As politicians prepare to jet into Belém, Brazil, for the 30th annual UN climate meeting, philanthropist Bill Gates has provided a straightforward insight: climate summits like COP30 should prioritize what truly improves human lives, and not just chase reductions in emissions or temperatures. His point is both refreshingly overdue and, frankly, obvious common sense.
I have long argued that policymakers should always ask: What’s the smartest way to do the most good with limited resources? For billions of people in the developing world, tackling immediate challenges like poverty and disease outweighs chasing distant temperature goals.
In poor countries, parents are not kept awake by concern about achieving a 0.1°C temperature reduction in a century. They worry whether their children will survive a bout with malaria or get a decent education. As Gates points out, “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.” Every year, more than 7.5 million people in poorer countries die from illnesses that can be very cheaply prevented or managed. Smart investments in health, nutrition, and education could every year save over 4 million people, while also building growth and resilience for the future.
Gates’s common-sense message is at the crest of a growing global shift in thinking. For years, no difference could be tolerated from dogmatic climate conformism. Making drastic emissions cuts at any cost was the paramount policy goal.
This extremist message was repeated ad nauseum by the United Nations secretary-general, endless politicians, and an army of hectoring celebrities. Anyone questioning the supremacy of the climate threat or expressing skepticism at the costly policies was derided as a “climate denier”.
Suddenly, pragmatism and nuanced thinking are back in fashion. In the US, Democrat Senator Chris Coons of Delaware declared that climate is “not a top three issue right now”. Canada’s Liberal prime minister—who warned a decade ago that potential climate catastrophe meant fossil fuel reserves could be “unburnable”—is fast-tracking the construction of an LNG export terminal and promising to “transform our country into an energy superpower.”
Even the green-leaning British and German governments are newly talking about the need to inject some economics into climate and energy policy.
It is time to move beyond the doomsday narratives that have dominated the climate discussion. Climate change is a real problem, but it is not the end of the world. Unaddressed, climate economics shows that it might shave 2-3% off global GDP by 2100—meaning we’ll be 435% richer instead of 450%. Climate is one issue among many, not an apocalypse that eclipses everything else.
Still, the same old activists are repeating their well-trodden arguments. First, the notion that climate spending is not crowding out efforts to tackle poverty. This idea is being pushed by climate professor Michael Oppenheimer, who claims Gates sets up a “false dichotomy”.
Yet, anyone living in the real world knows that money can’t be spent twice. By their own proud admission, the world’s multilateral development banks—international organizations funded largely by taxpayers to help the world’s poorest countries—devoted an astonishing $137 billion to climate financing in 2024. That is money spent on climate that won’t be spent on preventing disease and hunger.
Globally, we have spent over $14 trillion on climate policies. Last year alone, the cost exceeded $2 trillion. Again, it is money spent on climate policy that cannot be spent on basic education and maternal healthcare.
Then there is the alarmist claim from climate professor Michael Mann that “there is no greater threat to developing nations than the climate crisis.”
This patronizing argument suggests that climate campaigners in ivory towers know far better than those from the Global South. In real life, Africans from 39 nations rank climate as their 31st most important problem of 34 — far behind education, jobs, health, and roads. The greatest challenges are pretty obvious if you live in poverty, where disease and hunger claim lives daily.
What green campaigners are essentially saying is that poor people need emissions cuts first and foremost, before more food, medicine, or pathways out of poverty. Bill Gates has countered this by urging us to focus on what helps most.
A climate summit focused on human welfare would recognize that boosting prosperity is one of the best policy responses to climate change because it makes people more resilient.
Like with any policy, we should approach the climate with a focus on what makes the biggest impact. That means ending the obsession with costly and inefficient net zero and doubling down on adaptation, as well as R&D investment to catalyze green energy innovation.
In the Amazon city of Belém, the private jets of the world’s climate elites are massing for yet another climate summit. There—more than anywhere else—it is well past time for common sense to get a hearing.
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First”.