Bill Gates: My green manifesto

In the course of writing How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, I developed a way to answer that question. I call it Green Premiums — the differences in cost between a fossil-fuel-based way of doing something and the clean, non-emitting way of doing the same thing.

Planting trees, for instance. It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle.