Lauren Smith
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Why has Bill Gates, of all people, decided to break rank on climate change? The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist wrote earlier this week on his Gates Notes website, challenging what he called the “doomsday view of climate change.” While acknowledging that climate change would have “serious consequences” for some, he maintained that “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Rather, for the vast majority of the planet, “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.” Too much focus on climate is “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
Gates’s intervention might have been sparked by the United Nations’ latest apocalyptic proclamation, ahead of COP30 next month. In a statement on Monday, UN Secretary General António Guterres lamented the world’s failure to stop the average global surface temperature from rising by 1.5C—something that he believes will now have “devastating consequences” for humanity. As a result of this ‘overshoot,’ Guterres has warned that the Amazon rainforest could be turned into a savannah. “That is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible,” he said.
Guterres firmly falls into the “doomsday” camp of green acolytes. He believes that climate change (or the ‘climate crisis,’ as he would likely insist on calling it) will end life on Earth as we know it. All of humanity will be engulfed in hellfire. “The era of global warming has ended,” he declared in 2023, “the era of global boiling has arrived.” The year before, he told the world that “we are in the fight of our lives and we are losing.” He thundered: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” He has also, unsurprisingly, hinted that high-polluting nations have an obligation to address “loss and damage” (read: climate reparations) to poorer countries.
Incredibly, Guterres is not even an extreme outlier in the world of climate activism. These people really do believe that the apocalypse is just around the corner and, within a few decades, human life on this planet will be wiped out. This hysterical belief is why increasing numbers of young people are refusing to reproduce, and why children are reporting feeling paralysed by ‘climate anxiety.’
Naturally, Gates’s defection from climate catastrophism has provoked outcry from the true believers. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, accused Gates of “setting up a false dichotomy,” as reported in the New York Times, “that pits efforts to tackle climate change against foreign aid for the poor.” Climatologist Michael Mann similarly called Gates “deeply misguided on climate,” while writer David Callahan suggested that Gates’s comments were the result of “not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.”
What none of them can deny, however, is that Gates is certainly no anti-science crank. Via the Gates Foundation, he has poured billions into projects combatting climate change—including funding the development of stress-resilient strains of crops and helping farmers in Africa and South Asia to adapt to changing weather. In 2015, he founded Breakthrough Energy, an organisation with the aim of creating new technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emission and facilitate the more efficient use of renewable energies. And just four years ago, he penned a book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which proposed various technological innovations that would be needed to feasibly reach Net Zero and reduce human impact on climate.
The issue with Gates, as far as the green activists are concerned, is that he was always far too optimistic. Coming from a computing background, he believes that many of humanity’s problems could be solved by technology. Climate change in particular could be slowed or even reversed by existing or yet-to-be-invented tech. This is why the focus of his climate-related projects is typically innovation (developing new ways to harness clean energy, for example, or backing nuclear research), rather than attempting to socially engineer people into living more ‘sustainable’ lives.
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