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bill gates
Why We Shouldn't Care What Bill Gates Has to Say About the Climate Crisis
If we were listening to people on the grounds of whether they had a good track record, the world would not spend a lot of time on Gates and climate. But if you have a hundred billion dollars all is forgiven.
Nov 01, 2025
I feel quite strongly that we should pay less attention to billionaires—indeed that’s rather the point of this small essay—so let me acknowledge at the outset that there is something odd about me therefore devoting an edition of this newsletter to replying to Bill Gates’ new missive about climate. But I fear I must, if only because it’s been treated as such important news by so many outlets—far more, say, than covered the United Nations Secretary General’s same-day appeal to international leaders that began with a forthright statement of the science. Here’s António Guterres:
The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5°C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5°C 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.
In fact, I could probably just note that Gates, with impeccable timing, decided to drop his remarks at the same moment that Hurricane Melissa plowed into Jamaica, doing incalculable damage because of winds made stronger by the ocean heat attributable to global warming. As Jeff Masters reported:
Human-caused climate change increased Hurricane Melissa’s wind speeds by 7% (11 mph, or 18 km/h), leading to a 12% increase in its damages, found researchers at the Imperial College of London in a rapid attribution study just released. A separate study by scientists at Climate Central found that climate change increased Melissa’s winds by 10%, and the near-record-warm ocean waters that Melissa traversed—1.2°C (1.2°F) warmer than average—were up to 900 times more likely to be that warm because of human-caused climate change.
And, oh, the same day Hue, in Vietnam, reported one of the two or three greatest rainfalls in recorded human history: 5 feet of rain in 24 hours, the kind of deluge made ever more likely by a warming atmosphere that can hold more water vapor. As the Associated Press reported, “Global warming is making tropical storms stronger and wetter, according to experts, because warmer oceans provide them with more fuel, driving more intense winds, heavier rainfall and shifting precipitation patterns across East Asia.”
Anyway, Bill Gates’ letter.
It was wrong of him to write it because if his high-priced pr team didn’t anticipate the reaction, they should be fired. I assume they did, and that they were okay with the entirely predictable result from our president. Here’s how the Washington Times described it:
“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” said Mr. Trump in a Wednesday post on Truth Social. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”
Bill Gates didn’t, of course, say that. He said climate change was real and we should be worried about it, but that it wouldn’t lead to “humanity’s demise” or “the end of civilization” (which seems like the lowest of low bars) and that:
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
and therefore that’s where we should focus our money. His letter is actually directed at delegates to the global climate conference next month in Brazil, essentially telling them to back off the emissions reductions and concentrate on growing economies in the developing world because “health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.”
Any conversation about Bill Gates and climate should begin by acknowledging that he’s been wrong about it over and over again. He’s explained that up until 2006—i.e., 18 years after Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress laying out the science, and well past the point where George W. Bush had acknowledged its reality—he like Trump thought the whole thing was a crock. “I had assumed there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster,” he explained—at the time he was the richest man in the world, and yet his scientific advisers couldn’t get across the simple facts to him.
And he was last heard from on the topic in 2021, when he wrote a book explaining that it was going to be very hard to do renewable energy because it came with a “green premium”—i.e. it cost more. Sadly for his argument, that was pretty much the year that sun and wind crossed the invisible line making them less expensive than coal and oil and gas. (You can read my review from the New York Times here, and you can read his response to it in Rolling Stone here where he explains, “McKibben is stuck in this time warp.”)
So—if we were listening to people on the grounds of whether they had a good track record, the world would not spend a lot of time on Gates and climate. But if you have a hundred billion dollars all is forgiven, and so there has been lots of fawning coverage. The fact that Gates framed all this in a way designed to appeal to the president is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning (the richest men in the world have all been sucking up to him, so no extra shame here); let’s instead just go to the heart of his argument. Which is weak in the extreme.
