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I never thought I would have the audacity to comment on anything “Bill Gates”! I work for an organization which has enormous influence on the levers of the economy. As a conscientious corporate entity, the leadership is making an effort to educate its workforce on climate change and has offered a free copy of Bill Gates’s newest book “How To Avoid A Climate Disaster”. I snatched on this opportunity and got a physical copy of the book and spent most part of the weekend reading it.
I have had sustainability “bug” in me for a longtime. Over the years, I have written on this topic and shared my views with various audiences. However, reading a well researched book made me connect with my own life experiences in a profound way. Bill Gates highlights five main sources of greenhouse gases. In each of these sectors I have experienced transformative changes.
I grew up in 1970s in a sleepy village about 100 miles east of Bangalore. The carbon footprint of the village of the times was negligible. But for couple of homes, all the dwellings were adobes with thatched roof. The essential building materials were locally sourced. The durability of these homes was not all that great but the carbon emissions in building them was close to zero. Today, if I climb on to my ancestral home’s terrace I see only brick, cement and concrete homes and hardly any thatched roof adobes. The sizes are of these homes are modest but the transformation to life with carbon footprint has already started. Roll forward to 2010 and working in a building which is next to the construction site of San Francisco’s Transbay terminal, I literally saw millions of tons of concrete being poured into a three block stretch. As per Gates, cement, steel and plastic account for 31% of the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted every year.
For generations the main economic activity of my village is agriculture. Four decades back the primary source of irrigation was deep drawn wells.
Most of the farmers were using cattle to draw water. There were few farmers who had the luxury of using crude oil engines. Yes, “crude oil” is what we used to call. It was pretty dirty burning bunker fuel. It is hard to crank up the engine and start ignition. Our village got electrified in the year 1979. I was in 7th grade. The image of the first incandescent bulb glowing when the switch was turned on is etched in my memory. The electrification is also memorable for me personally as I delivered the vote of thanks in the function marked to celebrate the electrification! Today, the deep drawn wells are a thing of the past. The water table has gone down significantly and deep borewells to 1000 feet or more are the only source of water. Multi stage electric pumps are needed to draw water from down under. Bulk of the electricity generated is from Coal. Roll forward to 2020, the state of California has an installed capacity of 275GWh for electricity generation. Conspicuously missing from the energy mix is coal but, natural gas, another greenhouse contributor holds the lions share. Electricity generation accounts for 27% of greenhouse gases.
My grandfather graduated high school in the year 1932. It was an amazing feat for the times. In the 1970s he would tell me of how Green Revolution is working. An acre of land used to traditionally fetch 20 bags of rice. However, as a result of Green Revolution the output increased to 70 bags an acre. This was a remarkable achievement! I often heard the words ammonia, nitrogen, phosphorous on the small radio our family owned. These were the transition years. We had 40 head of low productive cattle and the only thing we got from them was the dung which was used as a natural fertilizer. We had a pit behind our home which was used to collect the dung. I remember the pit being warm all the time with the methane emissions. The book talks about how synthetic fertilizers and methane from cows contribute in a significant way towards greenhouse emissions . Midway between the San Francisco bay area and Los Angeles is Kettleman Road on Interstate 5. You will find 1000s of cattle concentrated in few 100 acres of California’s central valley. The whiff of cow dung you smell stays for sometime as one passes this industrial scale dairy farm. The crop dusters one notices while driving in California’s central valley not only deliver pesticides but deliver fertilizer too. Gates highlights that growing things account for 19% of greenhouse gases.
I remember that there were few bicycles in my village. Learning to bike was a rite of passage for boys of the time. The bus that came to the village twice a day was the only means of transportation to the nearby town. There were no tractors too. Cattle driven carts was the primary mode of transport for all the farmers. Today every other house has a 150/250 cc four stroke motorcycle. There are many tractors and few cars too. Currently, I live not too far from the Tesla factory and I see the transition from gas to electric cars. Having studied Internal Combustion Engines in depth in college I still remember a thing or two about the negative impact of ICEs. Though there is enormous momentum towards electric cars, not all sectors of the transportation can be easily electrified. Again from the book we understand greenhouse gases to the tune of 16% comes from transportation.
