World's most obnoxious carbon dioxide hysteric decides that there are worse things than carbon dioxide

The tide has turned against the climatists.

Bill Gates, the world’s most tiresome do-gooder, announced in an encyclical letter last week that climate change may not be the worst thing in the world after all. Ahead of the ponderously named 2025 Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30), Gates wrote that the world has “made great progress” on emissions and denied that “climate change will decimate civilisation.” He promised that “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future” and deplored a “doomsday outlook” that “is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals.” He further argued that “money being designated for climate” frequently goes towards the wrong things, with “less-effective projects … diverting money and attention from efforts that will have more impact on the human condition.”

It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change. Next month’s global climate summit in Brazil … is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives.¹ Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.

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. 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.

Gates’s post is an undeniable volte face, if a tangled one that tries to have it both ways. I guess it’s hard to spend a decade as a self-appointed climate hyperventilator only to decide that there are more important things to hyperventilate about than the climate. Thus Gates doesn’t directly say we should worry less about emissions; rather, he suggests that current projections aren’t that bad (because of our aforementioned “progress”) and insists that we “focus on innovation.” In this way, “over the next ten years we will have new affordable zero-carbon technologies ready to roll out at scale.” Gates believes we can afford to place our faith in magical innovation now because his projects have panned out so well and also because artificial intelligence.²

Gates naturally surrounds these statements with buckets of technoreligious copium. The man sings the praises in turn of cell phones, electric vehicles, heat pumps, methane-preventing cattle vaccines, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and the internet. There is nothing that some future innovation cannot fix because in Gatesland there are no trade-offs, only solutions.

Our Powerpoint Jesus of course spent many years singing an entirely different tune. In 2018, Gates was suggesting that the world’s poor might have to take a backseat to reducing emissions, conceding that developing-world economic growth may be “good for the world overall—but it will be very bad for the climate, unless we find ways to do it without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.” Two years later, when Covid was literally the only thing our flabby goof could think of, he wrote that climate change promised to be just like a recurring coronavirus pandemic, except “spread … out over a much longer period of time.” He predicted that “by 2100,” climate change “could be five times as deadly” as the virus that gave the plague chronicle its name.³ In 2021, Gates published a dismal book on How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, and to sell as many copies as possible he worked the words “climate disaster” or the equivalent into all manner of social media posts and interviews. He tweeted about the necessity of avoiding “climate catastrophe” and about “why we must reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to avoid a climate disaster.” In a CBS interview that same year, Gates opined that “The Syrian War was a twentieth of what climate migration will look like” and spitballed that “the deaths per year” would no longer be five times, but “ten times greater than what we’ve experienced in the pandemic.”

So yes, Gates has certainly moderated his views, and that’s very important. Among other things, it is vindication of my longstanding thesis that climatism as an ideology is dying. Below the fold, I’ll explain what is killing climatism, and why it matters that Gates has changed his tune.