Take the case of Jamaica. The warming-fueled hurricane that smashed into the island on Tuesday did a lot of damage. How much? The first estimates from the insurance industry say between 30 and 250% of the country’s annual GDP. The wide range is because we don’t yet have pictures from much of the country, so let’s go with the very low end of the range. Thirty percent of a country’s GDP is… a lot of money. It’s as if Hurricane Katrina had cost America $8 trillion. If America suddenly had an $8 trillion hole, what do you think that would do to its ability to pay for education and healthcare and the like? That’s what “development” is. Jamaica is in a hole it will spend forever getting out of.
And oh, Cuba and Haiti got smacked too. And Vietnam. And… and that was just last week. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, every one degree climb in temperature knocks 12% off GDP. The paper concluded that “by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change.” And who gets hurt the most? That would be the developing countries that Gates in theory worries about. Here’s a Stanford study showing that “the gap between the economic output of the world’s richest and poorest countries is 25% larger today than it would have been without global warming.”
Gates goes on and on about public health, but as the US Global Leadership Coalition (a group he has lauded extensively) said a few years ago:
Warmer temperatures could expose as many as one billion people to deadly infectious diseases such as Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. In the US alone, disease cases from mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas more than tripled from just under 30,000 to almost 100,000 a year from 2004 to 2016. A warmer climate could lead to an additional 250,000 people dying of diseases including malaria each year between 2030 and 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
Is this a smaller effect than the things he worries about? On the same day that Gates issued his letter, the premier medical journal the Lancet issued its annual update on climate and health, and what it found was:
Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed.
It says the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires, and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.
The irony of Gates’ new letter is that he acknowledges, in passing, how wrong he was four years ago about the “green premium”:
You probably know about improvements like better electric vehicles, dramatically cheaper solar and wind power, and batteries to store electricity from renewables. What you may not be aware of is the large impact these advances are having on emissions.
Ten years ago, the International Energy Agency predicted that by 2040, the world would be emitting 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Now, just a decade later, the IEA’s forecast has dropped to 30 billion, and it’s projecting that 2050 emissions will be even lower.
But he uses that new knowledge to argue that since they’ve done so well we’ve knocked the high end off climate projections and hence can calm down about it all. He misses the most obvious point, which is that if you care about development the rapid expansion of solar and wind power gives us the greatest possible chance we’ve ever had to really knock down poverty, at exactly the same point that we’re spreading the technology that can help limit how high the temperature eventually gets.
Jigar Shah, who led the Department of Energy loans office under Biden, put it best:
Bill Gates hasn’t made sense on Climate since he teamed up with Bjorn Lomborg in 2009. This is just a restating of Bjorn’s book from this year about how we have a finite amount of money and we shouldn’t use it for climate. What they get wrong is that climate solutions are now fully profitable.
Here’s Rajiv Shah, writing in the New York Times last year, about the opportunity:
As world leaders gather this week for the United Nations General Assembly they should reimagine their approach. In today’s digital world, nothing matters more to individual well-being than energy: Access to electricity determines fundamental aspects of individuals’ lives, like whether they are healthy or have a job.
Instead of treating electrification as one of many goals, it’s time to see it is essential to all of them. And that means the world needs to focus investment and effort on getting reliable, clean electricity to the nearly 700 million people who don’t have any—and the 3.1 billion more who don’t have enough.
As Rajiv Shah explained in the headline to that article, “Want to End Poverty? Focus on One Thing.” Clean electricity.
I doubt Rajiv Shah can say anything about Gates’ letter—he worked at the Gates Foundation for years as part of his long and distinguished career. In fact, not many people can really reply—Gates money is too important to too many agencies and organizations. But since I don’t get any of it, let me say: He’s really not the guy to be listening to on this stuff. Really.
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The Price We Pay for Bezos and Gates? Less Moral Societies
The longer we let inequality define our contemporary daily lives, new research helps us understand, the more the unethical behavior all around us will seem to reflect just the way our world naturally works.
May 08, 2024
Just what exactly happens when a society becomes substantially more unequal, when a few become fabulously richer than the many?
Defenders of our deepest pockets have a ready answer. What happens when wealth starts concentrating at a society’s summit? Nothing we need worry about. In fact, the richer our richest become, these cheerleaders for grand fortune posit, the better the lives the rest of us get to lead.
