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How Bill Gates is reframing the climate change debate
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- Title
- Bill Gates' pivot on climate change escalates debate with scientists
- Authors
- Amy Harder
- Published
- Oct 30 2025
- Word count
- 453 words
From the article:
Gate's article is here. It's hard to summarize because he anticipated common criticisms and mostly avoids binary thinking:
But maybe the best way to summarize it is that although an increase in global average temperature has bad effects on everything else, he thinks it's not the best way to measure human welfare:
...
Gates seems to be a big believer in economic growth:
Economists are big on economic growth and it's easy to see why: if you compare what life is like for average people in a poor country to a rich country, it's clear that people in rich countries are better off in most ways. So, if you can help poor countries become rich (or at least middle-income), that's a very high-impact intervention.
At least, if you can figure out how to do it. It's more easily said than done.
My criticism of economic growth as a metric is that this is a very zoomed-out way of thinking. Some kinds of economic growth are surely more valuable than other kinds, and GNP doesn't make distinctions.
Still, the specific projects that Gates calls out in the article seem like good ones.
It is, practically speaking, impossible with our current economic models. The luxury the rich world has is predicated upon attaining resources from the poor ones at slavery prices.
Otherwise, everyone who lives in the very rare chocolate and coffee producing regions would live like gods.
I completely agree that, collectively for humanity, the correct answer is to bring the bottom up. But it's not solving cliimate change. I have a bigger top-level brewing.
The big coffee and cocoa producers like Vietnam, Columbia, and the Ivory Coast have developed rapidly into middle-income countries. The Ivory Coast is considered lower-middle income, but for years its gdp has grown at 6–7% annually. These countries were extremely poor a generation or two ago.
The anti-globalization movement of the early 2000's has been ideologically defeated: global trade has massively accelerated the development of non-western countries and built a global middle class of billions.
Environmental degradation, on the other hand, is a different, sad story. But economically, the world is unfathomably wealthier than it was 20 years ago.
Yea, my house is on fire, but at least my bitcoin is worth lots of money. Never not relevant
I'm glad the bottom can now mostly afford food 200 years later, while the top has some billionaires having a private space race.
You're making it out like wealth is an intangable, trivial thing to be concerned about. It's the biggest impact on people's well-being out of any factor though. Billions of people no longer being in poverty means hundreds of millions of deaths avoided, and billions of people not suffering starvation or disease or other factors making their lives less miserable. If that's not the goal, what is?
Environmental destruction is primarily a problem because it negatively impacts those goals. But the world getting wealthier overall isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing.
Several Asian countries have grown rapidly within the last few decades, which I think disproves your thesis? And I don't see what producing coffee or chocolate has to do with it; this doesn't seem to be how countries do it.
Unfortunately, it's still hard to get growth going elsewhere.
Why would that disprove his thesis? That the GDP of a handful of countries is increasing does not mean that global inequalities are not a fundamental part of the luxury of rich countries. Could it not just be the case that those countries have, in part or in full, started exploiting exteranl and internal parties the same way that other rich countries have?
I'm not saying here that that IS the case - I don't know, it is not my field - but the aggregate wealth of a few countries does not to me seem to disprove anything.
Speaking of getting "growth going elsewhere" have you looked into how and why there is growth in the countries you link to? While we might group those countries together on geographical lication, their histories are quite different. I'm only personally truly familiar with the history of South Korea, and I would not call that a success story.
Does rising global inequality really matter if the wealth and welfare baseline is rapidly rising?
The average modern South Korean is 7 inches taller than the average Korean a century ago. That speaks to the astounding deprivation and undernourishment that Koreans historically experienced.
Since the 90s, an average Asian person now lives a decade longer; the average African, a decade and a half!
Also since the 90s, global extreme poverty (living on less than $3/day) has fallen from 43% to 10%: we lifted 33% or one-third of all humans from extreme poverty.
Yes. Because Gates is mostly wealth-washing, ignoring that the top of the inequality pyramid is burning the planet more than the much larger bottom segment.
Lop off the top of the pyramid, and then we can talk.
I'm pretty sure the average non-Westerner would take an extra 10+ years of life, steady food, electricity, safe plumbing, basic medicine, motorized transportation, and a magical device that lets them contact anyone and access all human knowledge over there being fewer Bill Gates in the world.
There are over 6 billion smartphone owners, so the average non-westerner already has such a magical device.
Yes. Trade was always a positive influence. Kings chopping off heads willy-nilly were not.
You just inadvertently explained to me why my daughter is tall!
South Korea has a surprisingly dramatic political history, but I don’t think anyone would deny that they’re a rich country now? That seems like an economic success story? Why wouldn’t you say it’s a success?
