Nice reasoned analysis of the Bill Gates climate memo, Zeke. One thing unaddressed here is Roger Pielke Jr.’s critique of Gates’s explanation for the recent downward revision in heating projections (less about actual emissions and more about changed scenarios?).
I’d also like more discussion of what I call “malmitigation” and Geoff Dabelko et al call climate-policy backdraft (where rich-country anti-fossil international investment policies harm historic low emitters): https://linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6980216494831853568/
But it’s a refreshingly constructive piece. And you're spot-on here:
“Our inability to have nuanced discussions about these matters is detrimental to the broader societal discussion about serious issues like climate change. The portrayal of climate as an all or nothing problem coupled with the US’s thermostatic politics (where control of government commonly switches between parties) is a recipe for a lack of clear long term action on climate or any other big societal problem that gets caught up in the politicized culture wars.”
Thanks Andy! I'd note that while Roger is right that some of the apparent progress we have made is associated with always-unlikely scenarios (e.g. RCP8.5 being the 90th percentile of no policy baselines at the time it was developed), Gates uses older IEA projections rather than RCP8.5 as his starting point for where we thought we were headed, which is more reasonable.
Ultimately the question of what would have happened in the absence of policy on climate change is the realm of subjective counterfactuals. Would clean energy costs have rapidly declined in the absence of any government funded R&D or deployment support? Was a world where we increased fossil fuel use through 2100 never possible? I included some of my thoughts on the topic in my recent Dialogues on Climate Change paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768659241304854
With respect to counter factual futures of climate scenarios, we can do much better than say we can never know.
The scenarios projecting extreme emissions have been comprehensively evaluated by Justin Ritchie (whose work Zeke cites, but also seems to always forget when we have this recurring conversation).
High emissions futures might be conceived of, however that ones that have been developed to date are implausible.
The community is presently working hard to create plausible high emissions futures, but so far are having a lot of difficulties doing so (see ScenarioMIP, to which Zeke is an advisor).
At present, it would be fair to hypothesize that climate policy has contributed to maintaining baseline rates of decarbonization. However, it would be inaccurate to claim that climate policy has altered our trajectory off of high emissions scenarios of the IEA, IPCC, or others of the past several decades. I see the appeal of the narrative, but it is just not true.
Assuming that a past linear decarbonization trajectory would continue in a changing world—regardless of shifts elsewhere in the economy—is, in my view, just as speculative as using a projected counterfactual based on the best available information at a given point in time (as Gates and many others do)
In 2008 we proposed using a frozen technology baseline as one way to clearly distinguished embedded assumptions in scenarios from introduced policy and technological change
It is worth noting that if the world could stay on the linear rate of decarbonization going forward, the world would hit net zero in the ~2070s and be within spitting distance of 2C
Thanks, interesting. My point was that I find speculative to say "policies had no impact because they didn't change the previously observed decarbonization trajectory" - it assumes that that trajectory (your Fig 1) would have continued also without policies. Maybe yes, maybe not.
This is all well and good but I think, maybe more important than the debate about emissions scenarios, we have the growing reality that the earth might be more sensitive to carbon emissions than previously anticipated. See this recent study on aerosol sensitivity: https://phys.org/news/2025-11-cleaner-air-clouds.html
Pretty much exactly what James Hansen predicted, at least directionally. That worries me a lot and at least councils some greater degree of risk aversion. I’m curious what you would say about this issue.
The inadvertent reality the unreal emissions scenarios point out is that decarbonization was, is and will be a waste of time, and a squandering of resources, on a ruinous scale. Not one decarbonization policy has made one bit of difference to the climate or to carbon emissions. As should be expected of a mega-industry that on a net basis is a zero sum grift
With respect to counter factual futures of climate scenarios, we can do much better than say we can never know.
The scenarios projecting extreme emissions have been comprehensively evaluated by Justin Ritchie (whose work Zeke cites, but also seems to always forget when we have this recurring conversation).
High emissions futures might be conceived of, however that ones that have been developed to date are implausible.
