Vegetable Salad with Sunflower Seed Pesto (watch the video).

Try them for yourself. I think you’ll discover that you can create a nutritious, protein-rich meal that’s good for you and the environment.

You’ll be surprised it’s not the real thing.

As someone now working fulltime in global health and development, I see firsthand how the U.S. government’s support for scientific research has improved people’s lives. That support is vital in another area—affordable, clean energy. I believe it is imperative that the government commit to clean energy innovation at a level similar to its research investments in health and defense.

In a time of economic crisis, asking policymakers in Washington, DC, to spend more money might not be the most popular position. But it’s essential to protect America's national interests and ensure that the United States plays a leading role in the fast-growing global clean energy industry. There is really no other choice. Carbon-based fuels are prone to wild price gyrations and are causing the planet to overheat. The United States spends close to $1 billion a day on foreign oil, while countries such as China, Germany, Japan, and Korea are making huge investments in clean energy technologies. The creation of new energy products, services, and jobs is a good thing wherever they occur, but it would be a serious miscalculation if America missed out on this singular opportunity.

The United States is uniquely positioned to lead in energy innovation, with great universities and national laboratories and an abundance of entrepreneurial talent. But the government must lend a hand. Market incentives, alone, will not create enough affordable, clean energy to get the nation to near-zero CO2 emissions, the level of emissions that developed countries must achieve if we are going to keep Earth from getting even hotter. Moreover, developing major new technologies, where the timeframes necessary for true innovation stretch past the normal horizons of patent protection, requires up-front investments that are too large for venture capital and traditional energy companies.

History has repeatedly proven that federal investments in research return huge payoffs, with incredible associated benefits for U.S. industries and the economy. Yet over the past three decades, U.S. government investment in energy innovation has dropped by more than 75%. In 2008, the United States spent less on energy R&D as a percentage of gross domestic product than China, France, Japan, or Canada.

Last year, I joined with other business leaders in a call to increase federal investment in energy R&D from $5 billion to $16 billion a year. (Others, including the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, have also recommended substantial increases.) Recently, our group, the American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC), issued a second report outlining ways to ensure that government research dollars are targeted wisely to achieve optimal returns. The report also suggests ways to pay for the increased investment: reducing or eliminating current subsidies to well-established energy industries, diverting a portion of royalties from domestic energy production, collecting a small fee on electricity sales, or imposing a price on carbon. Any combination of these could provide the funds needed to increase energy innovation. Even at almost triple the current level of government investment in energy innovation, the research dollars that the AEIC is advocating would represent a small fraction of the money presently spent on renewable energy subsidies and efficiency grants.

Energy transformations take generations. But if the United States begins in earnest today, the nation’s energy challenges can be solved in ways that truly set America on a path of energy independence and that provide affordable energy for everyone, especially the poor. The return on this kind of investment could change—perhaps even save—the world and provide generations to come with a brighter future.

This editorial was originally published in Science magazine.

To reduce the impact of climate change and meet the world’s energy demand, we need a reliable source of energy that’s cheap and emits no carbon. Many of the possibilities today involve intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun. The only way these can become primary sources of energy is if we develop inexpensive energy storage systems on a massive scale. Without this, renewable energy sources like wind turbines and solar cells will never approach the scale or affordability that is necessary.

Over the last 50 years, the technology associated with generating wind and solar power has advanced, but not the technology to store it. Hopefully, that’s changing. Professor Donald Sadoway, an MIT professor of materials chemistry, is leading research to develop an inexpensive “liquid metal” battery that will dramatically improve battery efficiency and provide large scale energy storage.

I first met Professor Sadoway after going to MIT’s OpenCourseWare website and watching video lectures of his courses. I subsequently had a chance to meet Professor Sadoway in person and am excited about the research he is doing. I believe so much in this technology that I’ve invested in the Liquid Metal Battery Corporation he is involved in, as well as a few other battery startups.

In my work at Microsoft and the foundation, I’ve always believed that the private and non-profit sectors have an important role to play in advancing innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology. When it comes to developing new sources of energy, and ways to store that energy, I believe the federal government needs to play a more active role than it does today. Recently, I’ve joined with other concerned business leaders to create the American Energy Innovation Council. Over the next several months, we’ll be offering detailed proposals to invigorate America’s energy innovation. You can read more about the issue in an op-ed that ran on April 23 in The Washington Post.

Energy sector poised for innovation -- with the right spark

by Bill Gates and Chad Holliday

This country runs on innovation. The American success story — from Ben Franklin’s bifocals to Thomas Edison’s light bulb to Henry Ford’s assembly line to today’s advanced microprocessors — is all about inventing our future. The companies we ran, Microsoft and DuPont, were successful because they invested deeply in new technologies and new ideas.

But our country is neglecting a field central to our national prospect and security: energy. Although the information technology and pharmaceutical industries spend 5 to 15 percent of their revenue on research and development each year, U.S. companies’ spending on energy R&D has averaged only about one-quarter of 1 percent of revenue over the past 15 years.

And despite talk about the need for “21st-century” energy sources, federal spending on clean energy research is also relatively small. The U.S. government annually spends less than $3 billion — compared with roughly $30 billion annually on health research and $80 billion on defense research and development.

As many have noted, an energy future built on yesterday’s technology threatens to leave people exposed to price shocks (hurting Americans and devastating the world’s poor) and would exacerbate our national security problems and increase our trade deficit, given our dependence on costly foreign oil. The science is also clear that without significant efforts to tackle the climate issue, the effects of warming will grow, undermining agriculture, making droughts and floods more common and more severe, and eventually destroying ecosystems.

We need a vigorous strategy to invent our future and ensure its safety and prosperity. In the realm of energy, as with medicine and national defense, that requires a public commitment.

Why can’t the private sector do this? What makes energy different from, say, electronics? Three things.

First, there are profound public interests in having more energy options. Our national security, economic health and environment are at issue. These are not primary motivations for private-sector investments, but they merit a public commitment.

Second, the nature of the energy business requires a public commitment. A new generation of television technology might cost $10 million to develop. Because those TVs can be built on existing assembly lines, that risk-reward calculus makes business sense. But a new electric power source can cost several billion dollars to develop and still carry the risk of failure. That investment does not compute for most companies.

Third, the turnover in our power system is very slow. Power plants last 50 years or more, and they are very cheap to run once built, meaning there is little market for new models.

It is understandable, then, why private-sector investments in clean energy technology are so small. Yet, while it may make sense for individual companies to make these choices, accepting the status quo would condemn our country to very bad options.

This is why we have joined with other concerned business leaders — including Norm Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin; Ursula Burns, chief executive of Xerox; John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins; Jeff Immelt, chief executive of GE; and Tim Solso, chairman of Cummins — to create the American Energy Innovation Council.

There is vast opportunity in energy. Prices are declining in solar energy and wind, and they could fall further with new technology. There is a critical need for better electricity storage technologies to enable electric vehicles and very-large-scale renewable energy. Advanced nuclear power could burn non-enriched uranium — which the world has in vast quantities. New efficiency technologies can cut energy demand by half or more in dozens of applications — in cars, buildings and some industrial processes.

And this list just scratches the surface. Vigorous federal commitments to new energy technology would bring these options to commercial viability.

Our country has great assets to bring to the challenge. Our research universities are among the best in the world, and our federal energy laboratories have brilliant scientists capable of delivering breakthroughs.

But we need to rethink the scale and urgency of the energy endeavor. The federal government must invest more and be smarter about the innovation process.

In a few months our group will offer detailed recommendations to strengthen and reform American energy innovation. As we develop recommendations, we are reaching out to leaders in business, government and academia, as well as experts in science and technology. Eventually we plan to advocate to Congress, the White House and others. We are pleased that energy innovation has never become politicized because Republicans, Democrats and independents share a common interest in scientific breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. We are confident that this spirit will be reflected in these discussions.

The core force of innovation — vision, experimentation and wise investments — has led to thousands of breakthroughs that benefit us all. A serious commitment to innovation can be transformative, as we saw with the effort to replace chlorofluorocarbons two decades ago. We need the same serious commitment in the energy sector to developing the original American energy supply: innovation.

Bill Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corp. Chad Holliday was chairman and chief executive of DuPont from 1998 to 2009.

TED 2010 was a great experience. Like last year, I was able to hear from and talk with many people who have introduced me to new things and have me excited to learn more about new areas I find interesting. I also return more passionate than ever for the work our foundation does.

Here are some of my favorites—which I’ll post links to as they get put onto the TED site. Nathan Myhrvold did a great job showing two projects his company, Intellectual Ventures, has been working on with the foundation. Michael Specter spoke on the importance of science and data to drive decision making, using GMOs as an example where science should inform the debate. Esther Duflo also presented a very thoughtful data-driven overview of how to judge the best way to encourage things like vaccines and malaria bed-nets.