Korea made some incredibly effective social improvements. Not the least of which is King Sejong’s innovation in literacy.
Because his stated thesis is that it is impossible for poor countries to become middle-income or rich. The existence of cases such as the Four Asian Tigers or even Ireland, where poor countries have become middle-income or rich, fundamentally disproves this claim. There are also the cases of the Middle Eastern petrostates which (though not a particularly exportable development strategy) also saw a rise from poor to high-income. Even China in its latest 5YP is aiming to push its per-capita GDP into middle-income territory within the next decade or so.
And yeah, each case has its issues. South Korea notably has very high income inequality and high levels of control by the chaebols. However, these issues (while important and need to be addressed) don't take away from the fact that South Korea was a dirt-poor, colonially exploited country that has seen incredible economic growth into one of the world's wealthiest countries. It grew from a GDP of $3 billion in the 60s to over $1 trillion in the 2000s, which is a crazy economic turnaround.
Not to be pedantic, but vord through a "practically" in there before saying "impossible" which was probably intended to account for the handful of countries that have been able to claw their way out of the bottom rung.
Except the Asian tiger economies were achieved through a combination of practical policy and foreign development assistance. Nothing about what these countries have achieved is a fluke or unreproducible. Taiwan wasn't destined by some quirk of geography to become a semiconductor powerhouse in the same way that Qatar became a wealthy petrostate. What these countries achieved aren't impossible at all, 'practically' or not. Since decolonization, many post-colonial states have managed to move from low income classification to low-middle or even high-middle income: Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the entirety of Soviet-controlled eastern Europe, the Caucasus countries, and of course the Asian tiger economies.
I'm not saying there aren't difficulties: look into the literature on development studies and the Middle Income Trap will rear its ugly head pretty quick. Yes there are issues. Economic development isn't impossible by any means though; the evidence just doesn't support that claim.
I'm regularly impressed at where he puts his energy, and the intensity that drives his desire to solve wicked problems.
Whether it's funding nuclear reactors run by waste or eliminating disease, we'd be further out of the mess we're in if more billionaires used their power for good.
Even better, if we didn't have billionaires competing with democracy for power.
Silver linings, friend. Not crazy, wild fantasies!
It's always curious people can imagine world ending easier than just saying no to capitalism.
To me, it's that they can't say no to zero-sum thinking. It's not the end of the world or the end of capitalism.
There's something in-between, but knowing that that is required nuance that we're collectively not currently set up to appreciate
"Ending capitalism" would mean an international revolution on a scale that feels impossible on the climate change timeline we're on.
He is working really hard to try to sanitize his legacy.
It's takes a lot to convince me that the Earth doesn't already have too many people on it. Even with all the massive efficiency gains we're making in power generation, growing our food, making houses, etc; we're still consuming the earth's resources (and more importantly causing millions of species of animals to go extinct) at an alarming rate. Climate change is only a piece of the disaster pie that we've cooked ourselves into, ecological collapse is a very real possibility in many parts of the world because of the damage we've done to the ecosystem.
I really do not subscribe to the "line goes up forever" philosophy, but I also understand we don't have any real way to curb population growth in the short term (other than programs like sexual education in developing nations, providing better healthcare for everyone, etc)
It seems we are successfully curbing our own population growth. The second derivative is promising.
It's telling that population is not declining due to famine or something though. That doesn't corroborate the theory that we've reached the earth's carrying capacity.
The real question is, will we slow down (or even start to reduce) our population in time to stop the massive damage we're doing to the environment around us. And I'm not even talking about emissions, mostly things like pollution and deforestation. The biodiversity of our ecosystems has already been devastated, and its getting a lot worse very quickly.
No of course not. But it also will only get so bad. I’m not saying it will be pretty getting there but we will eventually be in a cleaner and healthier world.
I'm blanking on the term in sociology, but its pretty well established that humans are good at regulating birth rates without needing external controls. There's a bit of lag when modern medical technology diffuses into a population, but after that it balances out around replacement rates.
Perhaps, but with developing nations starting to build towards prosperity, what makes us so sure they won't follow the pattern that countries like the US, China, and Europe have? Sure our population growth has slowed down significantly now, but we still have MASSIVE amounts of people who all require food, housing, and luxuries. I think we're already past the point where the damage done to the ecosystems is becoming irreconcilable; what do we do when most of our biodiversity is gone?
By what measure? The earth's carrying capacity? We still have a surplus on basically everything humans need. Food, water, space. Population is actually declining already, but its due to choice. Not famine or some sort of mass extinction. It seems clear the earth can definitely carry more than 8 billion people.
We have a surplus of those things because we are destroying every other species on this planet to get them. Every year we expand our farm land, our fishing nets, our cities, our mining operations, etc. Those expansions always come at the cost of the local environment for the animals living there before.