The community is presently working hard to create plausible high emissions futures, but so far are having a lot of difficulties doing so (see ScenarioMIP, to which Zeke is an advisor).
At present, it would be fair to hypothesize that climate policy has contributed to maintaining baseline rates of decarbonization. However, it would be inaccurate to claim that climate policy has altered our trajectory off of high emissions scenarios of the IEA, IPCC, or others of the past several decades. I see the appeal of the narrative, but it is just not true.
First; started swearing already- triggered much. What do you think the HIV market is worth? HIV has been around since the mid 80s ‘The global HIV drug market was valued at approximately $32.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach around $44.5 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 5.2%. Other sources estimate the market size differently, with figures around $33.92 billion for 2024 and forecasts varying between $46.30 billion and $49.68 billion by 2032’ So 20 years- say on average $20 billion per year thats 400 billion not including research grants, the testing market nor attempts at vaccine development grants.
And this is what you take out of my comment? Hey ho. Trillions is an expression, however,
Bill Gates has allowed pharma to make $80 billion in 2025 globally by peddling totally unnecessary and harmful vaccines. We’ve had vaccines for about 60 years. If $40 billion on average that’s $2.4 trillion so far- not counting profits from drugs for vaccine induced injuries.
Now, what I take from your comments is that you a) don't know what a trillion, b) you don't care about precision and c) tend to be emotional and overly dramatic.
I've noted an institutionalized myopic slant to your editorial. Since you are under professional constraints to tame your messaging, I'll fill in the gaps, albeit without illustrations since the platform doesn't support them in the comments.
The gap in your analysis stems from treating the climate crisis as a proxy for the polycrisis. It's not.
"Gates is right to note that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise”, but I’d suggest that this represents a bit of a straw man. Outside a fringe community of climate doomers there are few who think that climate change could realistically threaten the extinction of the human race (though some folks need to be a bit cautious about throwing around the term “existential threat” willy nilly). As the climate scientist Steven Schneider was fond of saying, for climate change “the end of the world and good for you are the two lowest probability outcomes”."
Climate scientists insist on scientific objectivity while relying on the politicized IPCC as their guidepost. Need I remind you that the oil barons ran the latest COP? I shouldn't have to.
The IPCC has consistently underestimated the damage from climate change. Even today, we are at the 1.5C threshold for the past 2 years that IPCC climate scientists characterized as 'safe' and that the IPCC originally predicted wouldn't happen for at least another decade, if at all, because we were making progress on our voluntary goals.
1.5C is not 'safe', despite us not even having the 20 years of temperature history required by the IPCC to conclusively demonstrate that the long-term trend in average temperature has crossed that threshold. A mere 2 years of blip temperatures is enough to convince everyone with open eyes that the climate crisis is already here.
My own amateur modeling of compensated sea surface temperatures indicates that the elusive unmodeled portion of 2023 warming likely came from supercooled polar water vapor after Hunga Tonga. I've mentioned this to you and other climate scientists repeatedly, asking you to take a closer look at my Twitter timeline for hints rather than relying upon unvalidated atmospheric modeling that ignores the admittedly problematic underestimation of polar amplification, but you all have collectively ignored me. The likelihood of analyzing this possibility with scientific rigor is fading now that even our satellites are under attack from budget cuts while the data repositories I'm using for my model become less available and reliable.
Hunga Tonga isn't a convenient denialist talking point. It's a warning that compounding rare natural climate variations with anthropogenic climate change is a recipe for unpredictable disaster. Hunga Tonga likely perched us upon that 'safe' 1.5 threshold for 8 years, from 2023 straight through 2031, costing trillions in damages and delaying all of our mitigation efforts as we re-align financing toward adaptive strategies.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 has become a pervasive disabling lethal pandemic that persists long after liberal western democracies declared it over. We've backed down our mitigation efforts there too by largely ignoring clean indoor air efforts, masking, distancing, isolating, and testing, instead relying upon adaptive immunity via a leaky vaccine that doesn't stop the spread and threatens to weaponize SARS2 in a similar manner to Marek's and other feedlot pathogens.
