Gates Climate Memo Has the Right Cake—But the Wrong Icing, Scientists Say

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates offered some wisdom to the climate community last week, sparking frustration among scientists and experts who say his overall framing is misleading and dangerous in this moment.

In his memo to diplomats, advocates, and others attending the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Gates calls for a “strategic pivot” away from a “doomsday outlook”  that he says is “causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals.”

“It’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” he warns. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”

Gates offers readers he frames as “three tough truths:” 1) Climate change is a serious problem but “it will not be the end of civilization,” 2) Temperature is not the best way to measure climate progress, and 3) Health and prosperity are the best defenses against climate change.

Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, who helped shape the 2015 Paris agreement aimed at limiting global warming, refuted the idea that improving human welfare should come at the expense of cutting emissions, insisting that both are urgent.

“Sorry Bill Gates, no amount of human welfare in Jamaica would have stopped, prevented or reduced the impact of Category 5 Melissa,” Figueres wrote on LinkedIn. “She got to that intensity because of abnormally warm waters on her path.”

The poorest countries with the lowest emissions per capita are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of global heating, Figueres added. “That is the deep injustice of climate change.”

And it means “we have to do both: reduce emissions where they are and improve livelihoods where that is needed. Both with urgency.”

Climate scientists attending an online discussion hosted by the Covering Climate Now (CCNow) global news collaborative took issue with some individual parts of the memo and accepted others, but broadly condemned how Gates—who wields considerable influence over global health, agriculture, and education policy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—framed his arguments.

Climate scientist Daniel Swain, from the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said he agreed with several points in the memo, but walked away feeling like it was “much less than the sum of its parts.”

Gates acknowledges that climate change is a serious and important problem, but then presents the view that “he is not too worried about it,” Swain said. So the fact that he isn’t denying climate change legitimizes his arguments—“a dangerous framing in this moment.”

Breaking Down Gates’s ‘Truths’

Gates’s first truth, that climate change will not end civilization, is a straw-man argument that misrepresents the climate community’s position to make it weaker, the CCNow panelists said.

Gates isn’t wrong when he says it, said public policy and public law professor Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy. But she added that no scientist has set out to predict human extinction due to climate change. It is a problem when Gates misrepresents how climate scientists depict climate change because it makes actions to address severe (though not civilization-ending) climate impacts seem less urgent.

Gates also suggests in the memo that enough progress has been made to slow climate change, and that the worst outcomes will be avoided. Advancements—like future technological progress and expanding clean energy capacity—will take care of the rest, he says. The panelists argued that now is not the time to slow down, and that sustained climate action in the future is far from certain.

Gates fails to account for global tipping points that will lead to widespread, cascading crises linked to failures of natural systems, Hayhoe added.

In his second “truth,” Gates argues that quality of life is a better indicator of progress than global temperatures and emissions. But if quality of life is measured by levels of health, hunger, and poverty, they’re all worsened by rising emissions, the panelists argued, emphasizing that “every tenth of a degree matters” for avoiding the suffering linked to these outcomes.

Gates also wrongly suggests that climate and humanitarian funding are exclusive of each other and there is a zero-sum trade-off between the two, the panelists said. Other experts have called it a “false dichotomy.”

“What world do they live in?” Gates said in response to this argument. He says foreign aid budgets for poorer countries often choose between climate and health.

Gates goes astray by suggesting that if rich countries stopped spending money on climate mitigation, the money would then flow to poverty alleviation, Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather told the panel. “That’s not a real trade-off.”

“We can chew gum and walk at the same time: we can fund adaptation for the poorest in the world while reducing emissions in middle income and rich countries.”

There is enough funding to better address both issues, Hausfather added. The barrier to doing so is “fundamentally a policy problem, not a resources problem.”

On the need for adaptation, Swain agreed with Gates: The climate community does tend to focus on mitigation at the expense of adaptation, “whereas we really have to be doing both as much as we possibly can,” Swain said.

He also agreed that global mean temperature is not the right metric. But Gates’s broader argument deemphasizing climate risks shows he hasn’t properly considered how temperature rise makes adaptation increasingly difficult, “where things change so dramatically that you can’t just bolster our existing systems.”

Right Cake, Wrong Icing

In the memo, Gates does say an emissions focus is important over the long term, but he argues that shorter-term impacts in poorer countries are more urgent. An example he uses is that higher emissions will likely lead to greater crop losses down the line, but action needs to be taken now against hunger.

He argues for economic growth in poorer countries, linking it to better public health outcomes. When the problem is considered in this way, “it becomes easier to find the best buys in climate adaptation—they’re the areas where finance can do the most to fight poverty and boost health.”

It isn’t clear who in the climate community Gates sees himself being at odds with on that point.

But his idea that technological improvements like air conditioning will help reduce heat-related deaths in the future is “so disconnected from the way the world works, particularly in poor places in the world, and even poor places in wealthy nations,” Swain said.

Hayhoe said many parts of the memo were encouraging, for instance Gates’s take on how climate solutions have proven effective. But the issue with the memo is its framing, she added.

“It’s like the cake was okay, but the icing was really off.”