I'm not even some tree hugging hippy, but simply looking at it pragmatically. The ecosystem that supports us and life as we know it on Earth is a finely balanced machine that we have been desperately hacking away at with a machete. At what point does it finally get damaged enough to become irreconcilable? A lot of scientists fear we're already well past that tipping point, we just haven't seen the worst of it yet.
Population growth is declining (very slowly), but our actual population and far more importantly our global consumption of resources is still growing, and the latter is growing alarmingly quickly. Now that rapidly developing nations are bringing billions of new people into the age of prosperity, they're starting to approach consuming on the level that the West has been irresponsibly doing for decades. So even if the number of people on earth isn't going up as much, the amount of the environment we have to devastate to support them will not stop growing.
Worldwide, agricultural land use and pasture use have peaked. (Cropland has not.)
Land use is still increasing in Africa and South America.
Yeah; Africa, South America, and south-east Asia still have a ton of developing and growth to do before they slow down. It's going to be a long road to any meaningful decrease in land use, especially since those areas that are still increasing are incredibly important ecosystems and carbon sinks.
It's also interesting to know the HYDE 3.2 line is rising to near peak levels again, makes me wonder if we'll break those numbers soon.
Edit: Also after some thinking, I wonder if the decrease in agricultural land use and pasture use is directly tied to the massive increase of factory farms for cows, pigs, and chickens since the 90's. Not exactly a very inspiring way to decrease our environmental impact on animals :(
Some light research suggests it probably is
Is what it is. We can make the choice to not have children as an individual, but we have no right to tell other people whether they can or cannot reproduce.
I never even began to suggest that. You can acknowledge a problem is a problem without proposing a good solution, because there obviously isn't one that anyone has right now.
I suppose I wouldn't even consider it a problem, in that case - more of a condition. Something we would need to work around. Conditions can be negative.
Population number itself is not a problem, it's arbitrary. The problem is how many resources were consuming and more importantly how we acquire those resources. It's impossible to ignore how badly damaged the earth already is, and how much worse it's going to get. Climate change is just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg.
His note doesn't read to me like he focuses on just economic growth in general. He still seems to want to focus on things that have the biggest impact on quality of life.
I see the motivation as twofold:
edit: One more reason that I think is implied but not explicitly named in the article. Focusing on economically helping poor undeveloped countries is also very advantageous because you attack multiple targets: economical development reduces mortality, reduces overpopulation, reduces large scale migration, in some situations reduces violent conflict etc., on top of possibly reducing environmental impacts. Whereas green programs in developed countries focusing on one goal, while great in some situations, are often inefficient and notoriously full of negative side effects. The probability of fucking things up is way smaller when focusing on helping the poorest.
Yeah, if only the large countries were able to talk to each other, devise a plan to decarbonize and then adhere to it.
I hate fascists. I hate liberals for always opening the door for them. Most of all I hate centrists who convince people that working together means communism means fascism. We need global socialism.
Personally I like realistic solutions the most. The chance that competitiveness between world's superpowers is going to end within the timeframe talked about here is tiny. And even with all the criticisms that I have for the west led by the US I greatly prefer a world led by the west to a world led by China because the west decided it doesn't want to be a superpower anymore. Global socialism is a pipe dream.
US only looked like it didn't want to be superpower because everyone fell in and US raked in free work from everyone else by selling the reserve currency.
US spent decades killing its high profile political rivals in other countries and using trade embargos on millions of people to eliminate any competition to its capitalist power structure. It didn't need to go to large scale wars to get what it wanted. Meanwhile the world learned to cope.
I don't want any one country to "lead the world". I want multipolar world where we talk stuff out and keep our promises.
Not one where "leader country" backs out of climate, healthcare and other commitments.
The US also got many allies by projecting soft power through mutually highly beneficial things like USAID programs (whether aimed at health or regional development), defense treaties or simply trade, all of that with pretty much no downsides, no catch. I'm in the ex-eastern bloc and US has been nothing but good to us.
Multipolar world in current reality means pretty much the opposite of "we talk stuff out and keep our promises", it means giving more influence to countries like Russia and China who care about international law even less than the US and want to expand their spheres of influence whether the affected countries want that or not. We want to be allies of the US. If the US backs out as a deterrent, sooner or later we will probably be forced into a hot war with Russia.
(the fact that Europe's defense and determination is not strong enough to be a deterrent on its own is entirely the result of our naivety and incompetence, not faulting US for that, though letting it happen would still be really stupid)
For a functioning multipolar world actors like China and Russia would have to change first and then the US could back down from being the biggest superpower, otherwise the result is going to be worse for everyone because at least now we have the US contest or deter their worst actions.
