Former Microsoft honcho Bill Gates is backing off on his former climate panic-mongering, at least to a certain degree. Facts can't remain ignored forever, after all, at least not by people with enough smarts to pound sand, and whatever we might think of Bill Gates, he's not stupid.
But why now? What's behind this sudden realization? We might note that Gates is getting flamed pretty harshly by his former allies in climate-scoldery. But his pivot has him tacking back a little closer to reality, and while the scolds are still snapping at Gates over his pivot, we should recognize it as a step in the right direction.
Economist and Climate Editor at the Daily Sceptic, Tilak Doshi, laid out some interesting thoughts on his Substack.
The climate alarmist establishment is in veritable disarray, as one of its most influential patrons appears to have defected from the faith. Last week, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates wrote a long missive from his digital pulpit GatesNotes, titled ‘Three tough truths about climate: What I want everyone at COP30 to know‘.
What upset devotees of the Church of Climate was Gates conceding that climate change will not cause humanity’s extinction:
Although 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.
While Mr. Gates was belaboring the obvious, his former co-religionists were blasting him for his apostasy:
This departure from the apocalyptic fervour that once aligned Mr Gates with the high priests of environmental doom — figures like Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Michael Mann and UN Secretary General of “global boiling” fame António Guterres, who prophesied planetary demise unless humanity submits to the ironclad dogma of ‘Net Zero by 2050’ — was met with righteous indignation by upholders of the faith.
Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, who concocted the infamous global warming ‘hockey stick’ chart, wrote to HuffPost that he observed “an alarming shift in Gates’s rhetoric on climate change in recent years”. The reliably Leftist-progressive outlet quoted Mann’s accusation:
It was hardly surprising to me to encounter Gates’s dismissive recent words downplaying the threat of climate change and the need for urgent action. They simply reinforce the fact that he has been misguided on climate for some time now.
Now, in this statement, Gates is correct: Climate change will not cause humanity's extinction. To give a little more detail from Gates, in his own words:
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.
It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change. Next month’s global climate summit in Brazil, known as COP30, is an excellent place to begin, especially because the summit’s Brazilian leadership is putting climate adaptation and human development high on the agenda.
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.
Now here, Gates is right, and he is wrong. He's still buying into the whole "green energy" horse squeeze. He hasn't mentioned how "improving lives" in the world's poorest countries is best done by giving them reliable and affordable electricity, and where appropriate, natural gas for heating and cooking. A substantial part of the Third World is still dependent on biomass for heating and cooking. As of 2024, about 2.1 billion people around the world are still using biomass - wood, dung, crop waste, and the like, along with kerosene and coal - for cooking. Solar panels and wind farms aren't what these folks need; it's reliable power, fueled by oil, natural gas, or coal. These are known technologies that can be set up relatively quickly, they are reliable, and they are affordable. The green sources, on the other hand, remain the same as they are here in the United States: Good for some niche applications, but not on the grid scale.
Read More: Stick a Fork in the Church of Climate Change - Even Bill Gates Seems Done
But boy, howdy, is poor old Bill taking the heat for this pivot. He had to have known this would happen; this is the world he moves in. So why now?
But why this shift, and why now? Is it the dawning of reason amid mounting scientific evidence against modern day Lysenkoism, or a calculated repositioning by one of the world’s shrewdest investors, perhaps hastened by the counter-revolution in American politics under President Trump?
I suspect it's some combination of both. Still, while Gates' former True Believers are casting aspersions, we should at least recognize that Gates is slowly, tentatively admitting he was wrong on at least the priorities around the climate issue. That's not the worst first step.
It may be some time before we are able to determine whether Mr. Gates is in the process of an actual "Saul on the road to Damascus" epiphany, or if he's just engaging in a political calculation. Either way, he has thrown a wrench in the works of the climate change panic-mongers by admitting, finally, that human activities aren't about to set the planet ablaze, and that philanthropic efforts may be better spent getting Third World people reliable electricity than in screeching, Thunberg-like, about a degree or two increase in the average global temperature.
We can talk next about how to deliver that electricity.
