Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has officially changed his tune on climate change.
In a memo addressed to COP30, a United Nations global climate summit convening in Brazil, Gates described a “doomsday” view of climate change that claims, “In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” Responding to this outlook, Gates stated, “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong.”
While Gates reiterated his view that climate change is a meaningful problem, he also pointed out the obvious fact that as countries modernize, they use more energy. A monomaniacal focus on climate change, therefore, would harm efforts to reduce poverty in the third world.
Gates illustrated his point by saying, “I’ll let the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria. People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.”
Republicans and Democrats have clashed over climate change for years, but Gates’s statement is noteworthy due to his foundation’s large-scale involvement in global climate initiatives. This rhetorical shift indicates that the Gates Foundation could begin allocating its significant financial resources differently.
Gates’s statement sparked charged political reactions from both sides. On Truth Social, President Donald J. Trump celebrated, saying, “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.” Liberal outlets, meanwhile, reacted as though Gates had sold out their sacred cause. The New Republic ran an article complaining of an alleged “techno-broligarchy” running America and discounting Gates’s rhetorical shift based on his wealth, while not meaningfully addressing the substance of his argument.
Since the 2024 election, the Left has attempted to dubiously recast itself as a “populist” movement, alleging that America’s wealthiest individuals, Gates included, have sold their soul to the Trump administration. It is a marked tonal shift from previous years, when liberals promoted figures such as Gates as part of a benevolent liberal elite. Like most issues in the new Trump era, though, this shift has nothing to do with rich vs. poor, and everything to do with maximally left-wing opinion continuing to fall out of favor.
In his memo, Gates predicted that diehard climate activists would see his argument as “[…] a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously.” Like fellow liberal J. K. Rowling, though, he will likely soon learn that the Left does not tolerate insufficient fanaticism on its pet issues.