In a functioning multipolar world EU would first climb out of the US ass and get serious. Repeating neoliberal mantras, offloading high profile research to US and then buying it back with extreme markup, dismantling socialist systems that kept people cultured and educated in the name of financial profit, that has to stop.
The last straw was being literally forced to subsidize US weapons R&D to keep being the weaker partner in perpetuity. Are we idiots? Well we obviously are, if we insist on purchasing defense as a service from US while it's turning full Nazi at an alarming rate.
Stop parroting the usual "China bad => must climb deeper to US ass" mantra. Stop being afraid of Russia! Eastern EU alone has enough productive capacity to defeat Russia. Make the union tighter! Build EU army with nukes and chill for fu*cks sake!
I learned that this is a bad strategy when playing Diplomacy.
If you want a multipolar world, then Trump is moving us there. Encouraging Europe to become militarily stronger, giving China a bigger voice by pushing other countries in their direction, and neglecting situations like Sudan and leaving it to the UN making statements. Because any enforcement action on the US's part alone would not be talking stuff out.
It reads to me like you believe a multipolar world would involved multiple powers working toward a common goal. But what if the powers-that-be have different goals?
That’s not how international trade works. Often, imports aren’t balanced by exports, but that’s because the money is invested instead. The US is a great place to invest and people in many countries like to own US investments. (What do you think billionaires own?)
If the stock market tanks or the dollar drops, those investments will lose value. Hasn’t happened yet, though. Unless foreign investors lose their shirts, it’s not accurate to say that the US is getting free imports.
In the end, humans are inherently selfish and more than willing to backstab one another for personal gain. That's been the case for the last 4000 years of recorded history. Is what it is, at this point.
The best way to get anything done, then, is to setup situations of mutual benefit. Economic growth, and cheapening green energy, is one way to have that. Telling a developing country stop using coal and just... suck it up and be poor just isn't going to be a convincing argument. Telling them that solar is competitive with coal in price/watt and has XYZ additional benefits is.
I don't necessarily think this is the case about your first point. Sure there is probably evidence to prove your point many times over and the mainstream media will push that narrative on you at any point they can but in reality I think most people are inherently good. Im aware that what I have just said seems the opposite of what I believe but its obviously a lot more complex than that. We have been conditioned to think this way so as not to realise that the ruling class/capitalists are taking everything from us.
The idea that people are selfish only serves to further promote capitalist ideals but we always see evidence of communities coming together to help each other. The LA fires was one such occasion and probably every other disaster that hits the US in the future since the gov aint coming to help. I have read a fair few anthropology books and ethnographies over the years and for the most part the texts promote an idea that humans were pretty chill over the millennia.
You only have to look at human history to see that’s not the case. The reality is that beyond the size of a village, human’s ability to cooperate altruistically breaks down quickly. Which isn’t surprising, this is about the extent to which our evolutionary social structures end and our constructed social structures start.
At a national or international level, when people play the prisoners dilemma, there will always be actors who will rat out the rest, and this will cause them to benefit immensely to everyone else’s detriment, and ensures the winning strategy is not to cooperate. It’s not a coincidence that every socialist state devolved into a authoritarian command economy heliocentric around a single dictator.
I get the feeling we will have to agree to disagree here because regardless of whether I go find sources to back up my point of view I think this specific topic is based on life experience and our particular views on the world and society. Had I seen this comment a decade ago I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly but over time I have softened my view on humanity in general.
I will agree that the village size example you used is accurate as all the evidence of I would provide would be in that context. In saying that I do want to point out that there are still people out there that are capable of thinking of the species in the larger context. Just look at all the climate scientists and activists. There are plenty of people who understand that to solve your local problems can lead to solving bigger issues.
I will leave some links to some of the books that have helped change my views on this topic.
https://anth101.com/book/
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/439533/the-social-distance-between-us-by-mcgarvey-darren/9781529103885
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-at-the-cafe
https://www.dogsection.org/product/solidarity-economy
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/347571/mans-search-for-meaning-by-viktor-e-frankl/9781846046384
With high population density and being forced inland and farm came the issue of not being able to walk away from bullies (aka kings, dictators, CEOs...).
We are pretty new to this. Its an exponential after all. Every major region has its own philosophy school dedicated to dealing with this issue and it's still ongoing area of research and experimentation.
With decline of globalist capitalism we will see more experimentation. I have hopes that in couple more centuries we will devise some cool arrangements that will limit the power of bullies more effectively.
It's important to remember that the goal for most of us is not to bully others, but to learn and grow. Better work on infrastructure that will facilitate that rather than slaving for random overlord.
Mirror: https://archive.is/zdaMP
And direct link to Gates' memo:
https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation/reader/three-tough-truths-about-climate