Why We Shouldn't Care What Bill Gates Has to Say About the Climate Crisis

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.