MORE ENERGY
At some point today, you’ll probably do one
or all of these things: Flip a switch for light. Take fresh food from a
refrigerator. Turn a dial to make your home warmer or cooler. Press a
button on your laptop to go online.
You probably won’t think twice about any of these actions, but you
will actually be doing something extraordinary. You will be using a
superpower—your access to energy.
Does that sound ridiculous?
Just imagine, for a minute, life without energy.
You don’t have a way to run a laptop, mobile phone, TV, or video
games. You don’t have lights, heat, air conditioning, or even the
Internet to read this letter.
About 1.3 billion people—18 percent of the world’s population—don’t
need to imagine. That’s what life is like for them every day.
You can see this fact for yourself in this photograph of Africa at night taken from space.
Africa has made extraordinary progress in recent decades. It is one
of the fastest-growing regions of the world with modern cities, hundreds
of millions of mobile phone users, growing Internet access, and a
vibrant middle class.
But as you can see from the areas without lights, that prosperity has
not reached everyone. In fact, of the nearly one billion people in
sub-Saharan Africa, 7 out of every 10 of them live in the dark, without
electricity. The majority of them live in rural areas. You would see the
same problem in Asia. In India alone, more than 300 million people
don’t have electricity.
If you could zoom into one of those dark areas in that photograph,
you might see a scene like this one. This is a student doing her
homework by candlelight.
I’m always a little stunned when I see photographs like this.
It’s been well over a century since Thomas Edison demonstrated how an
incandescent light bulb could turn night into day. (I’m lucky enough to
own one of his sketches of how he planned to improve his light bulb.
It’s dated 1885.) And yet, there are parts of the world where people are
still waiting to enjoy the benefits of his invention.
If I could have just one wish to help the poorest people, it would be
to find a cheap, clean source of energy to power our world.
You might be wondering, “Aren’t people just trying to stay healthy
and find enough to eat? Isn’t that important too?” Yes, of course it is,
and our foundation is working hard to help them. But energy makes all
those things easier. It means you can run hospitals, light up schools,
and use tractors to grow more food.
Think about the history classes you’re taking. If I had to sum up
history in one sentence it would be: “Life gets better—not for everyone
all the time, but for most people most of the time.” And the reason is
energy. For thousands of years, people burned wood for fuel. Their lives
were, by and large, short and hard. But when we started using coal in
the 1800s, life started getting better a lot faster. Pretty soon we had
lights, refrigerators, skyscrapers, elevators, air conditioning, cars,
planes, and all the other things that make up modern life, from
lifesaving medicines and moon landings to fertilizer and Matt Damon
movies. (
The Martian was my favorite movie last year.)
Without access to energy, the poor are stuck in the dark, denied all of these benefits and opportunities that come with power.
So if we really want to help the world’s poorest families, we need to
find a way to get them cheap, clean energy. Cheap because everyone must
be able to afford it. Clean because it must not emit any carbon
dioxide—which is driving climate change.
I’m sure you have read about climate change and maybe
studied it in school. You might be worried about how it will affect
you. The truth is, the people who will be hit the hardest are the
world’s poorest. Millions of the poorest families work as farmers.
Changes in weather often mean that their crops won’t grow because of too
little rain or too much rain. That sinks them deeper into poverty.
That’s particularly unfair because they’re the least responsible for
emitting CO2, which is causing the problem in the first place.
Scientists say that to avoid these dramatic long-term changes to the
climate, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 percent
by 2050, and eliminate them entirely by the end of the century.
When I first heard this I was surprised.
Can’t we just aim to cut carbon emissions in half? I asked many scientists. But they all agreed that wouldn’t be enough. The problem is that CO
2 lingers
in the atmosphere for decades. Even if we halted carbon emissions
tomorrow, the temperature would still rise because of the carbon that’s
already been released. No, we need to get all the way down to zero.
That’s a huge challenge. In 2015, the world emitted
36 billion tons
of carbon dioxide to produce energy. This is a mind-boggling number.
(It’s worth remembering, because it will come in handy. For example,
someone may tell you they know how to remove 100 million tons of carbon
per year. That sounds like a lot, but if you do the math—100 million
divided by 36 billion—you’ll see that they’re talking about 0.3 percent
of the problem. Every reduction in emissions helps, but we still have to
work on the other 99.7 percent.)
How can we ever reduce a number like 36 billion tons to zero?
Whenever I’m confronted with a big problem I turn to my favorite
subject: math. It’s one subject that always came naturally to me, even
in middle school when my grades weren’t that great. Math cuts out the
noise and helps me distill a problem down to its basic elements.
Climate change is an issue that has plenty of noise surrounding it.
There are those who deny it is a problem at all. Others exaggerate the
immediate risks.
What I needed was an equation that would help me understand how we might get our CO
2 down to zero.
Here’s what I came up with:
That might look complicated. It’s not.
On the right side you have the total amount of carbon dioxide
(CO2) we
put in the atmosphere. This is what we need to get to zero. It’s based
on the four factors on the left side of the equation: the world’s
population
(P) multiplied by the services
(S) used by each person; the energy
(E) needed to provide each of those services; and finally, the carbon dioxide
(C) produced by that energy.
As you learned in math class, any number multiplied by zero will equal zero. So if we want to get to zero CO
2, then we need to get at least one of the four factors on the left to zero.
Let’s go through them, one by one, and see what we get.
The world’s population (P) is currently 7 billion and expected to increase to 9 billion by 2050. No chance it’ll be zero.
Next, services. This is everything: food, clothing, heat, houses,
cars, TV, toothbrushes, Elmo dolls, Taylor Swift albums, etc. This is
the number that I was saying earlier needs to go up in poor countries,
so people can have lights, refrigerators, and so on. So
(S) can’t be zero, either.
Let’s take a look at
(E). That’s the energy needed
per service. There’s some good news here. Fuel-efficient cars, LED light
bulbs, and other inventions are making it possible to use energy more
efficiently.
Many people, and you may be one of them, are also changing their
lifestyles to conserve energy. They’re biking and carpooling to save
gas, turning down the heat a couple degrees, adding insulation to their
homes. All of these efforts help cut down on energy use.
Unfortunately, they don’t get us to zero. In fact, most scientists
agree that by 2050 we’ll be using 50 percent more energy than we do
today.
So none of the first three—population, services, and energy—are getting close to zero. That leaves the final factor
(C), the amount of carbon emitted per each unit of energy.
The majority of the world’s energy, other than hydro and nuclear, is
produced by fossil fuels like coal that emit an overwhelming amount of
CO
2. But there’s some good news here, too. New green
technologies are allowing the world to produce more carbon-free energy
from solar and wind power. Maybe you live near a wind farm or have seen
solar panels near your school.
It’s great that these are getting cheaper and more people are using
them. We should use more of them where it makes sense, like in places
where it’s especially sunny or windy. And by installing special new
power lines we could make even more use of solar and wind power.
But to stop climate change and make energy affordable for everyone, we’re also going to need some new inventions.
Why? Solar and wind power are reliable energy sources so long as the
sun is shining and the wind is blowing. But people still need dependable
energy on cloudy days, at nighttime, and when the air is still. That
means power companies often back up these renewable sources with fossil
fuels like coal or natural gas, which emit greenhouse gases.
It would help, of course, if we had a great system for storing solar
and wind power. But right now, the best storage option is rechargeable
batteries, and they are expensive. Lithium-ion batteries like the one
inside your laptop are still the gold standard. If you wanted to use one
to store enough electricity to run everything in your house for a week,
you would need a huge battery—and it would triple your electric bill.
So we need more powerful, more economical solutions.
In short, we need an energy miracle.
When I say “miracle,” I don’t mean something that’s impossible. I’ve
seen miracles happen before. The personal computer. The Internet. The
polio vaccine. None of them happened by chance. They are the result of
research and development and the human capacity to innovate.
In this case, however, time is not on our side. Every day we are releasing more and more CO
2 into
our atmosphere and making our climate change problem even worse. We
need a massive amount of research into thousands of new ideas—even ones
that might sound a little crazy—if we want to get to zero emissions by
the end of this century.
