Suddenly, Bill Gates is admitting that climate change won’t lead to “humanity’s demise” after all.
Now he tells us, after he long joined other climate alarmists in warning of “disaster,” as the West burned trillions on “decarbonizing” and steered economies toward the stone age.
The “doomsday view” that “cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization” is “wrong,” the Microsoft co-founder writes; people will “be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
His 2021 book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” somehow missed these truths; he predictied instead that global warming “could be worse” than COVID.
Climate change “will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on,” he once warned — “greater than landing on the moon,” “eradicating smallpox” and even “putting a computer on every desk.”
Gates still thinks it’s a “serious” problem, but admits “the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals” and “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
That’s precisely what moderates, like economist Bjorn Lomborg, and most conservatives have said for years.
The chief goal should be “improving lives” — not trying to end all carbon-fuel use, especially when China is still relentlessly building coal plants.
Like Lomborg, Gates now acknowledges that greater “prosperity” can let mankind cope just fine as the planet warms: “The faster people become prosperous and healthy, the more lives we can save.”
Thus air conditioning, however it increases emissions, also lets people escape heat and avoid sickness and death from heat exposure.
Too bad Gates has spent the last four years effectively endorsing the left’s efforts to makes Western nation aim for “net zero” carbon emissions — a quest that kills prosperity and spreads misery.
Western Europe, in particular, has hamstrung itself with foolish efforts to depend on wind and solar power; Germany even shuttered its nuclear plants, and so saw its economy contract in 2024 for the second year in a row.
And despite all that self-inflicted economic damage, global emissions and temperatures have continued to rise.
If Gates wants any credit for belatedly seeing the light, he needs to put maximum effort into getting the left’s climate warriors to wake up, too.