Anti-vaxx sentiment is growing even as governments collectively sigh while defunding even our paltry vaccination efforts. The right wing government of the United States grudgingly held a long Covid symposium with only one masked participant, then immediately forgot all about its lofty goals afterward.
The cost is more than just financial. New generations are being born with pervasive developmental disabilities as existing younger generations are dropping dead of heart attacks in alarming numbers. The right wing blames the carnage on vaccines instead of the virus that is likely a lab leak despite the desperate attempts of China and the US to pretend otherwise. Our best and brightest future climate scientists will be recruited from a pool of brain-damaged zombies by establishment adults who already have pervasive brain damage themselves from this horrific disease, as imaged and clinically recognized in multiple peer-reviewed studies.
Anyone who thinks that people will solve the polycrisis while afflicted with intensifying brain damage from ongoing infections by each new variant is fooling themselves.
"The portrayal of climate as an all or nothing problem coupled with the US’s thermostatic politics (where control of government commonly switches between parties) is a recipe for a lack of clear long term action on climate or any other big societal problem that gets caught up in the politicized culture wars."
Liberals in western governments have driven development. The capitalistic imperative of enlightened self-interest is cultivated by the scientifically educated rational elite. In the US, Democratic presidents have created twice as many jobs as Republicans from FDR to Trump 45, comparing peak cumulative jobs. Ignoring the peaks, the ratio is two and a half times as many jobs created. Democrats have also controlled majorities in Congress for twice as many months as Republicans over the same time span.
Democrats run the show. They take donations from the same oligarchical ruling class as Republicans, and then blame their congressional failures on Republicans while hiding behind the Parliamentarian. If that unconstitutional mechanism for stymieing progress isn't available, Democrats spoil their own majorities by farming out the 'bad guy' defector status to select Democratic candidates in safe districts.
It's the same story globally. Liberals in western nations always find a way to promote 'all of the above' energy policy along with every other polluting yet profitable technology, and do it far more effectively than ideologically-driven and ineffective conservatives.
In fact, liberals in the US especially go out of their way to court conservatives. Hillary Clinton backed Trump in the 2016 primary because she assumed his fascistic populism would repel independent voters. Kamala Harris refused to distance herself from Biden's genocidal funding of Israeli aggression even after voters were denied a Democratic primary.
Your partisan analysis is shortsighted and ahistorical. The common theme in liberal western democratic republics is how unified they are in promoting economic development at all costs regardless of who is in power.
"A world of unabated climate change will impact the poor most severely. Addressing it requires two strategies in tandem: prioritizing development and poverty alleviation to build adaptive capacity (and human flourishing), and reducing emissions rapidly in middle and upper-income countries to mitigate future climate impacts and drive down the cost of clean energy technologies so they can be more readily adopted by low income countries. Perhaps I’m unduly optimistic, but I think that society should be able to do both."
This analysis is likewise shortsighted. You are ignoring the fact that a collapsing industrial civilization will turn industrialized urban cities into death traps. No one will be spared except those who never industrialized in the first place and rely upon local economies, especially those indigenous societies closer to the poles where industrial civilization has not yet perfused them with global economics and global warming is a net benefit to their agriculture.
Your claim that the poor will be hurt the worst is only valid in the short term, like the rest of your analysis. In the long term, the developed world that relies upon redistribution of resources from rural agrarian communities to urbanized technological communities will be the most affected and worst hurt.
Also, as climate refugees aggregate toward the poles, remember that the available land area shinks precipitously. The globe is a lot smaller at the higher latitudes. This will intensify population pressure not only on humans but on all species that are also migrating toward the poles even now.
We often treat 2100 as if it were the finish line for climate goals, but it’s really just a modeling milestone — convenient for policy, meaningless for the planet. If we haven’t reached net zero by then, the world will keep warming; and even if we do, the deep ocean, ice sheets, and ecosystems will continue to bear the effects for centuries. The year 2100 will mark not the end of the story, but the beginning of Earth’s long response to what we set in motion.
