Bill Gates is completely wrong about climate change
By Adele Peters | Published: 2025-10-31 10:30:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
Bill Gates has invested billions over the past two decades to help fight climate change. But in A New blog postHe says the world is too focused on cutting short-term emissions.
“Doomsday predictions are causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions targets,” he says, calling for a “strategic pivot” to focus on “improving lives” by focusing development funds more on agriculture and eliminating disease and poverty.
This logic is flawed, built on a series of false trade-offs that ignore the interconnectedness between climate and development goals. Gates criticizes the “doomsday” view that climate change will “annihilate civilization” within a few decades, writing that it “will not lead to the demise of humanity.” Because progress has already been made on climate – and since humanity will survive – he argues that we should now focus more on alleviating human suffering rather than continuing to focus so intensely on rising temperatures.
But climate scientists do not claim that civilization itself will end. They say hurricanes, heat waves and other climate disasters are already killing people, destroying homes and infrastructure, making it more difficult to grow food, and making life more difficult and expensive in other ways. The longer we wait to reduce emissions, the worse these problems will become and the more difficult it will be to adapt to them. Human suffering is directly linked to whether or not emissions are curbed now.
Rachel Cletus, senior policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at Harvard University, says Gates’ article uses “a really flawed framework that pits improving people’s lives against science-based temperature and emissions goals that are closely linked.” Union of Concerned Scientists. “If you look around the world now, climate change is directly undermining human development, poverty eradication and health goals. We only have to look at the disruption caused by the climate extreme Hurricane Melissa to see an example of this.
A Report this week From the medical journal Lancet It explains that the effects of climate change are creating an “unprecedented threat” to people’s health and survival globally, with millions already dying needlessly every year. This threat continues to grow. As temperatures rise and rainfall increases, mosquitoes can thrive in new areas, increasing the risk of malaria, for example. “All of these things are directly related,” Cletus says. “You cannot solve these complex development and health challenges if you ignore climate change.”
Gates believes that temperature targets hinder the focus on improving global poverty. But the most ambitious temperature target in the Paris climate agreement — limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — came from poor island nations who saw that sea level rise would hit them first.
“Bill Gates has the audacity as a billionaire to say, ‘Well, climate people don’t care about the poor and the developing world,’ when in many respects the temperature stabilization framework came from the poor and the developing world,” says Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. “Why do we have a 1.5 degree target? Because these least developed countries, small island states, came together to say: ‘This is what we want.’ It was not the big rich countries that pushed for this.
Setting a temperature target was crucial, and a follow-up report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talked about how much emissions would need to be cut by 2030 to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. “This is a timeline that policymakers can rally around,” Stokes says. This has led to Biden pursuing an ambitious climate policy in the United States, and although Trump has reversed this, it has also motivated states, other countries and companies to set short-term goals.
Gates points out that we should not reduce funding for health and development to combat climate change. But this is a straw man argument. When the Trump administration cut spending on international health, it did not divert that money to climate programs. Globally, funding comes from various sources.
“It’s not the same money,” says Jigar Shah, co-managing director of the company. The multipliera clean technology consulting firm, previously ran the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. “USAID is not spending money on clean energy. The money for clean energy comes from the private sector, and most of these things are now very cost-effective and profitable, and they don’t even come from blended finance. They come from pure private sector dollars.”
Gates argues that societies are able to adapt to short-term climate impacts, and that economic growth would help avoid further deaths from climate change – if more people were able to buy air conditioners, for example, this would save lives. But this ignores the limits of economic growth and resilience to recurring disasters. “There is no way to grow economically when you are repeatedly exposed to climate-fueled disasters,” Cletus says.
The article also points out that economic growth in developing countries conflicts with climate policy. “There is not a single person in the world who makes that argument,” says Shah. “None of the poor countries have ever been asked to reduce their emissions.”
At the same time, as renewables become the cheapest source of electricity, developing countries are able to provide energy affordably without sharply increasing emissions. Pakistan, for example It imported the third-largest number of solar panels of any country in the world in 2024. “The entire solar revolution over the last three years in Pakistan has been done with private sector capital and DIY videos on WhatsApp,” says Shah.
Gates seems to be signaling that it’s okay to wait until emissions are cut further, because better technology (much of which is backed by his investments) is on the horizon. But since climate change is a cumulative problem, waiting another decade to cut emissions means we can easily pass critical tipping points. This is the biggest contradiction in his argument: if he wants to protect lives and livelihoods, emissions must be cut now.
“What the science shows is that within the next decade, if we do not sharply reduce greenhouse emissions, there is a real possibility of exceeding the various climate targets that have been agreed upon,” says Cletus. “This could open feedback loops in the Earth system that we cannot turn back even if we reduce emissions in the future.”
Gates is urging world leaders at the 30th session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30), this year’s global climate conference, to “prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human well-being,” rather than focusing on cutting emissions. Ideas are unlikely to have much impact on what actually happens at the conference. But the messaging is hurting climate action globally. “I think the impact is more about the build-up of a feeling that climate change is not something we should worry about,” Stokes says.
Of course, it makes sense to continue developing better and more affordable climate technology. The companies backed by Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures are able to play an important role. But Gates can do more to help expand the reach of clean technology that’s ready now.
While startups can also help later, Shah says: “I think it’s important to realize that if you want to reduce climate emissions at scale and make electricity bills more affordable at this moment, you have to deploy technologies that are already available at scale.”
“We have several technologies that have stalled at 5% penetration,” says Shah. “We have 5% of our roofs in the US, maybe 6% now, with solar panels. Australia is 30%. How do we get from 5% to 30%? We’re figuring that out today. I’d love to help him with that
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(tags for translation) Bill Gates
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