![\"Rick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rick_Perry_and_Bill_Gates_ARPA-E_1-1024x682.jpg.optimal.jpg\" "\\"Rick_Perry_and_Bill_Gates_ARPA-E_(1)\\"")
Bill Gates poses with Rick Perry in 2019, during Perry’s tenure as Secretary of Energy under the first Trump administration. (Public Domain)<\/p>\nBill Gates poses with Rick Perry in 2019, during Perry’s tenure as Secretary of Energy under the first Trump administration. (Public Domain)<\/p>\n
\u201cI suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.\u201d Thus wrote the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1966.<\/p>\n
If Maslow were around today, I imagine he might endorse the corollary that if your only tool is technology, every problem appears to have a technofix. And that\u2019s an apt characterization of the \u201ctech bro\u201d-centered thinking so prevalent today in public environmental discourse.<\/p>\n
There is no better example than Bill Gates, who just this week redefined the concept of bad timing with the release of a 17-page memo<\/a> intended to influence the proceedings at the upcoming COP30 international climate summit in Brazil. The memo dismissed the seriousness<\/a> of the climate crisis just as (quite possibly)<\/a> the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in human history\u2014climate-fueled<\/a> Melissa\u2014struck Jamaica with catastrophic impact<\/a>. The very next day a major new climate report (disclaimer: I was a co-author) entitled \u201ca planet on the brink<\/a>\u201d was published. The report received far less press coverage than the Gates missive. The legacy media is apparently more interested in the climate musings of an erstwhile PC mogul than a sober assessment by the world\u2019s leading climate scientists.<\/p>\n Gates became a household name in the 1990s as the Microsoft CEO who delivered the Windows operating system. (I must confess, I was a Mac guy). Microsoft was notorious for releasing software mired with security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing the premature release of features and profit over security and reliability. His response to the latest worm or virus crashing your PC and compromising your personal data? \u201cHey, we\u2019ve got a patch for that!\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the very same approach Gates has taken with the climate crisis. His venture capital group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, invests in<\/a> fossil fuel-based infrastructure (like natural gas with carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery), while Gates downplays the role<\/a> of clean energy and rapid decarbonization. Instead, he favors hypothetical new energy tech, including \u201cmodular nuclear reactors\u201d that couldn\u2019t possibly be scaled up over the time frame in which the world must transition off fossil fuels.<\/p>\n Most troublingly, Gates has peddled a planetary \u201cpatch\u201d for the climate crisis. He has financed for-profit schemes to implement geoengineering<\/a> interventions that involve spraying massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and cool the planet. What could possibly go wrong<\/a>? And hey, if we screw up this planet, we\u2019ll just geoengineer Mars. Right Elon<\/a>?<\/p>\n Such technofixes for the climate, in fact, lead us down a dangerous road<\/a>, both because they displace far safer and more reliable options\u2014namely the clean energy transition\u2014and because they provide an excuse for business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Why decarbonize, after all, if we can just solve the problem with a \u201cpatch\u201d later?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing, Bill Gates: There is no \u201cpatch\u201d for the climate crisis. And there is no way to reboot the planet if you crash it. The only safe and reliable way out when you find yourself in a climate hole is to stop digging\u2014and burning\u2014fossil fuels.<\/p>\n It was arguably<\/a> Gates who\u2014at least in part\u2014inspired the tech-bro villain Peter Isherwell in the Adam McKay film \u201cDon\u2019t Look Up.\u201d The premise of the film is that a giant \u201ccomet\u201d (a very thinly veiled metaphor for the climate crisis) is hurtling toward Earth as politicians fail to act. So they turn to Isherwell who insists he has proprietary tech (a metaphor for geoengineering, again thinly veiled) that can save the day: space drones developed by his corporation that will break the comet apart. Coincidentally, the drones are designed to then mine the comet fragments for trillions of dollars\u2019 worth of rare metals, that all go to Isherwell and his corporation. If you haven\u2019t seen the film (which I highly recommend<\/a>), I\u2019ll let you imagine how it all works out.<\/p>\n For those who have been following Gates on climate for some time, his so-called sudden \u201cpivot\u201d<\/a> isn\u2019t really a \u201cpivot\u201d at all. It\u2019s a logical consequence of the misguided path he\u2019s been headed down for well over a decade.<\/p>\n I became concerned about Gates\u2019 framing of the climate crisis nearly a decade ago when a journalist reached out to me, asking me to comment on his supposed \u201cdiscovery\u201d of a formula for predicting carbon emissions. (The formula is really an \u201cidentity\u201d that involves expressing carbon emissions as a product of terms related to population, economic growth, energy efficiency, and fossil fuel dependence). I noted, with some amusement<\/a>, that the mathematical relationship Gates had \u201cdiscovered\u201d was so widely known it had a name, the \u201cKaya identity,\u201d after the energy economist Y\u014dichi Kaya who presented the relationship in a textbook nearly three decades ago. It\u2019s familiar not just to climate scientists in the field but to college students taking an introductory course on climate change.