I was really impressed with Jake Shimabukuro, a young ukulele player who is pretty famous on YouTube, but whom I’d never seen. He was pretty amazing. Elizabeth Pisani’s talk was also very good, about AIDS prevention. And Seth Berkley did a very strong presentation on vaccines.

Those are subjects I care a lot about, and was happy to see them get exposure at TED.

Likewise, just before my talk, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin from KIPP talked about the need to improve education in the US. All of these will be worth your time, as well as lots of others from this year, and past TED conferences.

I spoke at TED about moving to zero-carbon energy, and our need to reduce CO2 emissions 80% by 2050. The talk was called Innovating to Zero and it just posted on the TED website today.

It’s the first time I’ve spoken in public on the topic, but I’ve been studying energy and climate change over the last couple of years, and have been lucky to meet fairly regularly with some of the leading scientists in the field.

In the presentation, I talked about the massive innovation effort needed to deliver “energy miracles,” breakthroughs that will make zero-carbon energy generation possible. There are many promising approaches which we need to continue pursuing aggressively: CCS, Nuclear, Wind, Solar PV and Solar Thermal – but they all have challenges that must be addressed. And the only way to get there is through innovation.

Only a significant increase in research R&D will get us to a place where we can meet that 2050 deadline, since it will probably take a generation of inventing, and then a generation to change over our existing infrastructure.

I come to these issues as someone who spends most of his time thinking about problems that touch the poorest 2 billion people on the planet. Giving people access to cheap (and clean) energy is a huge step in reducing poverty.

To drive home that point, at the end of the talk, I said that if I had only one wish, it would be for zero-carbon energy that is half the price of today’s. That would be quite an achievement, and would do massive good for the poor.

Some people reading about the talk have drawn an odd conclusion that I don’t care as much for vaccines or other efforts from our foundation as before. I hope when they see the talk, they’ll understand that isn’t the case at all. Luckily, we all have more than one wish to make the world a better place.

People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction—30% (off of some baseline) by 2020 and 80% by 2050.

I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050.

But we tend to focus on the first one since it is much more concrete. We don’t focus nearly enough on the things that put you on a path to making the 80% goal by 2050. To make the 80% goal by 2050 we are going to have to reduce emissions from transportation and electrical production in participating countries down to near zero.

You will still have emissions from other activities including domestic animals, making fertilizer, and decay processes.

There will still be countries that are too poor to participate.

If the goal is to get the transportation and electrical sectors down to zero emissions you clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power.

While it is all well and good to insulate houses and turn off lights, to really solve this problem we need to spend more time on accelerating innovation.

If addressing climate change only requires us to get to the 2020 goal, then efficiency would be the key thing.

Unfortunately, you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero. But because 2020 is too soon for innovation to be completed and widely deployed, behavior change and efficiency still matter.

Still, the amount of CO2 avoided by these kinds of modest reduction efforts will not be the key to what happens with climate change in the long run.

In fact it is doubtful that any such efforts in the rich countries will even offset the increase coming from richer lifestyles in places like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.

Innovation in transportation and electricity will be the key factor.

One of the reasons I bring this up is that I hear a lot of climate change experts focus totally on 2020 or talk about how great it is that there is so much low hanging fruit that will make a difference.

This mostly focuses on saving a little bit of energy, which by itself is simply not enough. The need to get close to zero emissions in key sectors almost never gets mentioned. The danger is people will think they just need to do a little bit and things will be fine.

If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters—getting close to zero.

With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need for the goal to be zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.

However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.

To achieve the kinds of innovations that will be required I think a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement is the key. There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.

My point is not to denigrate efficiency. Slowing the growth of CO2 ppm is of course a good thing. And there are lots of cheap—and in many cases self-funding—efficiency gains to be made.

We should at the least fix market barriers and dysfunctions that prevent these gains from being realized. That’s just being smart.

But it’s not enough to slow the growth of CO2 given the strength of demand driven by the poor who need to get access energy.

No amount of insulation will get us there; only innovating our way to what is essentially zero carbon energy technology will do it. If we focus on just efficiency to the exclusion of innovation, or imagine that we can worry about efficiency first and worry about energy innovation later, we won’t get there.

The world is distracted from what counts on this issue in a big way.