How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Bill Gates was born in 1955 and grew up in Seattle, Washington. As a child, he attended the Lakeside School, a private prep school. There, he joined the computer club, which taught programming and paid for access to a mainframe computer for students to practice on. What he learned in the club enabled him to get part-time work at two small computer companies. Then he and a friend learned that the mainframe at the University of Washington sat idle between three and six o’ clock in the morning even though the computer center was open. The campus was close enough to walk to, and they snuck out of their houses at night to go use that mainframe. He became obsessed with computers.

Gates attended Harvard University for two years before dropping out to start the computer company Microsoft with childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975. Allen left the company in 1983, and Gates ran it until 2000, when Steve Ballmer became CEO. Gates continued to work on software until 2008, when he began devoting all his time to philanthropic work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he and his former wife founded in 2000. The foundation focused on health care, education, and development worldwide. From his work there, he learned about and became interested in the issue of climate change.

Through his philanthropic endeavors, Gates traveled to poor countries and saw the importance of something that developed nations took for granted: electricity. Without it, people had limited opportunities, which negatively affected education, health care, and economic growth. The more he learned about electricity, the more he saw the challenges posed by climate change. In 2015, François Hollande, the president of France at that time, asked Gates to help garner support from fellow investors to commit to funding ideas from the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. From then on, Gates has been deeply involved in efforts to fight climate change.

Gates admits in the Introduction that given his background he may come across as not having the knowledge to author a book on climate change and propose solutions to it. His response is that he’s met with many experts over the years and has studied the problem for a long time. He actively funds research into clean energy, so he gains knowledge while vetting companies and meeting the people who do such work. In addition to his role at the Paris Climate Change Conference, he helped lead the Global Commission on Adaptation, which world leaders formed in The Hague to study and recommend methods of adapting to the effects of climate change.