Trump foxed by Gates’s climate change memo

“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” posted Donald Trump last week, thanking Bill Gates for having the courage to finally admit he “was completely WRONG on the issue”. If the mega-rich Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist wanted to draw attention to his latest memo on climate change, he couldn’t have found a better marketing man.

Gates’s message to those gathering for this month’s United Nations Cop30 in Brazil did not describe climate change as a hoax. Gates still sees it as an extremely serious problem for humanity – even if not, he believes, an existential threat.

He wants less emphasis at Cop on short-term carbon emissions and temperature targets and a greater focus on longer-term climate solutions that also reduce poverty and improve health.

Most of the fascinating memo highlights what could be achieved through business innovations, in which Gates is arguably the world’s leading individual investor through the Breakthrough Energy fund he launched in 2015. Innovations in the past decade have led the International Energy Agency to lower its forecast of annual carbon dioxide emissions in 2040 to 30bn tonnes, down from 50bn tonnes it forecast 10 years ago, he notes. With extra investment, and supportive government policies, more good news could follow.

Though billed as a “new” position, Gates is probably too committed an optimist ever to have taken seriously the idea that the climate crisis could wipe out humanity. The real purpose of his memo seems to be to inject positivity into a climate change movement increasingly depressed by governments and business backsliding on green commitments and the breaching of seven of the nine “planetary boundaries”. With climate change looking less like a hoax every day, reasons for optimism are certainly needed.

Photograph by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty