Gates says climate change 'won't 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.

- DAVID GELLES

Bill Gates at a climate event in New York in 2023.NYT

In a lengthy memo released yesterday, Mr 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 towards 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, yesterday's memo appears to amount to a major reframing of how Mr Gates, who is worth an estimated $122 billion, is thinking about the challenges posed by a rapidly warming world.

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

Over the past decade, Mr 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, Mr 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.