The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think technology can fix any problem. And I own big houses and fly in private planes—in fact, I took one to Paris for the climate conference—so who am I to lecture anyone on the environment?

Tip: Whenever you hear “kilowatt,” think “house.” “Gigawatt,” think “city.” A hundred or more gigawatts, think “big country.”

How much power does it take?

Here’s a summary of all five tips: Convert tons of emissions to a percentage of 51 billion. Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm. Kilowatt = house. Gigawatt = mid-size city. Hundreds of gigawatts = big, rich cou

When you cover land with water, if there’s a lot of carbon in the soil, the carbon eventually turns into methane and escapes into the atmosphere—which is why studies show that depending on where it’s built, a dam can actually be a worse emitter than coal for 50 to 100 years before it makes up for all the methane it’s responsible for.*2

For example, we saw that pneumonia was behind a large number of children’s deaths each year. Although a pneumo vaccine already existed, it was so expensive that poor countries weren’t buying it. (They had little incentive to, because they had no idea how many children were dying from the disease.) Once they saw the data, though—and once donors agre

Without that demand signal, the innovations that governments and businesses invest in will stay on the shelf. Or they won’t get developed in the first place, because there’s no economic incentive to make them.

adding up the extent to which emissions will go down by the year 2030 as a result of all the federal and state policies now on the books. All told, it comes to about 300 million tons, or about 5 percent of projected U.S. emissions in 2030. That’s nothing to scoff at, but it’s not going to be enough to get us near zero.

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