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Bill Gates' book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" would be a great place to start.

Mitigation costs are expenses to prevent climate change.

Adaptation costs are expenses incurred because of climate change. Some of them are relatively easy to calculate like $200B to build a sea wall for New York City. Some of them are more handwavy -- what are the costs of mass migration? Most of these costs are incurred by farmers.

Bill Gates covers this extensively in his recent excellent book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Even if all the rich world countries went to emissions zero, that wouldn’t be enough, because the developing world needs to continue to develop. This is a good thing but it is a problem of progress, and underscores how complicated the solution is

I really liked Bill Gates new Book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster[1].
I liked that it shows what we have to do to get to 0 greenhouse gas emissions. What's the current state of technology and what's still left to do to get there.

I often find suggestions like "Meatless Monday" or "Only fly when really necessary" etc, while probably good, not really useful advice.
In Gates book he talks about that transportation and "building things" is good and we should not stop it, but instead find a way to make it emission free.

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-new-climate-book-is-fin...

I just finished reading the book released by Bill Gates titled "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster." In it, he described how tackling this problem will take an extremely difficult combination of technologic advancement, government policy, and market alignment. We need to do everything we can to be sure that choosing the green energy option isn't just the morally correct choice, but is also the rational choice for everyone to make.

I recommend the book BTW. Though it tries its best to be optimistic, I finished it thinking "well shit, I don't know if this is possible." He is right in saying that it won't be easy.

How to avoid a climate disaster - Bill Gates. I found it extremely comprehensible and well structured, other than I learned a lot. It's the beginning of a new rabbit hole.

That will never work - Marc Randolph. I'm also a big fan of his new podcast, same title.

The dispatcher - John Scalzi. Short, kind of weird, but a nice distraction from tech & startups

(all available on Audible)

Interesting. I'm surprised I didn't hear that solution mentioned in Bill Gates "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" book.

He basically made the same battery weight argument and was pushing for alternative biofuels for planes, if I remember correctly. And that was just published earlier this year, and seemed pretty comprehensive about discussing all possible solutions, at least as far as I could tell.

Maybe just because it's (presumably) nowhere near the point where it could be feasible for commercial passenger planes?

> You're assuming "batteries" which is just wrong. [...] you want kinetic storage, or possibly power to gas.

...neither of which are cheaper than batteries or we'd be doing that

Yes, we are doing pumped hydro, but only in a few convenient locations. I recently watched a video about Ireland's new pumped storage facility[1], it mentions some pretty tight constraints for what we currently consider economical (e.g. hill slope). Bill Gates' new book[2] doesn't go into as much detail but also doesn't sound like we got this figured out any better than batteries, basically saying we need breakthroughs or this is going to simply be a prohibitively expensive undertaking for non-rich countries. Specifically about hydrogen (the "to gas" option that has the most buzz at least) [2] says that there are high losses in conversion (without saying how much) as well as hydrogen leaking from metal tanks and electrolyzers being very expensive. There's hope for breakthroughs but.. they do have to happen in order for it to be better (cheaper) than today's batteries.

At a bare minimum, it's not obvious that what GP wrote is "just wrong". This isn't something we have a definite answer to.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI

[2] "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need" ISBN 978-0-593-21577-7

I recently read Gates’ book How To Avoid a Climate Disaster which left me with the impression that the overriding factor in building costs is the energy required (and CO2 produced) for construction, heating, and cooling.

Unfortunately I didn’t see any mention of energy or carbon in this post.

Seems like the biggest breakthrough would be a pre-construction estimate of energy costs over, say, 30 years. Similar to the Energy Star sticker on appliances sold in the US which tell you the cost to run a given appliance with typical usage compared to the range for other models.

This would allow you justify spending more upfront for better insulation, HVAC, air sealing, etc. and recoup that over time. At scale this would allow our civilization to be more energy efficient and reduce the need to build more power plants.

This suggestion stood out:
”...move to resistance heating and thermoelectric cooling“

Unless I’m missing something, this would be a step backward. Modern heat pumps are 3-4x more efficient than resistance heating, since they aren’t creating heat but moving it from one place to another. For cooling, if the author is referring to Peltier type thermoelectric cooling, the same applies: heat pumps are many times more efficient.

The building revolution we need is one that cheaply produces extremely energy-efficient homes, IMO.

I recently listened to the audiobook of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. It was a fine tour of the landscape of solutions. My main takeaway is that we're going to need to do a wide variety of things in a wide variety of sectors. He gets into stuff like concrete, which is very important in growth but also big on emissions.

With respect to reforestation: Gates says it would help, but possibly not as much as you'd think and he's a bigger proponent of stopping the deforestation.

Yishan Wong thinks that growing forests (as opposed to just planting trees) is an important tool for carbon sequestration: https://www.terraformation.com/about

"[...] Need somewhere around 50 acres' worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the typical emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime. Multiply that by the population of the U.S. and you get 25 million square miles, roughly half the landmass of the world." -- How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates