David Gelles of the New York Times tried to put the best face on it, but climate philanthropist Bill Gates ($122 billion) is changing the narrative of climate alarm and related public policies.
“Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’” the headline reads, subtitled “… Microsoft co-founder warned against climate alarmism and appears to have shifted some of his views about climate change.”
In addition to dialing back alarmism, Gelles reports, Gates’s memo “called for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world.”
Alex Epstein, take a bow. Common sense is rising to the top. Alarmism is a nonstarter with the public. Climate policy cannot affect global climate for decades, if ever. Adaptation must step in where “mitigation” has failed.
The alarmists are alarmed by Gates’s rethink. Gelles continued:
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said Mr. Gates was setting up a false dichotomy “usually propagated by climate skeptics” that pits efforts to tackle climate change against foreign aid for the poor.
“Despite his efforts to make clear that he takes climate change seriously, his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change,” Dr. Oppenheimer said in an email.
Gates’s reset is timed for COP30, the annual climate confab held by the United Nations, scheduled for November 6–21 in Brazil, that Gates does not plan to attend.
Gates has already gotten out of the climate policy business, as previously reported by Gelles and Theodore Schleifer in the Times:
Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization funded by Bill Gates that works on a sprawling range of climate issues, announced deep cuts to its operations…. Dozens of staff members were cut, including Breakthrough Energy’s unit in Europe, its team in the United States working on public policy issues and most of its employees working on partnerships with other climate organizations….
The news for the Climate Industrial Complex gets bleaker by the day. Government subsidies to uneconomic energies are ending, and doomism is backfiring. Gelles quotes David Callahan, the editor of Inside Philanthropy: “The result of a lot of research is that it’s much better to lean into the optimism than the pessimism.”
The last word belongs to Bill Gates. “This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives.”
Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries…The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.
Well said. May Civil Society address real, here-and-now problems, not hypothetical ones based on exaggeration.
