I doubt if the irony of being responsible for increasing the world's reliance on electricity was lost on Bill Gates when he set out to write this book. Before he made his fortune, which now he admirably uses for philanthropy, his aim was to put a computer on every desk in the world.
His latest mission, which is even harder to achieve, is to reduce the world's dangerous emissions to zero.
Here he sets out in layman's terms a sensible roadmap. If you have been an advocate of clean energy probably nothing is new in this book. Though if like me, an ex diesel cab driver, you are slowly learning about climate change the book is essential reading.
The drawback for the work is that it is understandably American. If it could be edited for British consumption the book should be on the syllabus in secondary schools.

A well put-together, concise and insightful book on an important global crisis. This book made me realise I do not know enough about climate change and we all should know the basics. The book is aimed at someone who does at least know the basics but I was able to keep up. The author is very well known and I think it will have a positive affect on this book.

Bill Gates knows himself to be an imperfect messenger of this information but that doesn't take away from his intention to help solve the climate crisis.

The book starts with a basic guide to climate change, It's easily understandable and broken down into chapters covering each concept, why, and how climate change is happening.
Gates invests in much of this technology but provides an unbiased look at all the clean energy technologies.

Gates's main premise is we need to get down to ZERO carbon emissions and that technological evolution is the only way to do this. He explains exactly what we need to happen and more importantly how soon.

This is an important book as it has the opportunity to influence people who might see the opportunities that these new technological breakthroughs will bring.

I wish I liked this book a bit more than I did because I'd love to counter some of the negative comments from people who I suspect never read the book (ten years on Goodreads and this still makes my blood boil). Oddly, the negative reactions seem to fall primarily into two categories: 1) Bill Gates is a rich evil oligarch who only wrote this book to get even more money (muahaha), and 2) Bill Gates is an evil Marxist who only wrote this book to encourage the government to employ socialism (muahaha).

Personally, I see little evidence of either. My primary suspicion is that Bill Gates is an insufferable nerd who, having already offered a technological answer to several ills plaguing the world, has now turned his attentions to solving climate change. I strongly doubt he needed the paycheck from this book. He is almost nauseatingly optimistic at times (I guess being a billionaire will do that to you), but I at least hope the celebrity of him will encourage more people to take the issues seriously.

For me, this book wasn't as interesting or as enlightening as I'd hoped for. Most of it is like a beginner's guide to climate change, so I suppose it will be helpful to those who have little to no understanding of the issues. It is very accessible and easy to read, I'll give him that. Gates breaks down the science into simple concepts, explains why and how climate change is happening, and goes into all the clean energy alternatives.

That's the first part of the book-- barely more than a rehash of my high school science lessons. I'm curious: my US friend about the same age as me said she never learned about climate change in school, what are other people's experiences with this?

The later chapters turn to what we can do and, well, the problem is that I felt like 95% of these chapters were not about things I could do, but things that governments, environmental agencies, and tech companies could do. According to Bill Gates, the major thing the little people like me and you can do is harass our representatives about it. And yes, you should go do that. Making a fuss really can make a difference.

Gates is not really a proponent of less, which is interesting, and will surely invite criticism. He proposes we focus our efforts on turning the energy we use into clean energy, rather than attempting to use less of it. I think this is at least partly because he himself has an enormous carbon footprint, but also because, as he says, the developing countries his foundation has been pouring money into need more energy to get people out of poverty and end disease, not less.

I saw some people criticise this book as being a case of a ridiculously rich guy telling people poorer than him how they should live their lives and what they should eat. I didn't get that sense at all. In fact, Gates seems to see major changes to our personal lifestyles as a last resort, instead focusing on ways governments can harness clean energy alternatives to still deliver us the same amount of electricity.

The book didn't teach me much - except for the bit about geoengineering, which I found quite fascinating - but I sense it's real purpose might be to grab the attention of people who have been complacent up until this point. Here is a recognizable, much-admired man putting his name on the "climate change is a serious issue" bill. Maybe it will make people take note? Or maybe it will only serve to convince skeptics that climate change is a hoax the rich folks have implemented to control the rest of us. Who even knows anymore?

This book will be good for someone who wants a basic understanding of what issues we are facing and their consequences. I can see it's well researched and he's obviously talked to a lot of people but it's quite self-congratulatory, which I found quite annoying.

There are formatting errors in the Kindle edition as no numbers are displayed: dates, percentages etc but this isn't reflected in my rating. Just a note to the publisher.

Somewhat self-congratulatory in talking about what he has done, while still admitting to producing more than his fair share of the contribution to climate change in sustaining his global lifestyle, this is nonetheless a readable book. And it has its moments: Mr Gates has indeed contributed hugely to world development; and I enjoyed the case studies which demonstrate what can be done at ground level, to minimise or adapt to climate change. Overall, however, Mr Gates seems to believe that existing systems can create the change, whereas 50 years of words clearly demonstrate that existing systems and people are not competent to address it. A missed opportunity to promulgate system change as well as behaviour change.

Having read a lot on the topic, I found this book contained not a great deal that was new to me, though it was interesting to read about the carbon emitted in the manufacturing of both steel and concrete.

I have long admired Mr Gates's philanthropy, but I found his approach here of 'I did this', 'I invested x millions in that' a little tedious and self-congratulatory. And to say that giving up meat and driving an electric car are important but not enough, and urging us all to do more by lobbying governments, feels somewhat hypocritical when he freely admits he is still flying in private jets. We non-billionaires do what we can in our small way, thinking we are doing our best. In my household, for example, we eat a vegan diet, grow our own food, shop locally, have no heating or cooling system in our house, buy our electricity from a company which invests only in renewables, and have driven a maximum distance of 70km from home in the last year in our very small car. We really are trying, Mr Gates.