Or so the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis would have us believe.
“Rather than wishing for a world without billionaires, as some radical thinkers do,” Pethokoukis declared last month, “we might want to think about the immense value that uber-successful entrepreneurs provide.”
People who live in highly unequal societies feel “a lower sense of control” and look less askance at unethical behaviors, either from others or from themselves, than do people who live in distinctly more equal societies.
“Without the possibility of amassing significant wealth,” this think-tanker went on to add, “we wouldn’t have benefited from the contributions of entrepreneurs like Bezos and Bill Gates.”
But those “contributions,” researchers have made plain over recent years, have all come at an exceptionally high price. People who live in societies with wide gaps between the wealthy and everyone else turn out to live briefer lives than people who call more equal societies home. People who live in more equal societies, meanwhile, tend to live happier lives than their unequal-society counterparts. They face less crime. Their economies crash less often.
Epidemiologists and economists the world over are exploring all these sorts of phenomena. So are sociologists and political scientists. And, over recent years, psychologists have been jumping big-time into the fray, as an analysis from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has just highlighted.
One example: Recent studies from Northwestern’s Maryam Kouchaki and her colleagues Christopher To from Rutgers and Dylan Wiwad, a former Kellogg postdoc, have been illuminating how unequal distributions of income and wealth are serving to increase “the acceptability of self-interested unethical behaviors.”
Why do unequal societies tend to be more accepting of this “immoral behavior”? Kouchaki and her colleagues have been exploring that question. They’ve dug deep into huge international data sets that go back decades. They’ve also conducted experiments to dig even deeper into the psyches of both high- and low-inequality societies.
One of these fascinating experiments, involving some 800 participants, used images of ladders to help show how levels of inequality can impact attitudes on the importance of behaving ethically. The research team showed the participants five different ten-rung ladders. Each ladder represented a different society, with each ladder rung representing 10% of each society’s population. The top rung represented the richest 10%, the bottom the poorest.
Upon each rung, the researchers placed images of money bags to indicate the total net worth of households in each particular 10%. In the most equal of these five ladder societies, no one rung carried many more money bags than any other rung. In the most unequal ladder societies, just the opposite. In these unequal societies, the overwhelming bulk of the money bags sat on the ladders’ top-most rungs.
Northwestern’s Kouchaki and her colleagues then asked their experiment’s participants to choose the ladder image that best reflected the distribution of wealth in their own real-life society. They also asked these participants to rate how acceptable unethical behaviors—everything from cheating on exams to illegally downloading software—have become in their own real-life societies.
The bottom line from this particular experiment matched up with the findings from all the rest of this research effort: People who live in highly unequal societies feel “a lower sense of control” and look less askance at unethical behaviors, either from others or from themselves, than do people who live in distinctly more equal societies.
“Overall,” Kouchaki and her colleagues conclude, “our results suggest inequality changes ethical standards.”
Other recent psychological research has come to the same core conclusion.
“When are people more open to cheating?” asked the Canadian researchers Anita Schmalor, Adrian Schroeder, and Steven Heine in a paper published earlier this year. “Economic inequality makes people expect more everyday unethical behavior.”
The longer we let inequality define our contemporary daily lives, this new research helps us understand, the more the unethical behavior all around us will seem to reflect just the way our world naturally works. Economic inequality, in effect, normalizes unethical behavior. The sun will always rise and set, we come to assume, on a deeply unequal world that no mere mortals can ever change.
We need, some observers of our fraying social fabric suggest, more people in public life noble enough to champion basic ethical norms. True, we do need those champions. But what we need even more: a world of distinctly more equal societies.
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Why We Need to Abandon Industrial Farming
Many will argue that chemicals are needed to feed the population, but this is a false dilemma.
May 29, 2023
Our world is being propelled into a techno tyranny where a small band of billionaires owns our information, our water, our energy, and increasingly—our food. The billionaire doing more than most to shape the future of what we eat is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Not content with being the largest private farmland owner in the U.S., Gates is hell-bent on creating a new green revolution for Africa. Just like the last green revolution in the 1960s, Gates aims to end world hunger by supercharging industrial farming through planting hectare after hectare of "magic seeds" in order to resist bugs and adapt to the climate crisis.
