How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021)

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It would be immoral and impractical to try to stop people who are lower down on the economic ladder from climbing up. We can’t expect poor people to stay poor because rich countries emitted too many greenhouse gases, and even if we wanted to, there would be no way to accomplish it. Instead, we need to make it possible for low-income people to climb the ladder without making climate change worse.

Many farmers still have to use ancient techniques, which is one of the reasons they’re trapped in poverty. They deserve modern equipment and approaches, but right now using those tools means producing more greenhouse gases.

And in extreme cases, when electricity is especially hard to come by, we should have the ability to shed demand, meaning we’d ration electricity, prioritize the highest needs (say, hospitals), and shut down nonessential activities.

He’d sit in the restaurant, eating lunch while he sifted through requests we had received from people who were asking for donations.

Virtually all the wheat grown on earth is descended from the plants he bred. (One downside of these new varieties is that they need lots of fertilizer to reach their full growth potential, and as we’ll discuss in a later section, fertilizer has some negative side effects.)

But if we grow those crops on land that would otherwise be used to feed a growing population, we could inadvertently drive up food prices, pushing even more people into poverty and malnutrition while accelerating the already dangerous pace of deforestation.

They’ve tried using vaccines to cut down on the methanogenic microbes living in the cattle’s gut, breeding cattle to naturally produce fewer emissions, and adding special feeds or drugs to their diets.

And both kinds of artificial meat face another uphill battle. At least 17 U.S. state legislatures have tried to keep these products from being labeled as “meat” in stores. One state has proposed banning their sale altogether. So even as the technology improves and the products get cheaper, we’ll need to have a healthy public debate about how they’re regulated, packaged, and sold.

Another has developed a “smart bin” that uses image recognition to track how much food is wasted in a house or business. It gives you a report on how much you threw away, along with its cost and its carbon footprint. The system may sound invasive, but giving people more information can help them make better choices.

There are a few things that will help, such as advanced satellite-based monitors that make it easier to spot deforestation and forest fires as they’re happening and to measure the extent of the damage afterward.

People cut down trees not because people are evil; they do it when the incentives to cut down trees are stronger than the incentives to leave them alone. So we need political and economic solutions, including paying countries to maintain their forests, enforcing rules designed to protect certain areas, and making sure rural communities have different economic opportunities so they don’t have to extract natural resources just to survive.

People in rich countries will need to change some habits—we’ll have to eat less meat, for instance.

One, we need to raise the odds that malnourished children will survive. That means improving primary health-care systems, doubling down on malaria prevention, and continuing to provide vaccines for conditions like diarrhea and pneumonia. Although the COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly makes all these things harder, the world knows a lot about how to do them
well; the vaccine program known as GAVI, which has prevented 13 million deaths since 2000, ranks as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

I tell them, “Please don’t take away vaccine money and put it into electric cars. Africa is responsible for only about 2 percent of all global emissions. What you really should be funding there is adaptation. The best way we can help the poor adapt to climate change is to make sure they’re healthy enough to survive it. And to thrive despite it.”

Focus on the most vulnerable people. Women aren’t the only group of vulnerable people, but they are the biggest.

So we need to do things like promoting women’s property rights and targeting technical advice specifically for them.

To sum up: Rich and middle-income people are causing the vast majority of climate change. The poorest people are doing less than anyone else to cause the problem, but they stand to suffer the most from it. They deserve the world’s help, and they need more of it than they’re getting.

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 was a huge setback that undid a great deal of progress.

We need to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth by around 1 percent. There are various ways we could do that. One involves distributing extremely fine particles—each just a few millionths of an inch in diameter—in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

In general, the government’s role is to invest in R&D when the private sector won’t because it can’t see how it will make a profit. Once it becomes clear how a company can make money, the private sector takes over.

Put a price on carbon. Whether it’s a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system where companies can buy and sell the right to emit carbon, putting a price on emissions is one of the most important things we can do to eliminate Green Premiums.

We’ll need action at all levels of government, from local transportation planners to national legislatures and environmental regulators.

Government leaders are also thinking about education, jobs, health care, foreign policy, and more recently, COVID-19.

You can run for state or local office, where you’ll probably have more impact anyway.

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.”

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.

As I write this afterword in November 2020, COVID-19 has killed more than 1.4 million people around the world and is entering another wave of cases and deaths.

Globally, COVID-19 has undone decades of progress on poverty and disease. As governments moved to deal with the pandemic, they had to pull people and money away from other priorities, including vaccination programs. A study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that in 2020, vaccination rates dropped to levels last seen in the 1990s. We lost 25 years of progress in about 25 weeks.

The year 2020 was a huge and tragic setback. But I am optimistic that we will get COVID-19 under control in 2021.