<\/p>\n If this seems like a gratuitous critique, it is not. It speaks to a concerning degree of arrogance. Did Gates really think that something as conceptually basic as decomposing carbon emissions into a product of constituent terms had never been attempted before? That he\u2019s so brilliant that anything he thinks up must be a novel discovery?<\/p>\n I reserved my criticism of Gates, at the time, not for his rediscovery of the Kaya identity (hey\u2014if can help his readers understand it, that\u2019s great) but for declaring that it somehow implies that \u201cwe need an energy miracle\u201d to get to zero carbon emissions. It doesn\u2019t. I explained that Gates \u201cdoes an injustice to the very dramatic inroads that renewable energy and energy efficiency are making,\u201d noting peer-reviewed studies by leading experts that provide \u201cvery credible outlines for how we could reach a 100 percent noncarbon energy generation by 2050.\u201d<\/p>\n The so-called \u201cmiracle\u201d he speaks of exists\u2014it\u2019s called the sun, and wind, and geothermal, and energy storage technology. Real world solutions exist now and are easily scalable with the right investments and priorities. The obstacles aren\u2019t technological. They\u2019re political.<\/p>\n Gates\u2019 dismissiveness in this case wasn\u2019t a one-off. It was part of a consistent pattern of downplaying clean energy while promoting dubious and potentially dangerous technofixes in which he is often personally invested. When I had the chance to question him<\/a> about this directly (The Guardian asked me to contribute to a list of questions they were planning on asking him in an interview a few years ago), his response was evasive and misleading. He insisted that there is a \u201cpremium\u201d paid for clean energy buildout when in fact it has a lower levelized cost<\/a> than fossil fuels or nuclear and deflected the questions with ad hominem swipes. (\u201cHe [Mann] actually does very good work on climate change. So I don\u2019t understand why he\u2019s acting like he\u2019s anti-innovation.\u201d)<\/p>\n This all provides us some context for evaluating Gates\u2019 latest missive, which plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo, drawing upon nearly every one of the tropes embraced by professional climate disinformers<\/a> like self-styled \u201cSkeptical Environmentalist\u201d Bjorn Lomborg. (Incidentally, Lomborg\u2019s center has received millions of dollars<\/a> of funding from the Gates Foundation in recent years and Lomborg recently acknowledged<\/a> serving as an adviser to Gates on climate issues.)<\/p>\n Among the classic Lomborgian myths promoted in Gates\u2019 new screed, which I\u2019ll paraphrase here, is the old standby that \u201cclean energy is too expensive.\u201d (Gates likes to emphasize a few difficult-to-decarbonize sectors like steel or air travel as a distraction from the fact that most of our energy infrastructure can readily be decarbonized now.) He also insists that \u201cwe can just adapt,\u201d although in the absence of concerted action, warming could plausibly<\/a> push us past the limit of our adaptive capacity as a species.<\/p>\n He argues that \u201cefforts to fight climate change detract from efforts to address human health threats.\u201d (A central point of my new book Science Under Siege<\/a> with public health scientist Peter Hotez is that climate and human health are inseparable, with climate change fueling the spread of deadly disease). Then there is his assertion that \u201cthe poor and downtrodden have more pressing concerns\u201d when, actually, it is just the opposite; the poor and downtrodden are the most threatened by climate change because they have the least wealth and resilience.<\/p>\n What Gates is putting forward aren\u2019t legitimate arguments that can be made in good faith. They are shopworn fossil fuel industry talking points. Being found parroting them is every bit as embarrassing as being caught\u2014metaphorically speaking\u2014with your pants down.<\/p>\n For years when I would criticize Gates for what I consider to be his misguided take<\/a> on climate, colleagues would say, \u201cyou just don\u2019t understand what Gates is saying!\u201d Now, with Donald Trump<\/a> and the right-wing Murdoch media machine (the Wall Street Journal editorial board<\/a> and now an op-ed by none other than Lomborg himself<\/a> in the New York Post) celebrating Gates\u2019 new missive, I can confidently turn around and say, \u201cNo, you didn\u2019t understand what he was saying.\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe\u2014just maybe\u2014we\u2019ve learned an important lesson here: The solution to the climate crisis isn\u2019t going to come from the fairy-dust-sprinkled flying unicorns that are the \u201cbenevolent plutocrats.\u201d They don\u2019t exist. The solution is going to have to come from everyone else, using every tool at our disposal to push back against an ecocidal agenda driven by plutocrats, polluters, petrostates, propagandists, and too often now, the press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill Gates poses with Rick Perry in 2019, during Perry’s tenure as Secretary of Energy under the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264008,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-264007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}