My Top5 thoughts on this book!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHZ3hthGbmU

1. Climate Disaster
2. Realistic Optimism
3. Climate & Tech
4. The Good News
5. The Final Verdict

I would like to thank the Publishers, NetGalley, and Bill Gates for sending me a copy of this book.

A year or so ago I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, which laid out in often horrific details, the kinds of things that would happen to the planet if we didn’t change our ways.

Bill Gates goes for the much more practical, “So what can we do about it now?” approach. This book is basically his plan to cut our carbon emissions from 51 billion tonnes to zero by 2050. That’s it in a nutshell. If we don’t then, like a bath, with even just a slow dripping tap, we’ll end up overflowing and facing some of the consequences that Wallace-Wells laid out in his earlier work.

To do this, in this enormously readable book, Gates takes us through where the emissions come from, and examines ways to work through each of those sectors, which he breaks down into making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around and keeping warm and cool.

He tackles each in turn, although he notes that we spend a lot of time thinking about “getting around” – aka transport – which accounts for 16% of net emissions, but not so much on making steel and concrete. The food industry also gets a good look-in.

Gates is putting his money where his mouth is. Throughout the book he talks about the various companies he’s invested in. This could sound a bit, “Aren’t I clever?” but it doesn’t. He’s just being practical. It comes from the work he and his wife Melinda have carried out through their Gates Foundation in doing very practical things like fighting malaria. So he’s constantly referring to people he’s met, and businesses he’s keenly following.
And throughout, he is very pragmatic. Only a few of us are willing – or even able – to pay a “Green Premium” for some of life’s essentials. He readily acknowledges that the lower the income you are in, the bigger a proportion of your overall costs something like transport will be. So paying even a small premium is simply not affordable. He’s also very aware that the big growth in greenhouse gases is likely to come from developing parts of the world where billions are coming to expect the same kinds of middle-class lifestyles that Americans and Europeans have experienced.

So, what are the solutions? Well, this isn’t really a list of things that you or I can do directly – assuming neither of us is a world leader. There are some of those things, but this is more about policy as well as corporate and governmental support and investment. When we buy the cheapest concrete or steel, there is no carbon-cost attached to it. There’s no incentive to use the greener materials.

And where there are financial incentives, they don’t necessarily help. The energy industry is rife with them, but they protect the enormously cheap fossil fuel industry. On the other hand, laws might make it ridiculously hard to build things like windfarms (a particular problem, seemingly, in the US).

There are things which make you raise your eyebrows a bit. Gates doesn’t believe that just planting lots of trees will fix things. He’s got nothing against trees but I think sees them as a too simplistic solution that will require ongoing care to payback their investment over centuries. He is a big proponent of nuclear fuel, pointing out that while wind and solar energy are fantastic, they don’t provide consistent power. And even though at heart, Gates is a technologist through and through, he doesn’t see battery technology meaningfully moving on, which causes difficulties if you need to store vast amounts of power to even out supply on windless or cloudy days.

Some will look at Gates, flying around in his private jet and wonder if he really practices what he preaches? He acknowledges his own shortcomings, but I think this book shows that he is indeed putting his money where his mouth is.

Getting to net zero will not be easy, as he repeats throughout, but it’s achievable and he’s laid out a plan to get us there.

DNF at 17%.
I found it very slow and uninteresting, maybe it gets better later on but I can't force myself to read any further.
An important topic like this needs to grip you from the start and compel you to read further.

Bill Gates needs no introduction; he is one of the wealthiest people in the world and also one who has been responsible for far more than his share of "greenhouse gasses", the emissions that the scientific community believes is responsible for global warming and climate change. He admits this; but has also done something about it, researching the causes of global warming and how they can be mitigated or even removed. The task is very hard but not impossible, he says, if humanity can find the consensus and political will to address it.

Gates divides warming activities into five categories: making things, powering things (electricity); growing things (animals and food), travel, and keeping warm or cool. He then goes through each of these methodically, describing the problem, progress made on reducing emissions, and outlining a plan to eliminate them. He does not always have a convincing solution, but it is very matter of fact and unless you are already particularly well informed, you will likely learn something from the book; I certainly did.

Of course there are different views on this topic, some strongly held, and there are also many areas of uncertainty; this has never happened before. Gates may therefore be wrong about some things; but he has done his research and has the expertise of scientists to draw upon and I suspect there is little wrong with the main points.

There is little reason to be optimistic about this subject, but the reason I welcome this book is that Gates' influence as something of a celebrity will help promote informed debate; and since getting consensus about the problems we face in this area is one of its most challenging aspects, that makes it very worthwhile, even it it falls short of its apparent goal of setting out a plan to overcome global warming.

There appears to be a formatting error with this Kindle book. Unfortunately no figures are appearing within the text. None of the following are showing; year dates, no percentages and no monetary values. All of these are just showing as blank spaces within the rest of the text. This therefore meant that the book was not able to be read and I have DNF after 5% of the book.

What a clever man. The ideas he has and the way he talks about them sounds so easy. It’s time the world starts to listen and make the changes we need to secure our world’s future. Wonderfully eloquent, visionary and inventive. A must read for anyone who wants to do their bit to aid a greener future.

The more I read on the subject the less I feel hopeful for a positive outcome. Nevertheless this is an essential read. Both informative and accesible.