Lindsay Iversen
A drone view of the world's largest iron ore mine, run by Brazilian mining company Vale in the middle of a vast rainforest preserve, where autonomous mining vehicles are used to increase productivity by operating around the clock in hazardous environments Jorge Silva/REUTERS
Last week, tech titan and clean energy mega donor Bill Gates offered some surprising advice. Writing ahead of this month’s United Nations climate summit, Gates argued that the world was paying altogether too much attention to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate change, he contended, does not pose a threat to human survival. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” he wrote. By focusing too much on near-term emissions reductions, he continued, policymakers are “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” including fighting poverty and improving human health.
The essay generated shockwaves in the climate community. It strains credulity, advocates point out, to claim that the world is doing too much to curb emissions. Global average temperatures hovered more than 1.5°C above the preindustrial average for all of 2024, and even the world’s highest climate ambitions—to say nothing of its actual policies—fall far short of what’s needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Gates knows this, of course; indeed, he spends the middle third of the piece talking about the necessity of emissions cuts across various critical economic sectors. The argument he really seems to be making isn’t so much about trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation as such, but rather about trade-offs across time.
Cutting an additional ton of carbon will make a marginal contribution to improving lives in the future. Vaccinating a child will protect a life now. The choice between spending a dollar on vaccination versus a dollar on cutting emissions, therefore, comes down in large part to how you value a life today relative to one tomorrow.
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