As the UN Secretary General announced Monday that the world faces ‘devastating consequences” from failing to prevent global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees C, billionaire and environmentalist Bill Gates has suggested pivoting away from focusing on “near-term” global warming as the top issue facing the world today, identifying sustainable development in the world’s most vulnerable populations as our most significant problem.

This suggested shift in focus is being met with outrage with some suggesting Gates is caving in to the current administration’s climate denialism.

The Gates memo does not call for reversing the quest to reach 0 carbon emissions. 

Gates told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview Tuesday that pulling back from climate investment was a “huge disappointment,” albeit a necessary one. It also represents a stark contrast from where Gates had been focusing his efforts and philanthropy, including clean-energy businesses and lobby shops – and a turn from Gates’ tone from just a couple years ago.

In a 2023 since-removed Breakthrough Energy essay, for example, Gates noted that most people around the world are struggling with the effects of climate change – a feeling that can be “overwhelming” and necessitates a response with “unprecedented” scale and speed. www.cnn.com/…

While Gates has been in attendance at recent COPs, he is not attending this November in Brazil. As the NYT Notes:

As the Trump administration has slashed foreign aid budgets and shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, Mr. Gates has redirected much of his charitable giving to fill the void left by the U.S. government and focus on health and poverty in the developing world.

“He saw the U.S.A.I.D. situation as more pressing, and something where he could be more effective,” said Johannes Ackva, who leads climate work at Founders Pledge, an organization that advises philanthropists.

Let’s take a look at exactly what Gates had to say Tuesday in his call for a redirection away from a “doomsday view of climate change” that focuses “too much on near-term emissions goals”

From Gates Notes Three tough truths about climate, he writes:

Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. 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.

I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me, call me a hypocrite because of my own carbon footprint (which I fully offset with legitimate carbon credits), or see this as a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously.

To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.

Noting that historically “what’s good for prosperity is bad for the environment,” Gates says that while prices for wind and solar have decreased, we have not reached the point where this shift can be made without an increase in carbon emissions. The tools to make this shift demand a “focus on innovation” over the next ten years so that we can roll out zero-carbon technologies. By mid-century, he predicts a reduction in the gap between rich and poor countries. 

Looking forward, he says: “All countries will be able to construct buildings with low-carbon cement and steel. Almost all new cars will be electric. Farms will be more productive and less destructive, using fertilizer created without generating any emissions. Power grids will deliver clean electricity reliably, and energy costs will go down.”

Even with these innovations, though, the cumulative emissions will cause warming and many people will be affected. We’ll see what you might call latitude creep: In North America, for instance, Iowa will start to feel more like Texas. Texas will start to feel more like northern Mexico. Although there will be climate migration, most people in countries near the equator won’t be able to relocate—they will experience more heat waves, stronger storms, and bigger fires. Some outdoor work will need to pause during the hottest hours of the day, and governments will have to invest in cooling centers and better early warning systems for extreme heat and weather events.

Despite Gates’ earlier claim that our shift to electric vehicles, solar and wind power and batteries for storing renewable energy have not enabled us to decrease carbon emissions, he later states that there the International Energy Agency predicted ten years ago global emissions of CO2 would be 50 billion tons. That forecast has now dropped to 30 billion.  

Some other takeaways from the lengthy piece: 

“Climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems. We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause.”

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

“Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future.” 

“He’s got it all backwards.”

Some critics argue that Gates’ shift represents a false dichotomy: A significant amount of suffering that Gates now says is a priority is directly or indirectly a result of climate change.

“There is no greater threat to developing nations than the climate crisis,” said Michael Mann, Director, Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media. “He’s got this all backwards.”

From NYT:

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,” Mr. Oppenheimer said in an email.

From UN secretary general, António Guterres, 

“The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs,” Guterres said.

He added: “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”

From the AP:

Bill Gates thinks climate change is a serious problem but it won’t be the end of civilization. He thinks scientific innovation will curb it, and it’s instead time for a “strategic pivot” in the global climate fight: from focusing on limiting rising temperatures to fighting poverty and preventing disease.

A doomsday outlook has led the climate community to focus too much on near-term goals to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that cause warming, diverting resources from the most effective things that can be done to improve life in a warming world, Gates said. In a memo released Tuesday, Gates said the world’s primary goal should instead be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions in the world’s poorest countries.

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