Anyone familiar with the original green revolution in the 1960s may be feeling a tingling sense of déjà vu. Back in 1960, approximately 37% of people living in developing countries were undernourished. Fast forward to 2019 and the number had fallen to 8.9%. This is an achievement that rightly won Norman Borlaug a Nobel Peace Prize. Borlaug—the father of the green revolution—spent his life working to reduce global hunger, and he can hold his head high for a mission accomplished. Unfortunately for Borlaug and the rest of humanity, his method for reducing world hunger was to create genetically modified monocrops which were reliant on massive amounts of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and water. This led to the consolidation of farms with the wealthier farmers able to afford the necessary inputs. Those who could not, lost out.
Today, the average farm in the United States is $1.3 million in debt. Noneconomic impacts have been even worse. Our soils are dying, insects are going extinct, bird and mammal populations are crashing, and we are fast approaching a time when demand for water outstrips supply by 40%. While Borlaug may be resting in peace, the unforeseen impacts of his green revolution mean the rest of us may find it difficult to do so. And due to the Messiah complex of billionaires like Gates, we are about to fuel the destruction again. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are other futures we can choose.
We are in the middle of the sixth extinction with as many as 274 species going extinct every day—we have lost an average of 68% of all bird, fish, mammal, amphibian, and reptile species in the past 50 years.
Before we look at an alternative solution, let’s look at the problems industrial agriculture is causing. We are in the middle of the sixth extinction with as many as 274 species going extinct every day—we have lost an average of 68% of all bird, fish, mammal, amphibian, and reptile species in the past 50 years—and the decline is continuing at more than one percentage point per year. Agriculture is the largest cause of these declines—86% of those species threatened—with animal agriculture (60%) the salient perpetrator. A simple switch to plant-based diets could free up enough land that we could leave 50% of our planet to nature, just as the late biologist E.O. Wilson emphasized was necessary in his book Half-Earth. We could also sequester at least 14.7 GtCO2e per year—which is more than double what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states is necessary to remove to limit warming to 2.7°F (1.5°C) by mid-century.
While the majority of our extremely compromised attention is focused on the fast-dwindling species we can witness disappearing, many of the species being lost are out of sight and out of mind. Of the 69,003 vertebrate species, 69% have had their risk of extinction assessed whereas the number of insects to have been assessed is just 0.8%. While the plight of the polar bear might sell more advertising space than Sloane's Urania, E.O. Wilson was correct in his assumption that it was “the little things that run the world.” They might be small, but combined, insects weigh 17 times more than humanity, and whether it be pollinating plants, maintaining soil structure, or dispersing seeds, our insect friends pack a prodigious punch.
Unfortunately, industrialized farming—in addition to light pollution and our warming world—is pushing our tenacious troops to the brink. It is estimated we are losing 2.5% of insect biomass each year and we risk living on a bug-free ball by 2100. While a shift toward plant-based diets will free up the land to provide copious habitat, a shift toward genuine organic farming will ensure insects can thrive on the land unhindered by insecticides. The soil under our feet will also benefit.
In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote that “a nation that destroys its soils, destroys itself.” The United States is firmly on course for the former, and how long it can avoid the latter is debatable. To the average eye, soil looks like barren brown blobs, but up close and personal, contains a staggering quarter of all biodiversity. It prevents flooding, and drought, and is essential for providing clean water. Just a handful of soil contains billions of microscopic organisms. Sadly, the past tense needs to be used now, because the soil under our feet is being degraded at a staggering 30 soccer fields per minute. That’s around 24 billion tonnes of fertile topsoil being lost every year. Half of our topsoil has disappeared since the industrial revolution. The main reason for this degradation—as with insects—is Borlaug’s package. It’s not just the soil that is being affected, but its inhabitants too. Earthworms help to keep soil healthy and on land that is sprayed with pesticides, they grow to just half their weight and don’t reproduce as well as those where pesticides are not used.
