Bill Gates says climate change ‘will not lead to humanity’s demise’

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has spent billions of his own money to raise the alarm about the dangers of climate change, is now pushing back against what he calls a “doomsday outlook” and appears to have shifted his stance on the risks posed by a warming planet.

In a lengthy memo released Tuesday, Gates sought to tamp down the alarmism he said many people use to describe the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, he called for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” he wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Coming just four years after he published a book titled “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” Tuesday’s memo appears to amount to a major reframing of how Gates, who is worth an estimated $122 billion, is thinking about the challenges posed by a rapidly warming world.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said Gates was setting up a false dichotomy “usually propagated by climate skeptics” that pits efforts to tackle climate change against foreign aid for the poor.

“Despite his efforts to make clear that he takes climate change seriously, his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change,” Oppenheimer said in an email.

The Gates memo arrives a week before world leaders gather in Belém, Brazil, for the United Nations annual climate summit, known this year as COP30. Gates, who turned 70 Tuesday and has attended the event in previous years, will not be participating. He declined to comment about his memo.

Over the past decade, Gates has spent large sums of his personal fortune pushing for policies that would reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet. He has invested in companies working on clean energy and efforts to help poor communities adapt to rising seas, more extreme heat, fires and drought and intensifying storms and floods.

In 2015, Gates founded Breakthrough Energy, a venture fund to back promising new clean energy startups. It grew to include a climate policy group in Washington to promote ways to cut emissions.

“Climate change is already affecting most people’s lives, and when we think about the impact on our families and future generations, it can feel overwhelming,” he wrote in an essay in 2023 that was published on the website of Breakthrough Energy and has since been taken down. “The scale and speed of the transformation required to build a clean energy future is unprecedented.”

In March, Breakthrough Energy announced deep cuts that included dismantling its climate policy group.

And in May, Gates announced plans to wind down the Gates Foundation, which has spent billions on climate-related issues, including a $1.4 billion commitment to help farmers in poor countries adapt to a hotter planet.

As the Trump administration has slashed foreign aid budgets and shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, Gates has redirected much of his charitable giving to fill the void left by the U.S. government and focus on health and poverty in the developing world.

“He saw the USAID situation as more pressing, and something where he could be more effective,” said Johannes Ackva, who leads climate work at Founders Pledge, an organization that advises philanthropists.

Gates continues to invest in clean energy startups through groups including the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the Breakthrough Energy Fellows. In the memo, Gates did not announce a change in strategy for funding climate ventures.

He also continues to fund in nuclear energy. Last week, TerraPower, a nuclear company he backs, secured crucial federal approval as it works to bring a new type of reactor to market.

In the memo, Gates argued that the world should invest in efforts to lower the cost of clean energy and find ways to make manufacturing, agriculture and transportation less polluting.

But the memo also sought to redirect efforts away from the campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and instead focus on other ways to improve human lives and reduce suffering.

While he called climate change “a very important problem” that needs to be solved, he said that “the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals.” And that was “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” he wrote.

The world is warming faster than at any point in recorded history. Last year was the hottest on record. Scientists warn that unless countries make a rapid shift away from burning fossil fuels, the planet is likely to experience extreme weather and other changes faster than humans can adapt. Low-lying island nations are already seeing their land disappearing under rising seas caused by melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. An estimated 62,775 people died from heat in Europe last year.

Gates sought to shift attention away from the focus on temperatures, however, writing in the memo that “temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate.”

David Callahan, the editor of Inside Philanthropy, said Gates could be trying to reposition the debate around climate change during a highly political moment when Republicans are overtly hostile toward efforts to address the issue.

“One could imagine this being a continuation of wanting to move to the center and not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration,” Callahan said.

Politics aside, Callahan said Gates’ change in messaging was in line with studies that have shown that alarmist rhetoric about climate change is not the most effective way to motivate people to take action. “The result of a lot of research is that it’s much better to lean into the optimism than the pessimism,” Callahan said.

Many scientists believe that the planet’s rapid warming could bring about a series of irreversible tipping points that could have cascading impacts. These scenarios include changes to ocean currents, the disappearance of ice sheets and the mass death of coral reefs.

Gates did not address any of those scenarios in the new memo, though he has discussed them before.

“There are points at which when the corals die off, they never come back,” Gates said in 2021. “This is acidifying the ocean, and all the aqua ecosystems die off as that acid level goes up. As forests dry out, they are subject to both fires and infestations that kill all the trees, so you get a lot less trees. As the sea level goes up, the beaches go away.”