Table of Contents
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, long a vocal prophet of climate catastrophe, now insists global warming will not end civilization.
In a blog post this week, the 70-year-old billionaire wrote that climate change poses serious risks, especially for the world's poorest nations, but "will not lead to humanity’s demise."
"People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future," he added.
Gates, whose 2021 book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" warned the crisis could eclipse COVID-19 in severity, urged measuring success by human welfare gains over temperature reductions alone.
His Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured billions into emission-cutting ventures, including solar geoengineering to block sunlight.
Gates flies a $70 million private jet burning 450 gallons of fuel hourly but claims he offsets emissions "with legitimate carbon credits."
Gates highlighted cold as the greater killer: "surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier, killing nearly ten times more people every year than heat does."
He criticized emission obsessions harming the vulnerable.
"A few years ago, the government of one low-income country set out to cut emissions by banning synthetic fertilizers. Farmers’ yields plummeted, there was much less food available, and prices skyrocketed," Gates wrote. "The country was hit by a crisis because the government valued reducing emissions above other important things."
Pressure from "wealthy shareholders" to defund fossil fuels in poor nations has "almost no impact" on global emissions, he said, but blocks cheap loans for power plants serving homes, schools and clinics."
Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future," Gates concluded.
Cue the champagne for common sense: After years of jet-setting apocalypse sermons funded by his fortune, Saint Bill finally admits the sky isn't falling — cold kills more, green zealotry starves the poor, and humanity adapts.
The doomers' billionaire mascot just defected; let the recriminations begin.
Conversation