Editor’s Note: The media has been awash with stories about Bill Gates’ apparent about face on climate change. The New York Times, CBS, CNN, the Associated Press, and dozens of other outlets discussed a lengthy blog post Gates wrote in which he said climate change will not destroy civilization or lead to the extinction of humanity, and that there are more direct and pressing issues like alleviating poverty. The Heartland Institute has made this same point for three decades.
Most of the media are appalled with Gates’ public pivot on the existential danger climate change poses. As explored in the guest post below, Gates still believes climate change is occurring, caused by humans, and is dangerous. But he now also seemingly admits what readers of Climate Realism have long known: it is not a crisis, it won’t destroy society, and other problems facing humanity are much more serious, and solvable, with rapid economic growth and innovation. Jo Nova explains where Gates’ views have shifted and where they haven’t, which also explains what he now gets right and still gets wrong.
Guest post by Jo Nova
Yet another climate change heavyweight abandons ship
It’s the beginning of the end of the renewables fantasy, but there will be no apology — no admission they were wrong, or that millions of people have suffered because of climate sorcery.
Watch as the billionaire who lectured us from private jets, pivots into word salad. Now he says we still have to solve climate change (whatever that means), but the doomsday view is wrong, and that awful carbon pollution “will not be the end of civilization.” He’s suddenly turned into a kind of Bjorn Lomborg. Forget mitigation, say hello to adaptation.
On the cusp of COP30 in Brazil, Bill Gates has launched a life raft for his reputation — a 17 page memo called Three tough truths about climate.
Bill Gates can see what’s coming (a reckoning for the renewables debacle), and he is repositioning himself so he doesn’t go down with the ship. Indeed, he’s almost writing an escape plan for the whole Blob. In a nutshell, he’s admitting between the lines that wind and solar power are unaffordable, and since climate change won’t actually be that catastrophic, everyone should calm down while we invent technologies, and in the mean time, get back to stopping people from starving. Wouldn’t you know, he says “Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.” (That’s Truth #3 ).
What he’s not saying is that he and his friends wasted untold billions (maybe trillions) of dollars of our money installing wind and solar panels that aren’t very good. He is not connecting those dots.
We still need that breakthrough mythical technology to save us from the climate monster.
Three tough truths about climate
By Bill Gates
…though climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.
Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.
He’s still painting himself as a savior, of course:
If given a choice between eradicating malaria and a tenth of a degree increase in warming, Gates told reporters, “I’ll let the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria. People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.” –– AP News
Now, at long last, he says the first priority should be to prevent suffering in the here and now. This is very noble, but where were you Bill for the past 10 years when people in Africa needed coal plants — you were telling them to invest in wind and solar.
Compare this to Bill Gates in 2021:
“The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.”
–Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Bill Gates set up Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) “the future of energy” in 2015 and often put in a star performance at the UN COP Junkets.
Only a few short years ago, climate change was going to be awful in our lifetimes according to Bill:
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- Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.”
- “In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.”
Between the lines, Gates is admitting the wind and solar experiments were a waste of money.
The tough truth he dances around is that we don’t have a realistic way to get to Net Zero yet, we still need those breakthroughs. This is a polite way of saying that we wasted lots of money, and made life tougher for poor people.
Sometimes the world acts as if any effort to fight climate change is as worthwhile as any other. As a result, less-effective projects are diverting money and attention from efforts that will have more impact on the human condition: namely, making it affordable to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions and reducing extreme poverty with improvements in agriculture and health.
What he doesn’t say is that the UN doesn’t care less about the poor, it’s just a vehicle for dictators and corporations to profit or sabotage competitors. That’s why they are jumping up and down over the best managed reef in the world, and not spending more time talking about the murder of Christians in Nigeria.
The big shift away from climate dogma
This is the Big-pivot away from Climate Doom, the obsession with a tiny 0.14°C of warming (per decade) and wind and solar subsidy harvesting:
Truth #1: Climate Change is a serious problem but it won’t be the end of civilization.
Truth #2: Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate.
Truth #3: Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.
Expect The Blob to spend less time talking about temperatures and 1.5 degrees of warming, and more time talking about quality of life suddenly.
The New York Times makes out that it is a bit controversial, but really, we’ll solve climate change faster if we stop harping on about the prophesies of doom. Optimism, they now say, is the most effective way to motivate people.
Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’
By David Gelles, The New York Times
In a memo, the Microsoft co-founder warned against a “doomsday outlook” and appears to have shifted some of his views about climate change.
Politics aside, Mr. Callahan said Mr. Gates’s change in messaging was in line with studies that have shown that alarmist rhetoric about climate change is not the most effective way to motivate people to take action. “The result of a lot of research is that it’s much better to lean into the optimism than the pessimism,” Mr. Callahan said.
This is the man who wrote How to Avoid a Climate Disaster only four years ago. In it “Gates explains why the world must completely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions (“getting to zero”), rather than simply reducing them.” — Wikipedia
Feel the Quickening: the green retreat is accelerating
Originally posted at the JoNova blog, here. Reposted with permission.
