How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
BILL GATES
(ALLEN LANE, 272 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064
What if We Stopped Pretending?
JONATHAN FRANZEN
(4th ESTATE, 80 PP, £7.99)
Tablet bookshop price £7.19 • tel 020 7799 4064
Bill Gates wants us to remember a number: 51 – or rather, 51 billion. That’s how many tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gases you and I and the rest of the world add to the atmosphere each year.
The other figure he wants us to remember is zero. That’s the number of tons of greenhouse gases we should be adding to the atmosphere by 2050 if we don’t want to fry the planet, or if, at the very least, we want to slow a deadly rise in temperatures that is already causing all sorts of horrors, from desertification to rising sea levels to mass extinctions and mass migrations of climate refugees.
