Bill Gates and Climate Change: The Controversy of Tone Policing

Bill Gates wants us all to be more upbeat about climate change. He argues that we’ve made great progress on the problem, aided in large part by technological advances. So it’s time to focus more on improving people’s lives, particularly by fighting hunger and disease, he writes in a memo published Tuesday. Of course, he says AI can help.

It’s supposed to be a hopeful message released ahead of high-stakes UN climate negotiations taking place next month. But it gave me whiplash reading it. Gates is a high-profile climate philanthropist, having invested billions of dollars into new technologies that are supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, he writes in his blog, “the doomsday outlook [on climate change] 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.”

At the same time, AI has become a bigger focus for Gates and Microsoft. AI’s growing energy demands have led to some cognitive dissonance. Microsoft set a goal in 2020 to become carbon negative, removing more CO2 pollution from the atmosphere than it creates. Instead, developing energy-hungry AI models has pushed the company’s carbon emissions higher in recent years. Gates told me last year that he thinks the benefits of AI are worth it.

By arguing that emissions shouldn’t be such an important benchmark for climate action, Gates is pushing a narrative that lets polluters off the hook. He simultaneously advocates for technological fixes — including farmers using AI to learn how to plant crops more effectively as temperatures rise.

It sounds like a well-meaning rich guy not actually experiencing what’s happening on the ground, or understanding what people really need. The manifesto as a whole turns a blind eye to solutions that advocates from the most climate-vulnerable communities have pushed for most vigorously.

“He’s dangerously misguided and misleading, and I think pushing things in the wrong direction,” says Stacy Malkan, co-founder of nonprofit health research group US Right to Know.

Gates’ drawnout blog post includes “three tough truths about climate” he wants decisionmakers to consider at the UN climate conference. The first is that “climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.” Yes, climates have already changed — bringing on more severe droughts, storms, and wildfires, for example — and civilization is still here. But civilization doesn’t have to collapse for climate change to inflict heavy losses, entire communities wiped away by rising sea levels, pounding storms, and devastating infernos. It’s often folks who’ve been pushed to margins, perhaps moving to more vulnerable housing because it’s what’s affordable.

Gates acknowledges the disparities, but minimizes the role climate change plays in exacerbating inequalities. “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,” he writes.

Again, I think he’s missing something, based on the reporting I’ve done over the past decade in communities reeling from floods and fires. Yes, food and shelter are probably a bigger priority than climate change for someone trying to make ends meet. But the issues are connected.

Obviously, there was more than climate change at play in her story. But climate disasters often push people deeper into poverty and dangerous situations. Tropical storms draw heat energy from warming waters, and have grown more intense with climate change. Gates happened to publish his memo as Jamaica was bracing for life-threatening gales and flooding from Hurricane Melissa.

Gates’ second so-called truth is that “temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate.” He points to the UN’s Human Development Index as a way to gauge a country’s health and prosperity, showing how resilient its people may be to the risks posed by climate change. That leads to his third truth, that “health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.”

Agricultural reform and global health campaigns — two areas that Gates has funneled enormous sums of money into — are unsurprisingly his top priorities.