Bill Gates Believes Climate Change Won’t ‘Lead to Humanity’s Demise'

Bill Gates believes that when it comes to climate change, having a “doomsday outlook” has resulted in diverting resources from efforts that will have a greater impact on humanity, like fighting poverty and disease. He also knows not everybody will agree with him.

In a lengthy memo published on his Gates Notes blog, the Microsoft co-founder said that while it’s important to “keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions,” that shouldn’t come at the cost of funding “programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change.”

Instead of focusing on “near-term emissions goals,” Gates wrote that human welfare should be the priority. “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been,” he wrote. “Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”

Although Gates acknowledged that climate change “will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries,” he doesn’t believe it “will lead to humanity’s demise.”

“People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” he wrote. “Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.”

In addition to his work with the Gates Foundation, which remains focused on “health and development in poor countries,” in 2015, the billionaire founded Breakthrough Energy, an investment platform centered around clean energy innovation.

As the memo, which was published ahead of global climate summate COP30, continued, Gates argued that it’s not too late to pivot and refocus “on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives.”

“It’s the best way to ensure that everyone gets a chance to live a healthy and productive life no matter where they’re born, and no matter what kind of climate they’re born into,” he wrote.

However, not everybody agrees with his view — a fact that Gates acknowledged in his writing.

“I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me, call me a hypocrite because of my own carbon footprint (which I fully offset with legitimate carbon credits), or see this as a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously,” he wrote.

In an interview with CNBC, which labeled his memo a softening of his previously-expressed position on climate change, Gates remarked, “I didn’t pick that position because everybody agrees with it – it’s I think intellectually the right answer.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Kristie Ebi, a University of Washington public health and climate scientist, told the Associated Press that while yes, there should be a focus on improving health and well-being, Gates’ view of the world — and the pace of progress in the years to come — seemed unlikely.

Others have argued that efforts to help combat climate change and health aren’t really at odds.

“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,” Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, told The New York Times.

In the memo, Gates stressed that he still believed climate change is a “very important problem” that “needs to be solved,” but that “it’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.”

“Climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems,” Gates wrote. “We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause.”