Zeke’s analysis is generally very thoughtful and constructive. He is certainly right to point out that resources used for climate mitigation in the developed world and those used to address disease, malnutrition, and non-climate development challenges facing poor countries are not, in practical terms, part of a single fungible basket. However, there is some limited fungibility on the margin, and also potentially greater, although not complete, fungibility for using resources that the developed world already supplies to developing countries that are currently earmarked exclusively for climate mitigation purposes. Gates’ position on how to best apply this fungibility seems pretty clear in his recent memo. Zeke’s position on this is less clear.
“Similarly, I feel that Gates is a bit too cavalier in his treatment of climate risk.”
I think we need an IPCC special report on +2.5C +/- to help clarify what specific risks we’re talking about. Thoughts on this?
“That being said, we should take a hard look at international spending priorities for programs in the poorest countries which, in turn, are the least responsible for global emissions today. Here adaptation should be strongly prioritized, and restrictions around finance for some fossil fuels (e.g. natural gas development in Sub-Saharan Africa) that could help support greater clean energy deployment should be reconsidered. We should generally spend more than we are today on adaptation and development (though the two are strongly related), and mitigation should be less of a priority in low income countries.”
Yes!
“Richer countries should be the ones taking the lead on emissions reductions, and paying a (green) premium that will help drive down the costs of clean energy technologies so that they can be cost effectively adopted by lower income countries.”
This money ought to be ruthlessly directed at targets with the most potential for emission reductions and at the least wealthy people. Fewer rebates for well-off people to buy cars and more money to decarbonize affordable housing for example. It’s an utter shame that even a modest carbon price/dividend is off the table in most of the world but perhaps a growing club of countries with a price on large emitters could work?
“Outside a fringe community of climate doomers there are few who think that climate change could realistically threaten the extinction of the human race…”
Doesn’t net zero *2050* as a goal (less than 25 years to zero out all emissions) imply a buy-in to the catastrophic framing? If you relax the existential framing and look around at what is a realistic global response to climate change something like DNV’s projection of net zero 2093 makes for a better starting point that we can stretch from imo. That sure would make the politics a lot easier — especially if climate policy recedes into the background and gets a broader multi-partisan buy-in around the world.
I’ll stop there. Again, appreciate the nuance, pushback and groundedness of your thinking on this.
Gates is just another techno-optimist who doesn't want to understand the full impact of climate. The best, most accurate climate scientists now show with 95% certainty that doubling CO2/CO2-e will result in +4.8°C (+/-1.2°C) - which we're currently on track to do in the mid-2060s.
We've passed +1.5°C and we're going to hit +2.4°C around 2040, and +3.0°C around mid-2050s, no matter what we do because of systemic momentum, aerosol reduction, albedo crash, carbon sink collapse, and the fact that we're still mitting record amounts of CO2, CH4, NOx and the F-gasses, and feedback loops that are accelerating and tipping - and will ALL tip by +2.4C.
Tragically, Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Theil, Zuckerberg, et al have the power, resources, and scientific background to help humanity to make massive transformations and transitions - but they'd have to admit they screwed up and give up their techno-optimist dreams and get super practical and real about the existential threat facing human civilization, humanity, and life on Earth before it's too late.
Jonathan Wood Logan exemplifies exactly the type of mentality that Gates is pointing out. I'm not sure how climate communicators don't understand this, and thus cast blame on Gates himself rather than taking some responsibility themselves, but the total distortion is counterproductive and deeply disturbing. In fact, it’s only since Gates’ memo that I’ve noticed more nuanced discussion emerging from the usual voices, and for that, we owe him credit. Initiatives like Covering Climate Now, which aim to make climate a part of every story, are in reality undermining objective perception and fostering a kind of collective delusion, zealotry, and catastrophe fetish. Kids in the global north literally believe they have no future based on exposure to classroom materials. How on Earth can citizens make rational decisions under such conditions.
