It's A Long Road To Zero Emission: Bill Gates

The world still needs to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions from 51 billion tons to zero, but global emissions continue to increase every year.

Photo Insert: More than 70 countries have committed to reaching net zero, including big polluters like the US and the European Union (EU).

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, Bill Gates wrote in his annual memo.

“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,” Gates wrote.

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.

More than 70 countries have committed to reaching net zero, including big polluters like the US and the European Union (EU). 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.

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