Billionaire Bill Gates warned in a blog post on Tuesday that climate change will create a “dramatically worse” world for “our grandchildren.”
Gates argued that the solution to climate change can be summed up in two sentences.
“We need to eliminate global emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. Extreme weather is already causing more suffering, and if we don’t get to net-zero emissions, our grandchildren will grow up in a world that is dramatically worse off,” he wrote.
Gates also wrote that it would be one of the hardest things humans have ever done. One of the world’s richest men, Gates has focused particularly on battling climate change in recent years and said that soon becoming a grandfather had affected his thinking about the future.
“Getting to zero will be the hardest thing humans have ever done. We need to revolutionize the entire physical economy—how we make things, move around, produce electricity, grow food, and stay warm and cool—in less than three decades,” he said in his blog post.
Gates wrote that emissions “rose from 51 billion tons of carbon equivalents to 52 billion tons” between 2021 and 2022, but that the world was further along on “getting companies to invest in zero-carbon breakthroughs.”
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder added that buildings were a surprising source of carbon emissions.
“The energy they use for air conditioning, heating, lights, and so on is responsible for nearly 14% of all greenhouse gases. And buildings waste a lot of energy: Because of inefficient windows and gaps in what’s known as the building envelope, as much as 40% of heated or cooled air leaks out of the typical building,” he said.
Gates also noted two companies that were working to develop products that might reduce heat leakage from windows and other spots in buildings.
The White House announced plans to study spraying aerosols such as sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in an effort to counter climate change in early December.
President Biden warned while speaking to Air Force personnel station in the United Kingdom in June 2021 that climate change was the biggest threat to America’s national security.
“When I went over to the tank in the Pentagon when I was first was elected vice president with President Obama, the military sat us down and let us know what the greatest threats facing America were, the greatest physical threats,” he said. “This is not a joke. You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest physical threat facing America was? Global warming.”