Nice reasoned analysis of the Bill Gates climate memo, Zeke. One thing unaddressed here is Roger Pielke Jr.’s critique of Gates’s explanation for the recent downward revision in heating projections (less about actual emissions and more about changed scenarios?).
I’d also like more discussion of what I call “malmitigation” and Geoff Dabelko et al call climate-policy backdraft (where rich-country anti-fossil international investment policies harm historic low emitters): https://linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6980216494831853568/
But it’s a refreshingly constructive piece. And you're spot-on here:
“Our inability to have nuanced discussions about these matters is detrimental to the broader societal discussion about serious issues like climate change. The portrayal of climate as an all or nothing problem coupled with the US’s thermostatic politics (where control of government commonly switches between parties) is a recipe for a lack of clear long term action on climate or any other big societal problem that gets caught up in the politicized culture wars.”
Thanks Andy! I'd note that while Roger is right that some of the apparent progress we have made is associated with always-unlikely scenarios (e.g. RCP8.5 being the 90th percentile of no policy baselines at the time it was developed), Gates uses older IEA projections rather than RCP8.5 as his starting point for where we thought we were headed, which is more reasonable.
Ultimately the question of what would have happened in the absence of policy on climate change is the realm of subjective counterfactuals. Would clean energy costs have rapidly declined in the absence of any government funded R&D or deployment support? Was a world where we increased fossil fuel use through 2100 never possible? I included some of my thoughts on the topic in my recent Dialogues on Climate Change paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768659241304854
We don’t need future counterfactuals to assess progress-to-date on decarbonization.
Here the evidence is unequivocal that the 60+ trend in decarbonization of the global economy has seen no inflection point:
See Fig 1 here: https://open.substack.com/pub/rogerpielkejr/p/understanding-decarbonization
With respect to counter factual futures of climate scenarios, we can do much better than say we can never know.
The scenarios projecting extreme emissions have been comprehensively evaluated by Justin Ritchie (whose work Zeke cites, but also seems to always forget when we have this recurring conversation).
High emissions futures might be conceived of, however that ones that have been developed to date are implausible.
The community is presently working hard to create plausible high emissions futures, but so far are having a lot of difficulties doing so (see ScenarioMIP, to which Zeke is an advisor).
At present, it would be fair to hypothesize that climate policy has contributed to maintaining baseline rates of decarbonization. However, it would be inaccurate to claim that climate policy has altered our trajectory off of high emissions scenarios of the IEA, IPCC, or others of the past several decades. I see the appeal of the narrative, but it is just not true.
Assuming that a past linear decarbonization trajectory would continue in a changing world—regardless of shifts elsewhere in the economy—is, in my view, just as speculative as using a projected counterfactual based on the best available information at a given point in time (as Gates and many others do)
No scenario uses such an assumption
See:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0091-3
In 2008 we proposed using a frozen technology baseline as one way to clearly distinguished embedded assumptions in scenarios from introduced policy and technological change
It is worth noting that if the world could stay on the linear rate of decarbonization going forward, the world would hit net zero in the ~2070s and be within spitting distance of 2C
Thanks, interesting. My point was that I find speculative to say "policies had no impact because they didn't change the previously observed decarbonization trajectory" - it assumes that that trajectory (your Fig 1) would have continued also without policies. Maybe yes, maybe not.
This is all well and good but I think, maybe more important than the debate about emissions scenarios, we have the growing reality that the earth might be more sensitive to carbon emissions than previously anticipated. See this recent study on aerosol sensitivity: https://phys.org/news/2025-11-cleaner-air-clouds.html
Pretty much exactly what James Hansen predicted, at least directionally. That worries me a lot and at least councils some greater degree of risk aversion. I’m curious what you would say about this issue.
The inadvertent reality the unreal emissions scenarios point out is that decarbonization was, is and will be a waste of time, and a squandering of resources, on a ruinous scale. Not one decarbonization policy has made one bit of difference to the climate or to carbon emissions. As should be expected of a mega-industry that on a net basis is a zero sum grift
We don’t need future counterfactuals to assess progress-to-date on decarbonization.
