Bill Gates Says We'll Survive Climate Change, World Furious

In the panic age, nothing offends like optimism

From the “You can’t make this up” file:

Billionaire Bill Gates yesterday gave an interview on CNBC and released an essay called “Three Tough Truths About Climate.” One of the “tough truths” was — this is not a joke — “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.” Gates put his “truth” in a box under a field, probably the most humorously grasping use of green imagery since the UNorth commercial in Michael Clayton.

Why survival should be “tough” news wasn’t clarified, but Gates offered a summary of his thesis:

There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. 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. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Reaction was swift and furious. In the words of the immortal Greta Thunberg, “HOW DARE YOU!” The New York Times rushed a piece out titled, “Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead To Humanity’s Demise.’” The paper linked to Gates’s net worth on the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index, to his prior comments about irreversible ecological damage, and to the Gates Foundation’s $1.4 billion commitment to climate change research. It didn’t link to Gates’s new essay, though, instead quoting the editor of Inside Philanthropy, who said “one could imagine” this was Gates’s way of “not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.” Social media is still burning with theories about Gates betraying the climate cause to get out from under an investigation into his foundation’s alleged funding of Chinese entities. The imminent extinction dream is dying hard.

On the eve of the the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Gates’s downshift from “We’re gonna die!” to “A serious but survivable problem” was ripped as a grievous affront. The climate story has been reported as an extinction panic for decades, in the process becoming one of the most influential news stories ever. Its impact reached far beyond energy policy to realms like mental health, family planning, even journalism and academic freedom. Ostensible uniformity of climate consensus was used as an argument against both “viewpoint diversity” on campuses and objective “both sides” reporting.

Global warming and the certainty of a “sixth mass extinction” became this century’s End-Times religion, replete with the Millerite pattern of repeat “final” warnings and failed predictions or “tipping points” (we reportedly just passed one two weeks ago, missing a chance to prevent “widespread dieback”). Even when warnings were scientifically accurate, the concept of unsurvivable catastrophe was still treated as an article of faith, and refusal to panic could be a cancelable offense. Denial of climate emergency was even listed in Twitter’s Files as the company’s “canonical” (!) example of “unhealthy content,” i.e. speech that should be shadow-banned even if it doesn’t violate rules:

Climate denial, the “canonical” speech offense

Now one of the most influential figures in the fight against global warming, a man who just a few years ago wrote a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, essentially just mumbled “never mind,” in a memo that reads like an admission of strategic overreach.

“To use the British expression, they over-egged the custard,” says Professor Steven Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science in Barack Obama’s Department of Energy and author of Unsettled.

Just when you thought the world had exhausted the reasons for hating Gates, people on all sides of the climate issue are seething. The Microsoft titan will go down in history as God’s own proof that no amount of money can buy likeability: