For decades, the Democratic Party has elevated the fight to stop climate change above every other economic concern. Jobs, energy prices, economic growth, and even inequality all took back seats to climate change in influencing the party’s public policy priorities. Now, in a truly dramatic reversal, one of the party’s biggest funders, including $50 million to 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s campaign alone, Bill Gates has done an about face, embracing, without acknowledgement, the Trump administration’s position that while climate change is a challenge, the best way to address the problem is through economic growth, not an all-out push to reduce carbon emissions.
Gates wrote an essay describing the narrative peddled by environmentalists that “cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization” and that “nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.” Gates flatly rejects this premise, writing, “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.”
Gates goes on to debunk other false climate narratives pushed by the Left, including that rising temperatures are causing more weather-related deaths. “Excessively hot weather now causes around 500,000 deaths every year. Despite the impression you’d get from the news, though, the number has been decreasing for some time, chiefly because more people can afford air conditioners.” He added, “The story so far with natural disasters is similar. In the past century, direct deaths from natural disasters, such as drowning during a flood, have fallen 90 percent to between 40,000 and 50,000 people a year, thanks mostly to better warning systems and more-resilient buildings.”
Gates goes on to document some of the real harm environmentalists have inflicted on poor people with their efforts to cut emissions at any cost. “For example, a few years ago, the government of one low-income country set out to cut emissions by banning synthetic fertilizers,” Gates writes, describing Sri Lanka without mentioning it by name. “Farmers’ yields plummeted, there was much less food available, and prices skyrocketed. The country was hit by a crisis because the government valued reducing emissions above other important things.”
Gates even goes on to chide efforts by “multilateral lenders” to “ stop financing fossil fuel projects” in poor countries. “This pressure has had almost no impact on global emissions,” Gates correctly notes, “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.”
“From the standpoint of improving lives, using more energy is a good thing, because it’s so closely correlated with economic growth,” Gates continues, sounding more and more like a Republican. “More energy use is a key part of prosperity.” Absolutely correct.
Instead of focusing on reducing emissions, Gates encourages people to focus on economic growth instead. He invokes a University of Chicago Climate Impact Lab analysis that found when expected economic growth in poor countries was taken into account by climate impact models, deaths in those countries were projected to fall by half. “Since the economic growth that’s projected for poor countries will reduce climate deaths by half,” Gates concludes, “it follows that faster and more expansive growth will reduce deaths by even more.”
Before Trump appointed him, Energy Secretary Chris Wright outlined similar conclusions in a report to his company, Liberty Energy. “Climate change is a global challenge but is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life,” the report reads, using words very similar to those later used by Gates. “Making energy more expensive or unreliable compromises people, national security, and the environment.”
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Adaptation was, is, and always will be humanity’s best response to an ever-changing climate. “Pre-modern humans survived multiple glaciations with simply massive temperature and climate swings,” Wright’s report reads. “Modern humans are vastly better equipped to deal with climate change today.”
We don’t expect Gates to start switching his donations away from Democrats to Republicans, but his message of economic growth and adaptation rather than war on fossil fuels will seep into the saner parts of the party. Maybe then, with bipartisan majorities, Congress can pass permitting reform that will make America a country that builds things again.