Why Bill Gates’ Pivot Away from Climate Change Is So Dangerous (and Incoherent)

My apologies for not having published an article earlier this week — I’ve been moving, and so have had much less time than usual to write! :-)

Three days ago, Bill Gates — the 19th richest person in the world — published a lengthy article on his website Gates Notes in which he bemoans and rejects what he calls the “doomsday view of climate change.” This view supposedly claims that

in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us — just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

Gates proceeds to argue that

1. “Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,”

2. “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization,” and

3. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

This announcement coincides with an end to “the Bill Gates era of climate giving,” to quote Heatmap News. Indeed, Gates’ Breakthrough Energy organization — which has no connection to the ignominious Breakthrough Institute — “is winding down its policy and advocacy office” and “laying off dozens of employees throughout Europe and the US.” The shift is a big deal because it “will very likely end the nonprofit’s grant writing efforts,” which is “a major blow to climate nonprofits, and further evidence that, for all their feel-good bluster, the mega-rich never forget their bottom line.”

I read Gates’ article, and found it both incoherent and dangerous. For example, he advocates “for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world,” but mitigating climate change is obviously integral and paramount to achieving this. Similarly, he suggests that there needs to be more philanthropic focus on foreign aid (especially given that DOGE dismantled USAID, which will likely result in over 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030), but climate change is a form of foreign aid. And he reassures us that climate change won’t “lead to humanity’s demise,” but neither will global poverty! (So, like, what’s the point of saying that?)

Gates oscillates between talking about “humanity’s demise” and “the end of civilization.” But these are not the same thing! I have never once heard a legitimate climatologist say that climate change will bring about our extinction — to the contrary, there’s a consensus that it won’t. (Perhaps there are positive feedback loops, e.g., involving methane clathrates, that could trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, but this is thought to be very improbable.)

Nonetheless, many scientists vigorously contend that climate change could precipitate the destruction of our modern, global civilization. One study from 2023 estimates that at least 1 billion people will die prematurely from climate change within a century. As one of the coauthors, Joshua Pearce, says:

Such mass death is clearly unacceptable. It’s pretty scary really, especially for our children … When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom. We’ve done that here too and it still doesn’t look good.

A more recent estimate from the University of Exeter calculates (in Appendix 1 of their report) that if we reach 2-3 degrees C of warming by 2050, we should expect between 2 and 4 billion (with a “b”) premature deaths. Many — but not all — of these climate change victims will live in the Global South, of course.

More to the point, I find it difficult to see how civilization as a whole could survive in its current form if the human population were to rapidly decline by “only” just 1 billion people — let alone 2-4 billion in the coming decades.

When I asked one of the coauthors of the Exeter study, Timothy Lenton, about the figure, he said: “I would not have described them as (premature) deaths but I would say 2 billion people will be exposed to risk of mortality from unprecedented heat at 2.7C based on my paper [“Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming”] … and that paper misses a load of other sources of potentially fatal risk.”

Gates also ignores the possibility of tipping points in Earth systems, which Gates has previously discussed, as well as the rapidly worsening catastrophe of global biodiversity loss. Tipping points have been described as “the achilles heels of the planet,” as crossing such thresholds “could bring about the sudden, catastrophic collapse of vital ecosystems. The consequences will be felt far and wide.” James Hansen, one of the most famous climate scientists, says that “we are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.” A study coauthored by a large team of scientists reports that

planetary-scale critical transitions have occurred previously in the biosphere, albeit rarely, and that humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience. …

Comparison of the present extent of planetary change with that characterizing past global-scale state shifts, and the enormous global forcings we continue to exert, suggests that another global-scale state shift is highly plausible within decades to centuries, if it has not already been initiated.

As a result, the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.

Yet another group introduced the influential “planetary boundaries” framework in 2009, where such boundaries demarcate a “safe operating space for humanity.” Transgressing any of these boundaries could leave us vulnerable to “abrupt global environmental change” that would have “disastrous consequences for humanity.” They argue that, of the 9 boundaries identified since 2023, we have already crossed 7 of these.

From here.

As for biodiversity loss, consider the 2022 Living Planet Report, which found that

monitored populations of vertebrates (mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish) have seen a devastating 69% drop on average since 1970, according to World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2022. Populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have fared worst, with an average decline of 94%. Global freshwater species have also been disproportionately impacted, declining 83% on average.

This is an absolute emergency. The civilization we’ve built almost certainly cannot exist without a functioning, intact biosphere, and our actions are pushing local and global ecosystems, along with entire Earth systems such as the AMOC and the Amazon rainforest, to or beyond the brink of collapse. It’s not alarmist to be alarmed when the evidence justifies it, just as it’s not misguided doomsaying to say we might be doomed (in the sense of civilization collapsing) if we don’t address the world’s growing carbon emissions with celerity.

From here.

Finally, it’s also worth disputing Gates’ characterization of the “doomsday view of climate change” as claiming that “nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.” There’s a big difference between “nothing matters more” and “nothing else matters.” No one is claiming that climate change mitigation is the only thing that’s important. This isn’t an either-or situation. As the Princeton University professor of geosciences and international affairs, Michael Oppenheimer, notes in a New York Times article, Gates is “setting up a false dichotomy ‘usually propagated by climate skeptics’ that pits efforts to tackle climate change against foreign aid for the poor.”

There are, of course, tradeoffs, as Gates reminds us in his article. We have finite resources that have to be allocated according to triage logic. But climate change is what I’ve previously called a “frame” or “context” risk, i.e., a risk that frames the entire human predicament in the 21st century. All other risks exist within this frame, and the probability of those risks will rise or fall in relation to how bad climate change becomes. To draw a silly analogy, there’s always a risk of tripping when walking through one’s house. But if the house is full of clutter on the floor, the risk increases. Climate change is the clutter.

For example, climate catastrophes will likely make conflict more likely, as desperate people fight over dwindling resources. To quote a Stanford Report article, “as global temperatures climb, the risk of armed conflict is expected to increase dramatically, according to experts across several fields.” It elaborates:

Intensifying climate change will increase the future risk of violent armed conflict within countries, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. Synthesizing views across experts, the study estimates climate has influenced between 3% and 20% of armed conflict risk over the last century and that the influence will likely increase dramatically.

Some scholars have even argued that climate change will boost the likelihood of terrorism. As I write in my 2017 book Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing (which I now disavow, as the book approaches existential threats to humanity and civilization from a TESCREAL perspective):

A 2015 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that climate change was partly responsible for a record-setting drought in Syria from 2007 to 2010. This spurred a mass migration of desperate farmers into Syria’s urban centers, which contributed to the 2011 Syrian civil war … But the cascading effects don’t end here: the Syrian civil war was … the Petri dish in which [the Islamic State, or ISIS] — at that point a floundering group of Salafi-Jihadist apocalypticists — consolidated its forces to become arguably the largest and best-funded juggernaut of terrorism in human history. As David Titley comments, “It’s not to say you could predict ISIS out of [the Syrian drought], but you just set everything up for something really bad to happen. … [Y]ou can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.

Studies also suggest that “there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050” — again, “billion” with a “b.” Think of the extraordinary chaos that such migration would cause. Think about how this will fuel the continued rise of far-right, fascist movements in the US and European countries given the anti-immigration stance that they embrace. Think about how it will exacerbate global poverty and wealth inequalities!! Gah!!!

This looks very, very bad. Indeed, it looks so bad in so many complex ways that I doubt any of us can possibly comprehend its true badness. Climate change is a major reason we are “superfucked” this century.

In fact, Gates’ article indicating a pivot away from climate change has already emboldened climate deniers. As Oppenheimer tells the New York Times: “Despite his efforts to make clear that he takes climate change seriously,¹ his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change.”

On cue, Trump claimed victory on Truth Social, writing:

From here.

For all these reasons, I’m hugely disappointed in Gates’ article. It doesn’t have a coherent message; mischaracterizes the “doomsday view of climate change”; fails to acknowledge that climate change mitigation and foreign aid are inextricably bound up together; and provides ammunition for the climate-denying right to further undermine efforts to ensure that our precious planet remains livable for future (and current!) generations. Sigh.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!

1. Does he, though? After all, Gates has decided to undermine a major source of funding for climate nonprofits, as noted earlier!