New ways to make solar and wind power available to everyone around
the clock could be one solution. Some of the crazier inventions I’m
excited about are a possible way to use solar energy to produce fuel,
much like plants use sunlight to make food for themselves, and batteries
the size of swimming pools with huge storage capacity.
Many of these ideas won’t work, but that’s okay. Each dead end will
teach us something useful and keep us moving forward. As Thomas Edison
famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve successfully found
10,000 ways that will not work.”
But to find thousands of ways that won’t work, you first need to try
thousands of different ideas. That’s not happening nearly enough.
Governments have a big role to play in sparking new
advances, as they have for other scientific research. U.S. government
funding was behind breakthrough cancer treatments and the moon landing.
If you’re reading this online, you have the government to thank for that
too. Research paid for by the U.S. government helped create the
Internet.
But energy research and the transition to new energy sources takes a
long time. It took four decades for oil to go from 5 percent of the
world’s energy supply to 25 percent. Today, renewable energy sources
like wind and solar account for less than 5 percent of the world’s
energy.
So we need to get started now. I recently helped launch an
effort by more than two dozen private citizens that will complement government research being done by
several countries. It’s all aimed at delivering energy miracles.
You may be wondering what you can do to help.
First, it’s important for everyone to get educated about this energy
challenge. Many young people are already actively involved in climate
and energy issues and I’m sure they could use more help. Your generation
is one of the most globally minded in history, adept at looking at our
world’s problems beyond national borders. This will be a valuable asset
as we work on global solutions in the decades ahead.
Second, if you’re someone with some crazy-sounding ideas to solve our
energy challenge, the world needs you. Study extra hard in your math
and sciences. You might just have the answer.
The challenge we face is big, perhaps bigger than many people
imagine. But so is the opportunity. If the world can find a source of
cheap, clean energy, it will do more than halt climate change. It will
transform the lives of millions of the poorest families.
I'm so optimistic about the world’s ability to make a miracle happen
that I’m willing to make a prediction. Within the next 15 years—and
especially if young people get involved—I expect the world will discover
a clean energy breakthrough that will save our planet and power our
world.
I like to think about what an energy miracle like that would mean in a
slum I once visited in Nigeria. It was home to tens of thousands of
people but there was no electricity. As night fell, no lights flickered
on. The only glow came from open fires lit in metal barrels, where
people gathered for the evening. There was no other light for kids to
study by, no easy way to run a business or power local clinics and
hospitals. It was sad to think about all of the potential in this
community that was going untapped.
A cheap, clean source of energy would change everything.
Imagine that.
2016 Annual Letter
More Time
by Melinda
I’m sure you’ve seen images like this one. I think they’re
hilarious. And they remind me of how much has changed since I was a girl
in Dallas in the 1970s, back when we watched
Wonder Woman instead of
Supergirl.
My brothers and sister and I had a lot of friends whose mothers, as we used to say, stayed home
instead of working (though now I know that staying home
is working—and working very hard, even though you don’t get paid for it).
The moms in our neighborhood seemed to spend most of their time in
the kitchen. I’m interested in design, so I know now that their kitchens
were “triangle kitchens,” with the fridge, sink, and stove laid out to
make whipping up an omelet as quick and easy as possible. Kitchen design
was a fad throughout the 20th century. In one demonstration, a woman
baked two identical strawberry shortcakes, one in a regular kitchen and
the other in a new and improved version. The process required 281
footsteps the first time around but only 41 the second. The kitchen
itself made cake-baking 85 percent more efficient!
What the triangle kitchen didn’t do was challenge the idea that women
were supposed to spend most of their lives in the kitchen, retracing
their steps in a seemingly endless triangle.
But this is 2016, not the 1970s or the 1950s. If you’re an American, three out of four moms at your school have a job.
Your father probably does at least some cooking. There’s a 35 percent chance you live with one parent (which means he or she has to do all the paid work
and
all the unpaid work). Maybe you split your time between two houses and
four parents, or maybe both your parents are moms (or dads). The world
has changed a lot.
