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.