During my last week of vacations I had the chance to read a couple books which I would strongly recommend: Homodeus from Yual Noah Harari (had been on my reading list since I read Sapiens a couple years ago) and How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the new book from Bill Gates about how to fight climate change. The latest, though, has only met half my expectations.
Don’t get me wrong, the publication of Bill Gates’ book is something to celebrate for those of us who work in the sustainability sector as it will help raise awareness and accelerate the required action worldwide. The timings could not be better: we are (hopefully) moving out of COVID19’s worst 12-months with many lessons learnt on global cooperation for crisis response, and only half a year ahead of COP26 in Glasgow.
However, I believe that Bill Gates’ book has i) not touched one of the most important lever to fight climate change and ii) is highly focused on consumerism. More concretely:
i. It underestimates the emissions from forests (i.e. deforestation) and their contribution to climate warming (both by halting deforestation and by increasing CO2 removals from standing forests).
ii. It does barely mention the 3R’s (i.e. reduce, reuse and recycle) which, in my opinion, should be the basis of any well-intended sustainability policy. Gates rather focuses on more sustainable ways to keep consumerism as high as possible.
As I believe these two topics should be part of any conversation about how to fight climate change, I wrote down what I believe Bill Gates’ book should have told all of us in the first place.
Forests-alone (aka deforestation) contribute up to 8Gt CO2e (16% of global emissions) and account for -16Gt CO2e of carbon removals (31% of global emissions) — as opposed to the 3% mentioned in the book
Bill Gates’ book provides, in a very simple and useful way, a clear picture of where emissions today are coming from:
However, it extremely underestimates the contribution of Forests and it does not differentiate between actual carbon emissions and removals, but rather takes the net of both (that’s the #1 error that any climate scientist would immediately correct).
According to the book, forests (actually, deforestation) contribute to a net of +1.6Gt CO2e emissions per year. The concept of net emissions come from the fact that forests are both a CO2 emissions contributor (i.e. if all forests were a country they would be the 4th largest CO2 polluter worldwide) and a CO2 remover (forest act as the largest carbon sink on Earth, storing carbon both above and below ground). Thus, net emissions come from adding all the CO2 emissions from deforestation and subtracting all CO2 removals from standing forests. That’s the 1.6Gt mentioned above and it does poorly reflect the actual contribution of forests to carbon emissions and removals.
Moreover, the latest research in this field (see Harris et al. paper Global maps of twenty-first century forest carbon fluxes, written by some of the most recognized climate scientist worldwide) estimates this figure to actually be negative. That is, the net “emissions” from forests are -7.6Gt CO2e per year, thus 7.6Gt of carbon removals from standing forests. In other words, the carbon removals from standing forests exceed deforestation emissions by -7.6Gt a year, equivalent to -15% of global GHG emissions.
More concretely, according to Harris et al. paper, gross emissions add up to 8Gt CO2e a year, equivalent to 16% of global GHG emissions, mostly coming from tropical forests (65%) — I make the point about the importance of tropical forest as this is where my current work at SYSTEMIQ is focused on.
On the other hand, carbon removals from forests account for -15.6Gt CO2e per year (equivalent to -31% of global GHG emissions), mostly coming from old secondary forests (72%) — I make the point about the importance of protecting old-forests as it is often incorrectly stated that old forests do not act as a carbon sink, well it’s actually the opposite (for those interested in the matter I recommend reading Why forests, why now from Frances Seymour and Jonah Busch).
Therefore, any climate change policy or text that does not include i) halting deforestation and ii) accelerating forest restoration is missing “half of the climate change story” — meaning it is not tackling 16% of the problem (halting deforestation) and 31% of the solution (increasing carbon removals from forests).
In Bill’s words, deforestation “isn’t primarily a technological problem. It’s a political and economic problem” and I do agree with that. However, that does not justify underestimating its contribution to climate change nor excluding it as a solution in any climate change policy.
Halting deforestation and accelerating the rate at which we restore our forests should be in the top 3 priorities (together with greening power generation and industrial production) of any global, realistic climate change plan.