I know from listening to my kids and their friends—and from looking
at polling data about how teenagers see the future—that most girls don’t
think they will be stuck with the same rules that kept their
grandmothers in the home. And most boys agree with them.
I’m sorry to say this, but if you think that, you’re wrong. Unless
things change, girls today will spend hundreds of thousands more hours
than boys doing unpaid work simply because society assumes it’s their
responsibility.
Unpaid work is what it says it is: It’s work, not play, and you don’t
get any money for doing it. But every society needs it to function. You
can think of unpaid work as falling into three main categories:
cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly. Who packs
your lunch? Who fishes the sweaty socks out of your gym bag? Who hassles
the nursing home to make sure your grandparents are getting what they
need?
Now, this work has to be done by
somebody. But it’s overwhelmingly women who are expected to do it, for free, whether they want to or not.
This holds true in every single country in the world. Globally, women
spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work. Men spend less than
half that much time. But the fact is that the burden of unpaid work
falls heaviest on women in poor countries, where the hours are longer
and the gap between women and men is wider. In India, to take one
example, women spend about 6 hours, and men spend less than 1 hour.
Most girls in poor countries don’t have a triangle kitchen. Instead,
they move in long, straight lines, back and forth, because they have to
walk miles to fetch water and chop wood. The geometry of their footsteps
is different, but it’s still based on the assumption that keeping the
household running is their responsibility. The massive number of hours
these girls spend on these tasks distorts their entire lives. It’s
almost impossible for those of us lucky enough to live in rich countries
to understand how unpaid work dominates the lives of hundreds of
millions of women and girls.
When I visited Tanzania a couple of years ago, I spent a few days
with Anna and Sanare and their six kids. Anna’s day started at 5 a.m.
with lighting a fire to cook breakfast. After we cleaned up, we fetched
water. Once Anna’s bucket was full it weighed 40 pounds. (The average
distance women walk to get clean water in rural Africa and Asia is two
miles each way. Imagine doing that with almost half your body weight on
your head!) When we got back to the house I was exhausted, even though
I’d carried less than Anna. But we couldn’t rest, because it was time to
build the fire again for lunch. After that we went into the forest to
chop wood for the next day’s fires, being careful not to get stung by
scorpions. Then we went for more water, then milked the goats, then
dinner. We were up past 10 at night, washing dishes in the moonlight.
How many thousands of steps did I take that day? However many it was,
Anna had to multiply that number by every day of her life.
Why am I counting the footsteps of women around the world, like a human Fitbit?
Because you are imagining your future right now, and I want
your feet to lead you wherever you’re going to find the most meaning and
satisfaction.
It's not just about fairness; assigning most unpaid work to women harms everyone: men, women, boys, and girls.
The reason? Economists call it opportunity cost: the other things
women could be doing if they didn’t spend so much time on mundane tasks.
What amazing goals would you accomplish with an extra hour every day?
Or, in the case of girls in many poor countries, an extra five or more?
There are lots of ways to answer this question, but it’s obvious that
many women would spend more time doing paid work, starting businesses,
or otherwise contributing to the economic well-being of societies around
the world. The fact that they can’t holds their families and
communities back.
Girls in poorer countries might say
they’d use extra time to do their homework. Housework comes first, so
girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it’s
increasingly girls, not boys, who don’t know how to read.
Mothers might say they’d go to the doctor. In poor countries, moms
are usually responsible for their kids’ health. But breastfeeding and
traveling to the clinic take time, and research shows that health care
is one of the first tradeoffs women make when they're too busy.
Some women might simply read a book or take a walk or visit a friend, and I totally support that, too.
Everybody’s better off when more of us are fulfilled in our daily lives.
I’m writing this because I'm optimistic. Though no country has gotten
the balance perfect yet, many have narrowed the unpaid labor gap by
several hours a day. America and Europe have come a long way. The
Scandinavian countries have gone even further.
The world is making progress by doing three things economists call
Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute:
Recognize that unpaid work is still work. Reduce the amount of time and
energy it takes. And Redistribute it more evenly between women and men.
Let’s start with Reducing, because that’s the most straightforward.
Rich countries have done a great job of Reducing the time it takes to do
most household tasks. That’s what the triangle kitchen was all about.