Here the evidence is unequivocal that the 60+ year trend in decarbonization of the global economy has seen no inflection point:
See Fig 1 here: https://open.substack.com/pub/rogerpielkejr/p/understanding-decarbonization
With respect to counter factual futures of climate scenarios, we can do much better than say we can never know.
The scenarios projecting extreme emissions have been comprehensively evaluated by Justin Ritchie (whose work Zeke cites, but also seems to always forget when we have this recurring conversation).
High emissions futures might be conceived of, however that ones that have been developed to date are implausible.
The community is presently working hard to create plausible high emissions futures, but so far are having a lot of difficulties doing so (see ScenarioMIP, to which Zeke is an advisor).
At present, it would be fair to hypothesize that climate policy has contributed to maintaining baseline rates of decarbonization. However, it would be inaccurate to claim that climate policy has altered our trajectory off of high emissions scenarios of the IEA, IPCC, or others of the past several decades. I see the appeal of the narrative, but it is just not true.
Gates did not help to combat HIV, he helped to spread progaganda about it that made $millions for pharma https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-intellectual-freedom?utm_source=publication-search
First: Bullsh*t. Second: Trillions? More Bullsh*t.
First; started swearing already- triggered much. What do you think the HIV market is worth? HIV has been around since the mid 80s ‘The global HIV drug market was valued at approximately $32.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach around $44.5 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 5.2%. Other sources estimate the market size differently, with figures around $33.92 billion for 2024 and forecasts varying between $46.30 billion and $49.68 billion by 2032’ So 20 years- say on average $20 billion per year thats 400 billion not including research grants, the testing market nor attempts at vaccine development grants.
So, you're saying that you don't actually know what a trillion is?
I can see from your feed that you’re confused about what causes disease- this might help https://jowaller.substack.com/p/lets-hope-the-monkey-pox-nonsense
It’s only 400 billion up till now…who knows.
And this is what you take out of my comment? Hey ho. Trillions is an expression, however,
Bill Gates has allowed pharma to make $80 billion in 2025 globally by peddling totally unnecessary and harmful vaccines. We’ve had vaccines for about 60 years. If $40 billion on average that’s $2.4 trillion so far- not counting profits from drugs for vaccine induced injuries.
Now, what I take from your comments is that you a) don't know what a trillion, b) you don't care about precision and c) tend to be emotional and overly dramatic.
Emotional eh?- I think you meant I don’t know what a trillion IS, then you said you you don’t care about precision.
Anyway I don’t care- you haven’t proved me wrong on vaccines with this silly quibbling.
I'm going to have to push back on Gates,- he did not help to eradicate polio- he helped to increase acute flaccid paralysis 10 fold, nearly bankrupted the government and barely got out of India alive. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/piss-off-out-of-africa-bill-gates?utm_source=publication-search
Propaganda.
No. It's not propaganda. Have you ever looked into polio? https://jowaller.substack.com/p/toxicology-vs-virology-the-rockefeller?utm_source=publication-search
I've noted an institutionalized myopic slant to your editorial. Since you are under professional constraints to tame your messaging, I'll fill in the gaps, albeit without illustrations since the platform doesn't support them in the comments.
The gap in your analysis stems from treating the climate crisis as a proxy for the polycrisis. It's not.
"Gates is right to note that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise”, but I’d suggest that this represents a bit of a straw man. Outside a fringe community of climate doomers there are few who think that climate change could realistically threaten the extinction of the human race (though some folks need to be a bit cautious about throwing around the term “existential threat” willy nilly). As the climate scientist Steven Schneider was fond of saying, for climate change “the end of the world and good for you are the two lowest probability outcomes”."
Climate scientists insist on scientific objectivity while relying on the politicized IPCC as their guidepost. Need I remind you that the oil barons ran the latest COP? I shouldn't have to.
The IPCC has consistently underestimated the damage from climate change. Even today, we are at the 1.5C threshold for the past 2 years that IPCC climate scientists characterized as 'safe' and that the IPCC originally predicted wouldn't happen for at least another decade, if at all, because we were making progress on our voluntary goals.