As a child our main source of light during nights was a kerosene lamp. My duty was to clean the chimney every evening and also cut the unevenly burnt wick. Summers were hot and the only relief came from my grand father’s palm leaf fan. Today, the temperatures are much higher than 1970s and summers are miserable. We have few air conditioners in the village but almost all homes have an electric fan. I remember one of the recent summers I was in the village it was miserable when we had a blackout and my brother was calling the electric sub-station in the middle of the night to find out of what was going on. Located close to the bay it is always chilly and the neighborhood I currently live in have heaters and do not have air coolers. However, central heating and cooling is integral part of living in these part of the world. As per Gates the cooling and heating accounts for 7% of greenhouse gases.
Every step of the way I can connect to what Bill Gates writes in his book in terms of the increase in greenhouse gases. I have seen first hand the transition happening in all the five major areas Bill Gates talks about. Greenhouse gases by itself wouldn’t mean much. The impact of greenhouse gases have on climate change is what the topic of discussion is. There is no mistaking the fact that the life of the villagers back home has fundamentally changed for the better in the past 4 decades. They have many a modern conveniences. Many have graduated college and work in cities. The inequalities of the past have diminished. However, to put things in perspective the average temperature of the earth during the ice age was just 6 degree Celsius less than the current temperatures. An increase of mere 2 to 3 degree Celsius can have unimaginable devastating effects. Our ecosystem is that sensitive!
Coming to the crux of the problem, the climate has significantly changed in the past 4+ decades back home. We used to have copious rainfall most years. The joys of childhood used to be seeing the irrigation wells brim with water. The days spent swimming in those wells is still vivid in my memory. Today there are no wells with water. Rainfall has become erratic and we have multi-year droughts. The reality is setting in and once revered wells are being closed. A way of life which has sustained for centuries is coming to an end. The soil is becoming drier year over year. Once upon a time the land was used for growing rice and sugarcane. Sugarcane is a water guzzler and it has all but disappeared. Rice is grown an odd year when there is heavy rainfall from a cyclone. It may be once in 5 years at best. Most people depend on Mango orchards. They employ drip irrigation. Still it is not uncommon to see mango trees dying off in summer. The summers are unbearable in the recent years, with the temperatures being in high 40s (Celsius). The odd 50C is also recorded. Life pre 1970s was difficult. However, sustainability was never an issue. The biocapacity of the land was able to support its people. Today, sustainability is a question mark. This I have seen first hand in the space of 4 decades. If the deterioration follows the same trajectory it is hard to fathom the life of the future generations! Life in California too will change dramatically with every passing year if climate change is not addressed. It is not a problem of rich vs poor, first world vs third world. Greenhouse gases and climate change do not honor continental or national boundaries. We are one Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, a Sanskrit phrase which means ‘the world is one family’. The solutions to this grave crisis cannot happen in isolation and it should be from the whole ‘world family’!
The book is a great read! However, let me confess, it is not transformative. Unless one is living in a cave we know the changes happening to climate in many parts of the world. Bill Gates brings clarity to the problem at hand. It is a clarion call for action and without which there will be millions and even billions of lives at risk!
There is one important thing that the book does not address. I guess Gates already under pressure rather unfairly from sections of public opinion did not touch on this topic. To me it is the elephant in the room. It is the population growth! The population cannot grow at this rate and still expect the land to be sustainable. The prior grave projections of population bomb was claimed to have not materialized. From my personal experience I do not think so. The population bomb is still ticking and it is just the the bomb’s fuse got little longer. The advances in farm productivity which delayed the gloom of the “population bomb” came at an enormous cost to the environment. It has unsettled the sustainability along with climate change. I would think we cannot address climate change in isolation without addressing population growth!
To the humanity, there is no bigger crisis than this one! I also believe there is no better advocate than Bill Gates in bringing this important problem to the consciousness of the people!