If you want to become sustainable, there are 3 words you need to remember: reduce, reuse and recycle
The last chapter of Gates’ book focuses on “what each of us can do” to avoid a climate disaster. As citizens, he talks about getting our voices heard by politicians (which I completely agree). As consumers, it focuses on shifting our non-sustainable consumption into less-polluting alternatives (which I don’t fully agree). More concretely, it gives 4 recommendations:
- Switch to a clean energy provider
- Reduce your house emissions (e.g. replace incandescent lights with LEDs)
- Buy an electric vehicle
- Buy plant-based burgers — more concretely Beyond Meat and Impossible Food ones
I fully buy that 1) switching to a clean energy provider and 2) reducing your house emissions should be on the top of any citizen to-do list for sustainable living (that’s a no-brainer). However, it should be mentioned in the first place that reducing the consumption should be the focus (i.e. it has the largest environmental impact) and moving to less-polluting alternatives should be our second choice.
For points 3) and 4) above, I somehow agree that these are sustainable alternatives (although not always) but again I believe they shouldn’t come in the first place when writing any credible recommendations for fighting climate change at an individual level.
More concretely, the problem with these recommendations is:
3) We don’t need a Tesla, we need to move around in a sustainable way: I don’t need an EV, I need a source of transportation that is sustainable (full stop). There are many alternative choices that are way more sustainable that buying a brand new EV, such as just walking, riding a bike, taking the public transportation, car sharing, etc. Moreover, for an EV to be an effective sustainable alternative, you will need to drive it tens of thousands of km until the emissions of buying a new EV compensate the decreased emissions from not burning gasoline using your existing internal combustion engine (ICE) car. Therefore, in some cases, it would just be better to keep on driving your car until the end of its life-cycle (as by that time you won’t even need to buy an EV, as other sources of transport might have developed, such as large scale car sharing networks). You can rather invest this money (about 40,000$ for a Tesla Model 3) in reducing your emissions elsewhere.
4) We don’t need burgers, we need a healthy diet rich in proteins: actually, our developed-world diets (on average) have more proteins than the necessary and healthy amounts, so actually we might not even need that many proteins... In any case, we shouldn’t focus the recommendations on a product, but on a general set of solutions. Sustainable alternative choices to meat, specially beef and lamb, don’t need to come from artificial meat grown in a lab. They can come from natural plant-based products (I won’t extend on this topic, as I have already written an article about veganism).
In short, the book focuses on keeping consumerism as high as possible and about shifting the demand into (more) sustainable choices.
However, any well-intended recommendation to make our lives sustainable at a personal level must be based on the 3Rs (reduce, reuse and recycle)
Moving your consumption habits into (more) sustainable ones needs to follow but they won’t have such an environmental impact as reducing your consumption in the first place.
Final note
My background is in economics, and therefore I must say that I do understand why Bill Gates’ focuses on switching our consumption into (more) sustainable alternatives, rather than reducing our consumption — we need to think about the economic impact. Also, I believe that Gates’ solutions — based on innovation and technological developments — are often more appealing for politicians and the private sector than the ones I described above.
First of all, as he largely describes in the book, increasing demand for these (more) sustainable products in the rich world will drive prices down, making them cheaply available in the future — what he refers to as reducing the Green Premiums. This will allow rich countries to supply (aka export) these products and match the increasing demand from growing developing-countries’ middle-class. That is, we can’t prohibit developing-countries’ citizens to eat meat, but we can offer a (more) sustainable plant-based alternative at the same price and get paid for it.
In other words, increasing the demand of these products in rich countries today will enable the creation of new markets abroad in the future, thus increasing national exportations and economy.
On the other hand, fighting climate change will affect structural sectors (e.g. fossil fuels power generation) that employ millions of workers in all countries. Thus, it is also key to shift demand into new sectors that can create new jobs and absorb the current working force that might lose their jobs in highly polluting industries.
That said, a book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster should focus on the most effective solution to fight climate change. When needed, one can mention their economic implications, but it should be cleary differentiated.