1.5C is not 'safe', despite us not even having the 20 years of temperature history required by the IPCC to conclusively demonstrate that the long-term trend in average temperature has crossed that threshold. A mere 2 years of blip temperatures is enough to convince everyone with open eyes that the climate crisis is already here.
My own amateur modeling of compensated sea surface temperatures indicates that the elusive unmodeled portion of 2023 warming likely came from supercooled polar water vapor after Hunga Tonga. I've mentioned this to you and other climate scientists repeatedly, asking you to take a closer look at my Twitter timeline for hints rather than relying upon unvalidated atmospheric modeling that ignores the admittedly problematic underestimation of polar amplification, but you all have collectively ignored me. The likelihood of analyzing this possibility with scientific rigor is fading now that even our satellites are under attack from budget cuts while the data repositories I'm using for my model become less available and reliable.
Hunga Tonga isn't a convenient denialist talking point. It's a warning that compounding rare natural climate variations with anthropogenic climate change is a recipe for unpredictable disaster. Hunga Tonga likely perched us upon that 'safe' 1.5 threshold for 8 years, from 2023 straight through 2031, costing trillions in damages and delaying all of our mitigation efforts as we re-align financing toward adaptive strategies.
Meanwhile, Covid-19 has become a pervasive disabling lethal pandemic that persists long after liberal western democracies declared it over. We've backed down our mitigation efforts there too by largely ignoring clean indoor air efforts, masking, distancing, isolating, and testing, instead relying upon adaptive immunity via a leaky vaccine that doesn't stop the spread and threatens to weaponize SARS2 in a similar manner to Marek's and other feedlot pathogens.
Anti-vaxx sentiment is growing even as governments collectively sigh while defunding even our paltry vaccination efforts. The right wing government of the United States grudgingly held a long Covid symposium with only one masked participant, then immediately forgot all about its lofty goals afterward.
The cost is more than just financial. New generations are being born with pervasive developmental disabilities as existing younger generations are dropping dead of heart attacks in alarming numbers. The right wing blames the carnage on vaccines instead of the virus that is likely a lab leak despite the desperate attempts of China and the US to pretend otherwise. Our best and brightest future climate scientists will be recruited from a pool of brain-damaged zombies by establishment adults who already have pervasive brain damage themselves from this horrific disease, as imaged and clinically recognized in multiple peer-reviewed studies.
Anyone who thinks that people will solve the polycrisis while afflicted with intensifying brain damage from ongoing infections by each new variant is fooling themselves.
"The portrayal of climate as an all or nothing problem coupled with the US’s thermostatic politics (where control of government commonly switches between parties) is a recipe for a lack of clear long term action on climate or any other big societal problem that gets caught up in the politicized culture wars."
Liberals in western governments have driven development. The capitalistic imperative of enlightened self-interest is cultivated by the scientifically educated rational elite. In the US, Democratic presidents have created twice as many jobs as Republicans from FDR to Trump 45, comparing peak cumulative jobs. Ignoring the peaks, the ratio is two and a half times as many jobs created. Democrats have also controlled majorities in Congress for twice as many months as Republicans over the same time span.
Democrats run the show. They take donations from the same oligarchical ruling class as Republicans, and then blame their congressional failures on Republicans while hiding behind the Parliamentarian. If that unconstitutional mechanism for stymieing progress isn't available, Democrats spoil their own majorities by farming out the 'bad guy' defector status to select Democratic candidates in safe districts.
It's the same story globally. Liberals in western nations always find a way to promote 'all of the above' energy policy along with every other polluting yet profitable technology, and do it far more effectively than ideologically-driven and ineffective conservatives.
In fact, liberals in the US especially go out of their way to court conservatives. Hillary Clinton backed Trump in the 2016 primary because she assumed his fascistic populism would repel independent voters. Kamala Harris refused to distance herself from Biden's genocidal funding of Israeli aggression even after voters were denied a Democratic primary.
