Ahead of COP30, right-wing media misrepresented Bill Gates’ memo to declare climate change is over

2 comments

1. I read BillG’s note. It had quite a few talking points which are often used by the Big Carbon disinformation machine.

   1. Climate change is not an extinction level event:

   – As long as at least 10,000 humans survive, we can avoid an inbreeding down-spiral into extinction. Not terribly reassuring.

   – While I am confident that the climate will not directly wipe humans off the map, I think we should remind ourselves that declassified material reveal that there were multiple close calls during the cold war. Situations where equipment malfunctions (such as infrared sensors on satellites) or human error came close to causing a nuclear launch. There are now 9 nuclear armed countries. One of them (Pakistan) is under severe debt and climate stress, has an active border conflict with Afghanistan and hates India, their southern neighbor. If the use of nuclear weapons gets somewhat normalized, BillG might be wrong.

   2. Fusion power is just around the corner. His exact quote is below.

   “And fusion, which promises to give us an inexhaustible supply of cheap clean electricity, has moved from science fiction to near-commercial. ([TerraPower](https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation/reader/wyoming-terrapower-groundbreaking), [Commonwealth Fusion Systems](https://cfs.energy/), [Type One Energy](https://typeoneenergy.com/))”

   I call: I doubt it.

   3. We should focus on improving the well being of the poorest people in the Global South by providing technical assistance/technology for them to improve their farm yields and offer healthcare support of various types.

   Sounds like regional hospice care to me. Let’s keep these people comfortable, while in parallel Big Carbon continues to make their part of the world unlivable (see Sudan, Syrian, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, etc.).

   —————————-

   Nothing about the fastest path to decarbonization, which is rapidly scaling up renewables paired with more storage and a modernized grid. Nothing about the recent improvements to perovskite solar.

   While BillG is largely funding Natrium, a new type (molten salt) of fission plant, which is supposed to come online in Wyoming in 2030, we won’t have a strong sense of how effective that tech is until the early 2030’s. And even then, we have an enormous public perception hurdle to clear before widespread rollout of that type of source.

2. Is the guy so completely surrounded by yes-men that no one was able to tell him how predictable it was that his note would be misrepresented?

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