So, how can we get out of this mess? Gates and the billionaire brood wish to convince us that further industrialization is the only answer to feeding 10 billion people. Are they correct? Or are they purely profit-driven? Considering we already grow enough food for 10 billion people yet have 828 million going hungry every night suggests industrialization is not the answer. Many people simply can’t afford to pay for food. If Gates and his ilk are really serious about ending world hunger, perhaps they could cough up the $259 billion that Oxfam claims it would cost. This is a drop in the ocean for the world’s richest; unfortunately, it’s difficult for them to profit from, so it may never happen. Likewise, they could quietly ask supermarkets to stop wasting 30% of all food grown or pay their money-hungry friends in government to stop paying subsidies to harmful industries. It seems highly unlikely that an escalation of the sterile monocrops dependent on fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides is going to reverse the damage.
Something much more likely to succeed would be a return to our roots. The share of people employed by agriculture has dropped precipitously since 1800. U.S. agriculture has gone from almost 60% of the workforce to 1.36% in 2019. In Britain, barely 1% help to satiate hunger. Globally—since 1991—the share of agricultural employment dropped from 43.7% to 26.76% in 2019. As artificial intelligence begins to strip humans of their worth, imagine if humans began working the land once again. What could be earthlier than returning to the land and reconnecting human animals with the natural world that gives them life?
Removing oneself from the deafening noise of car horns and replacing it with bird song wouldn’t be the only benefit. Organic farmers need less mechanization than conventional farmers and so need less money to get going. Once up and running, they also require fewer inputs and again this reduces overheads. While research into organic versus conventional yields provides varying results, when the time comes to sell the produce, organic produce sells for between 13-22% more than those reliant on chemicals. This is necessary because organic farming requires more labor but remember: This is the whole point. Young Americans between the ages of 24 and 40 are already doing this with around 30,000 opting to relocate each year since 2014. Can you imagine millions of people opting to return to revitalize rural areas? The benefits to these communities left behind by globalization would be immense.
With the climate crisis upon us, it is imperative for young people to get into politics to try and direct their futures down a sustainable path.
Around the world, whether the U.S., U.K., or Japan much of the population living in urban areas tends to be more progressive than those in rural areas. As we have seen with the polarization of the United States, this divide desperately needs to be bridged. What better way than for progressives to move back to the heartlands and get their hands dirty along with those with more conservative leanings? With the climate crisis upon us, it is imperative for young people to get into politics to try and direct their futures down a sustainable path. This is far more easily achieved in lowly populated areas where communities can hold politicians' feet to the flames.
Many will argue that chemicals are needed to feed the population, but this is a false dilemma and it’s worth noting that much of this propaganda comes from the chemical companies themselves. The transition isn’t without hurdles though. The world can thank Sri Lanka for their disastrous attempt at going organic without adequate planning or training for farmers. We can and must learn from their mistakes. We shouldn’t forget, either, that Borlaug himself made this argument 60 years ago when he warned that by “predicting doom for the world through chemical poisoning, the world will be doomed not by chemical poisoning but from starvation.” In the space-race-’60s, perhaps this was hard to argue against. In 2023, however, it is not.
Even if we accept that organic yields are 15% lower than conventional farming, with an area the size of Brazil and North America combined freed up by our switch to plant-based diets or the adoption of cellular meat, we could easily accept lower yields. We don’t necessarily have to accept lower yields though. A 2022 meta-analysis that looked at 30 long-term experiments from Europe and Africa found that ecological intensification (EI) practices had a generally positive effect on staple crop yields. EI refers to the utilization of natural processes instead of human-made inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers to sustain or enhance food production per unit area. These practices include increasing crop diversity, adding fertility crops to add nitrogen naturally, and planting flower-rich habitats around fields to provide natural enemies for crop pests.
Forget food revolutions, forget green revolutions, what we need is not a revolution but an evolution—of consciousness. And we won’t get this in cities saturated with advertising, we won’t get this online, we won’t get this with AI robot vacuums, but we will get it surrounded by nature.Keep ReadingShow Less
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