Bill Gates about turn on Climate Change

Bill Gates says climate crisis won’t cause ‘humanity’s demise’ in call to shift focus to ‘improving lives’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/28/bill-gates-climate-crisis-pivot

Much as I have said all along we have a climate problem not a climate emergency. We need to reduce our consumption of our finite resources and reduce our impact on our planet.

This needs to be done on a sensible time scale and on a science and engineering basis not on emotion and dogma.

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The billionaire Microsoft co-founder criticized what he described as a “doomsday view of climate change” which is focusing “too much on near-term emissions goals”.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

“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,” Gates wrote.

“The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”

He said the Cop30 climate summit, which will bring together world leaders in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém in November, was “a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives”.

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Maybe at last the world will see sense and stop wasting resources on wind turbines, solar panel and batteries in the somewhat mistaken belief that this will ‘Save the Planet”

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  • Given that humans are currently living everywhere from the Sahara desert to the high arctic, it's safe to say that climate change won't wipe out humanity.

    But that's a really bad excuse to not do anything.  There are already large parts of the planet that are barely habitable.

    There are hot dry areas that are so hot and so dry that if things get any hotter then crops will all fail and livestock will die.  There are hot humid places that are only barely tolerable by humans.  Add a couple more degrees C and they will effectively become uninhabitable without constant air conditioning.  If your car breaks down and the air conditioning stops, then you will die if you try to walk to the nearest town.

    Things aren't all great in the arctic either.  Houses built on permafrost are subsiding as the ground thaws in summer.  The land turns into swamp.  Ice melting in Greenland is measured in gigatonnes, or cubic kilometers if you prefer.  If all that melts, then coastal cities will be underwater and island nations will disappear.  It won't suddenly all melt overnight, but if temperatures continue to rise, there will be nothing to stop it melting eventually.  Land and open sea absorb heat from the sun a lot easier than white ice.  So once it starts, it becomes self-reinforcing.

    In the UK, we are fretting about tens of thousands of immigrants arriving on small boats.  What happens when that becomes hundreds of thousands or even millions, because we have destroyed the homes of so many people across the World?

    We have a global alliance of people who are too greedy to change things, because fossil fuels make so much money, and intransigent people who don't want to change because they like the way things are.  And even though things are already changing, every change becomes the new norm after a few years.  It's the boiling frog thing (and frogs aren't actually stupid enough to stay in a pot of boiling water).

  • Plus, to get purely parochial, the change to the gulf stream will have a huge effect on the UK. Ok, it won't affect those living in Silicon Valley, that doesn't mean it's not a problem. 

    And the big frustration, as you say Simon, is that all this is preventable. Fortunately today's engineers are working hard to address the issues, but it needs political will to support this.

    For the engineering industry, investing in net zero is a win-win scenario. Keeps us gainfully employed and maintains a sustainable planet to live on.

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  • Plus, to get purely parochial, the change to the gulf stream will have a huge effect on the UK. Ok, it won't affect those living in Silicon Valley, that doesn't mean it's not a problem. 

    And the big frustration, as you say Simon, is that all this is preventable. Fortunately today's engineers are working hard to address the issues, but it needs political will to support this.

    For the engineering industry, investing in net zero is a win-win scenario. Keeps us gainfully employed and maintains a sustainable planet to live on.

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