Americans don’t fetch water because faucets fetch it for us, instantly.
We don’t spend all day on a load of laundry because the washing machine
does it in a half-hour. Cooking goes much faster when you start with a
gas stove instead of an ax and a tree.
In poorer countries, though, most women still haul water, clean clothes by hand, and cook over an open flame.
The solution is innovation, and you can help. Some
of you will become engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and software
developers. I invite you to take on the challenge of serving the poor
with cheap, clean energy, better roads, and running water. Or maybe you
can invent ingenious labor-saving technologies. Can you imagine a
machine that washes clothes using no electricity and very little water?
Perhaps you can improve on the mortar and pestle, the 40,000-year-old
technology I see women using to grind grain into food every time I
travel in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia.
But Reducing by itself isn’t enough, because it’s not just that
housework takes a long time; it’s also that every culture expects women
to do it. If tasks start taking less time, societies can (and do) simply
assign women more tasks to fill up the time they’re deemed to have
available. No matter how efficient we make housework, we won’t actually
free up women’s time until we Recognize that it’s just as valuable as
men’s.
This isn’t a global plot by men to oppress women. It’s more subtle
than that. The division of work depends on cultural norms, and we call
them norms because they seem normal—so normal that many of us don’t
notice the assumptions we’re making. But your generation can notice
them—and keep pointing them out until the world pays attention.
Think about your household chores. If you’re an American girl, you
probably do 2 hours of chores a week more than boys. If you’re a boy,
you’re 15 percent more likely to be paid for doing your chores. And what
percent of girls’ chores are inside, and what percent of boys’ are
outside? Why is that?
In TV commercials you see, how often are men doing laundry, cooking, or running after kids? (The answer:
2 percent of the time.) How many of the women are advertising kitchen or cleaning products? (More than half.)
Once we see these norms, we can replace them with something better.
What do those better norms look like? How are you going to Redistribute the work it takes to live?
It’s not an easy question.
For example, nobody supports a 50/50 split of all types of work at
all times. Part of belonging to a family is cooperating, and sometimes
one person is going to change a few more diapers because another is
focused on a different important task.
Furthermore, not all unpaid work is created equal. Folding laundry
isn’t rewarding, unless you’re one of those obsessively neat people.
(I’m not.) But caring for a child or a sick relative is deeply
meaningful, and many people, Bill and me included, want to take time to
concentrate on that part of life. Sharing the burdens of unpaid work
also means sharing the joys.
In fact, studies show that when fathers are able to take time off
from paid work when their children are born, they spend more time with
their kids and doing other kinds of housework for years to come. As a
result, they form a stronger bond with their partners and children.
That’s one reason why I think access to paid family and medical leave is
so important for families.
In the end, the goal is to change what we think of as normal—and not
thinking it’s funny or weird when a man puts on an apron, picks up his
kids from school, or leaves a cute note in his son’s lunchbox.
When it comes to Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute, the story of
Anna and Sanare, the couple I stayed with in Tanzania, is pretty
inspiring. When they got married, Anna moved from a lush part of the
country to live in Sanare’s drought-ridden area. She had a hard time
adjusting to the extra work that meant. Finally, Sanare came home one
day to see Anna sitting on the steps ready to leave, her bags packed and
their first child, Robert, in her arms. Sanare, heartbroken, asked how
he could persuade her to stay. “Fetch water,” she said, “so I can nurse
our son.” And so, Recognizing the imbalance, he did. He started walking
the miles to the well every day. At first the other village men made fun
of him and even accused Anna of witchcraft. But when he said, “My son
will be healthier because I’m doing this,” they started Redistributing
the work with him. After a while, when they got sick of working so hard,
they decided to build water tanks to collect rainwater near the
village. Now that they’ve Reduced, no matter who goes to get water, Anna
or Sanare, it’s a lot closer—and they both spend more time with Robert
and their other kids.
The world can learn a lot from this couple.
I can’t wait to see where your steps will lead you. Not necessarily
in triangles. Not in straight lines, unless that’s what you want. But in
any direction you choose.
