Last week, Microsoft founder and liberal philanthropist Bill Gates posted an essay on his website that set climate activists’ hair on fire worldwide.
For decades, Gates has been a huge advocate and financial supporter of aggressive measures to combat climate change. Then suddenly, he announced a fundamental change of heart on one of the cornerstones of climate change activism: he now rejects out of hand the notion that failure to arrest climate change will decimate life on our planet — in essence, the doomsday mentality that calls for draconian measures and boundless expenditures to combat it.
You might think that a scientific topic like climatology would be apolitical. But with trillions of dollars in play, affecting global industries, investments, energy supplies, etc., it is anything but. It’s no surprise that potential beneficiaries of philanthropy (e.g., the Gates Foundation) or U.S. government largesse would be spooked by Gates’s public announcement.
But cutting through all of the hubbub surrounding Gates’s revised posture on climate change, one aspect strikes me as extraordinary. Bill Gates is a very influential public figure, a pioneer of the computer age, a visionary, and a thought leader. When was the last time we’ve seen a highly visible, powerful player change his mind on a controversial topic — and have the courage to admit it? Hats off to Mr. Gates; he did just that.
In fairness, Gates’s revised assessment is not so much a U-turn from his prior views (he wrote a book on the subject in 2021) as much as it is major course correction; his critical adjustment is recognition that actions and expenditures to deal with climate change must be prioritized, and that breaking the bank in hopes of reducing future global temperatures by a degree or two would be far less effective than directing those resources to the protection of those endangered by climate change.
In that sense, Gates’s new assessment is very much in line with the views generally held on the Right. It is often asserted — wrongly — that those opposing extreme actions to control climate change are “climate change deniers.” On the contrary, like everyone else, we understand that the Earth is four billion years old, that its climate changes constantly, cycling from extremely hot to extremely cold, and that today’s inhabitant-friendly climate won’t last forever. And we accept that the actions of Earth’s eight billion inhabitants tend to accelerate global warming.
What we deny (evidently, as Bill Gates now does as well) is that massively expensive efforts to modulate the Earth’s naturally occurring cyclic climate changes are likely to improve that problem appreciably. We believe that, alongside manageable steps to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, we must place much greater focus on adaptation to the inevitable changes.
While there is plenty of room for conservative disagreement, by and large, Bill Gates’s climate essay is logical, technically sound, and altogether sensible. Unlike the many scientific papers on climate change that make pinpoint (usually incorrect) projections of global temperature increases, the Gates essay takes a much broader view of climate change consequences, including its likely disproportionate adverse effects on the world’s poor.
Some critics argue that Gates is not a “real” climate scientist. True enough, but his voice is far more credible than Al “Inconvenient Truth” Gore’s or globe-trotting climate czar John Kerry’s.
The paper builds logically on what Gates describes as the “tough truths” on climate change:
- Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization. He adds the qualifier, appropriately, “in the foreseeable future”
- Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate (Gates provides many good reasons)
- Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change. I can imagine President Trump himself saying the same thing. Although he and Gates would surely have different views of “prosperity” and how to achieve it, in principle, they would agree!
The Gates essay offers a solid framework for common ground on an issue that demands — and should garner (wishful thinking perhaps) bipartisan agreement.
Moreover, Gates’s reversal on climate change raises a broader question for all who hope for some progress toward political common ground: What other epiphanies are out there? Could Bill Gates’s initiative lead the way?
One obvious example is the climate-related matter of revitalizing the atrophied U.S. nuclear power industry, which has languished for decades, primarily — and with undue political influence — on grossly exaggerated safety concerns. On that issue, the need for substantially more nuclear power as a clean and safe component of our energy portfolio is now widely recognized and is attracting both government support and renewed financial investment. Sadly, our nation squandered four decades of development and growth of the once-vibrant industry. We’ll recover, but it is a big hill to climb. We must, and we will.
Meanwhile, Mother Nature doesn’t care what Bill Gates — or the scientific climate wizards, or the attendees at next month’s COP30 conference in Brazil — think about climate change. She doesn’t care about public opinion polls. She’ll do what she wants with our Earth’s climate, largely without regard to our feeble efforts to fix it.
But as Gates points out, it’s up to us to look ahead, anticipate and adapt to our ever-changing climate, and take care of our planet’s fellow inhabitants, as best we can.
