A generation of Americans has grown up believing that climate change is an existential crisis that threatens human existence. Some young adults say they are hesitant to have children because of climate change. More than half of respondents in a 2021 survey said “humanity is doomed.”
It’s a message that has been reinforced in a genre of books and films called “climate dystopia" and by warnings of prominent people like former Vice President Al Gore and tech titan Bill Gates.
Now, in advance of a world climate summit in Brazil next month, Gates has toned down the alarm, saying, in effect, that reports of humanity’s pending extinction have been greatly exaggerated.
“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. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further," Gates wrote on his personal blog.
He went on to say that “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.”
Gates’ remarks have been widely viewed as a pivot by one of the foremost Cassandras of climate change. In 2021, he published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster‚” a book that argued for more efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
“The case for zero (emissions) was, and is, rock solid. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions — but not eliminate them — won’t do it. The only sensible goal is zero," Gates wrote while promoting the book.
Now, just four years later, he’s saying that what’s been done so far, combined with future innovation, is enough to stave off disaster, and we need to focus on caring for our fellow human beings.
The reaction was explosive, with some people accusing Gates of walking back his climate change views in order to appease the Trump administration.
Gates himself acknowledge that what he is advocating for is a pivot, likening it to to a “strategic pivot” he made three decades ago at Microsoft.
“For a company, it’s relatively easy to make a shift like that because there’s only one person in charge. By contrast, there is no CEO who sets the world’s climate priorities or strategies, which is exactly as it should be. These are rightly determined by the global climate community,” he wrote.
“So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare. It’s the best way to ensure that everyone gets a chance to live a healthy and productive life no matter where they’re born, and no matter what kind of climate they’re born into.”
It’s unclear whether Gates anticipated the reaction, both the high-fives from people who believe that the harms of climate change have been overstated, and the clapbacks from those in the climate-doom camp who thought he was on their side.
A writer for The Verge accused Gates of “tone policing” and said he sounded like “a well-meaning rich guy not actually experiencing what’s happening on the ground, or understanding what people really need.” One person quoted in the article called Gates “dangerously misguided and misleading.”
David Gelles, who reports on climate change for The New York Times, noted that Breakthrough Energy, a venture Gates started in 2015 to support clean energy initiatives (including one in Utah), said earlier this year that it would dismantle its climate policy arm. The Times article quoted David Callahan, the editor of Inside Philanthropy, who said “One could imagine this being a continuation of wanting to move to the center and not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.”
But Callahan also told the Times that “alarmist rhetoric” regarding climate change is not always effective. “The result of a lot of research is that it’s much better to lean into the optimism than the pessimism,” he said.
Gates, who donated about $50 million to a nonprofit backing Kamala Harris’s campaign in 2024, has met with Trump at least two times this year, once in January, after which he said he was impressed with the president’s interest in a range of issues, and again in September, when he joined other technology luminaries.
His positive remarks about Trump, however, have done little to mollify Trump supporters who deride him as a “globalist” and others who dislike his promotion of vaccines. Meghan McCain wrote on X last month that Gates “is an anathema to every conservative in the country and the movement that got Trump re elected.