Bill Gates Rethinks Climate Catastrophe

 The climate conformity caucus is breaking up at long last, and the latest evidence is a change of mind by none other than Bill Gates. The Microsoft billionaire turned liberal philanthropist now says the “doomsday view” about the climate is wrong, and “it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”

As epiphanies go, this is welcome. Mr. Gates, in his advocacy, has been a leading promoter of the view that a warming climate is an existential crisis that demands urgent political action. His 2021 book has the nuanced title, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” Without innovation, he wrote, “we cannot keep the earth livable.” The effect on humans “will in all likelihood be catastrophic.”

Now, on the cusp of the latest COP30 climate conclave in Brazil next month, Mr. Gates offers different advice. An essay released on his website promises “three tough truths about climate,” the first of which is that rising temperatures are “a serious problem” but “will not be the end of civilization.”

Wait—this is a hard truth? You mean humanity isn’t doomed? The only people for whom this is a “tough” message are the climate zealots who remain committed to the idea that rising temperatures are a totalizing emergency. They say this to intimidate politicians into giving them billions of dollars in green subsidies, along with other powers to remake the modern economy and society.

Mr. Gates now sounds like Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist” whose writing often runs in these pages. Mr. Lomborg has been arguing for years that while warming temperatures are a reality, the world’s poor in particular face far more urgent challenges. He believes, as these columns have also long argued, that the best way to cope with rising temperatures is through innovation, adaptation, and policies that continue to spread economic growth and prosperity.

Now listen to the new Mr. Gates. “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,” he writes. “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.”

Health problems related to poverty, such as malaria, kill about eight million people a year, according to Mr. Gates’s essay. While about 500,000 people a year die from excessive heat, he says, “surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier, killing nearly ten times more.” Mr. Lomborg has been assailed by the climate left for making that same point about deaths from cold versus heat.

Mr. Gates also recognizes that “using more energy is a good thing,” because it means economic growth. Yet activists in wealthy Western countries, he says, have pushed to keep fossil fuels in the ground. “This pressure has had almost no impact on global emissions,” he says, “but it has made it harder for low-income countries to get low-interest loans for power plants that would bring reliable electricity to their homes, schools, and health clinics.”

Give that last part a Glory Hallelujah.

This is a hard slap of reality from a source that the COP30 crowd can’t easily ignore. It’s also a sign of the shift away from the catastrophe consensus that has dominated debate about climate. If Bill Gates can dissent from Armageddon orthodoxy, maybe Facebook won’t censor our op-eds in the future.

Much credit for this consensus crackup belongs to the world’s democratic voters, who have made clear over many years in many places that they won’t accept a degraded quality of life for promised climate benefits decades in the future. Perhaps Mr. Gates is responding to that political reality.

He calls for investments in innovation, with a vision for a world in which “almost all new cars will be electric,” and clean cement and steel displace today’s materials. But give the billionaire credit for also urging an intellectual climate change at COP30, or as Mr. Gates calls it, “a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare.” Imagine that.