{"id":39519,"date":"2025-11-05T18:33:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T18:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/39519\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T18:33:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T18:33:09","slug":"bill-gates-doesnt-regret-his-controversial-climate-memo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/39519\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Gates doesn’t regret his controversial climate memo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, Bill Gates published a 17-page memo<\/a> on his personal website that critics said pitted climate and public health efforts against each other, when they should instead be working in tandem.<\/p>\n

Monday night, speaking at Caltech in Pasadena, Gates doubled down, brushing off the critiques that came from across the ideological spectrum, including from climate scientists and President Trump. <\/p>\n

Stressing that philanthropic resources are finite, Gates said he\u2019s shifted some of his efforts from preventing climate change to reducing human disease and malnutrition in a world that he said will undoubtedly become warmer. <\/p>\n

The United Nations\u2019 2025 Emissions Gap Report<\/a>, published on Tuesday, says it\u2019s likely that by 2100, global temperatures will have increased between 2.0 and 2.4 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. Gates said he believes that number will be closer to 3 degrees Celsius.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real measure there is all the things we\u2019re doing to help the most vulnerable people on the planet,\u201d he said. He went on to say that he wants to refocus on scientific innovation that will remove climate-change-related costs \u2014 what he called a \u201cgreen premium\u201d \u2014 from technology to address hunger and sickness in the poorest countries in the world.<\/p>\n

Climate scientists raised concerns about Gates\u2019 memo released last week, arguing it inaccurately isolated the challenges of disease and hunger from climate change. \u201cThey are not separate problems, they are problems being exacerbated by this very issue,\u201d said Katharine Hayhoe, a leading atmospheric scientist who studies climate change, in a forum Tuesday afternoon with other scientists.<\/p>\n

At Caltech, in front of over 1,000 people \u2014 a mix of mostly students and professors \u2014 Gates expressed frustration with climate scientists who critiqued his memo as erroneously downplaying the potential impacts of climate change. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat world do they live in?\u201d he asked at one point, arguing that his critics were not taking into account that you could do more to save lives by spending money to address disease and other issues than by investing in reducing carbon emissions. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a numeric game in a world with very finite resources,\u201d Gates said on Monday night. \u201cMore finite than they should be.\u201d <\/p>\n

Gates also rebuked Trump, who he said made a \u201cgigantic misreading\u201d of the memo in a Truth Social post<\/a> last Wednesday that suggested Gates was no longer a climate change believer. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a climate activist, but I\u2019m also a child survival activist, and I hope you will be too,\u201d Gates told the crowd at Caltech. \u201cThat\u2019s the best way to make sure that everyone gets a chance to live a healthy life, no matter where they\u2019re born or what climate they\u2019re born into.\u201d<\/p>\n

The billionaire said that his shift in focus to human health is intended to support poor countries that typically receive aid from the U.S. and other rich nations, at a time when the U.S. has backed away from such largesse. The Trump administration in July paused most <\/a>foreign aid payments, which make up just about 1% of the national budget, but which researchers at the nonprofit Center for Global Development have found save some 3.3 million lives worldwide. <\/p>\n

At Caltech, Gates also discussed technologies he supports to mitigate climate change, including nuclear fusion reactors and geo-engineering. <\/p>\n

Gates\u2019 critics within the climate science world say he is focusing on the wrong things. \u201cHe\u2019s sort of perpetually downplayed the importance of the clean energy transition with the technology we have in favor of promoting some future tech,\u201d said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. It could take decades for some of those technologies to be implemented at scale, said Mann. \u201cWe don\u2019t have decades to address the climate crisis.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, Bill Gates published a 17-page memo on his personal website that critics said pitted climate and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[27085,21162,27084,20,443,7833,27088,27086,6103,48,52,51,5562,1637,47,50,49,27087,1970,2281,8074],"class_list":["post-39519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-17-page-memo","tag-bill-gates","tag-caltech","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-critic","tag-finite-resource","tag-human-disease","tag-hunger","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-last-week","tag-life","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-poor-country","tag-technology","tag-u-s","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}