Your partisan analysis is shortsighted and ahistorical. The common theme in liberal western democratic republics is how unified they are in promoting economic development at all costs regardless of who is in power.
"A world of unabated climate change will impact the poor most severely. Addressing it requires two strategies in tandem: prioritizing development and poverty alleviation to build adaptive capacity (and human flourishing), and reducing emissions rapidly in middle and upper-income countries to mitigate future climate impacts and drive down the cost of clean energy technologies so they can be more readily adopted by low income countries. Perhaps I’m unduly optimistic, but I think that society should be able to do both."
This analysis is likewise shortsighted. You are ignoring the fact that a collapsing industrial civilization will turn industrialized urban cities into death traps. No one will be spared except those who never industrialized in the first place and rely upon local economies, especially those indigenous societies closer to the poles where industrial civilization has not yet perfused them with global economics and global warming is a net benefit to their agriculture.
Your claim that the poor will be hurt the worst is only valid in the short term, like the rest of your analysis. In the long term, the developed world that relies upon redistribution of resources from rural agrarian communities to urbanized technological communities will be the most affected and worst hurt.
Also, as climate refugees aggregate toward the poles, remember that the available land area shinks precipitously. The globe is a lot smaller at the higher latitudes. This will intensify population pressure not only on humans but on all species that are also migrating toward the poles even now.
We often treat 2100 as if it were the finish line for climate goals, but it’s really just a modeling milestone — convenient for policy, meaningless for the planet. If we haven’t reached net zero by then, the world will keep warming; and even if we do, the deep ocean, ice sheets, and ecosystems will continue to bear the effects for centuries. The year 2100 will mark not the end of the story, but the beginning of Earth’s long response to what we set in motion.
You are way wrong on Gates and agriculture.
Zeke’s analysis is generally very thoughtful and constructive. He is certainly right to point out that resources used for climate mitigation in the developed world and those used to address disease, malnutrition, and non-climate development challenges facing poor countries are not, in practical terms, part of a single fungible basket. However, there is some limited fungibility on the margin, and also potentially greater, although not complete, fungibility for using resources that the developed world already supplies to developing countries that are currently earmarked exclusively for climate mitigation purposes. Gates’ position on how to best apply this fungibility seems pretty clear in his recent memo. Zeke’s position on this is less clear.
Great piece. Some highlights and comments:
“Similarly, I feel that Gates is a bit too cavalier in his treatment of climate risk.”
I think we need an IPCC special report on +2.5C +/- to help clarify what specific risks we’re talking about. Thoughts on this?
“That being said, we should take a hard look at international spending priorities for programs in the poorest countries which, in turn, are the least responsible for global emissions today. Here adaptation should be strongly prioritized, and restrictions around finance for some fossil fuels (e.g. natural gas development in Sub-Saharan Africa) that could help support greater clean energy deployment should be reconsidered. We should generally spend more than we are today on adaptation and development (though the two are strongly related), and mitigation should be less of a priority in low income countries.”
Yes!
“Richer countries should be the ones taking the lead on emissions reductions, and paying a (green) premium that will help drive down the costs of clean energy technologies so that they can be cost effectively adopted by lower income countries.”
This money ought to be ruthlessly directed at targets with the most potential for emission reductions and at the least wealthy people. Fewer rebates for well-off people to buy cars and more money to decarbonize affordable housing for example. It’s an utter shame that even a modest carbon price/dividend is off the table in most of the world but perhaps a growing club of countries with a price on large emitters could work?
https://salatainstitute.harvard.edu/building-a-climate-coalition-gcpp-flagship-report/
“Outside a fringe community of climate doomers there are few who think that climate change could realistically threaten the extinction of the human race…”
Doesn’t net zero *2050* as a goal (less than 25 years to zero out all emissions) imply a buy-in to the catastrophic framing? If you relax the existential framing and look around at what is a realistic global response to climate change something like DNV’s projection of net zero 2093 makes for a better starting point that we can stretch from imo. That sure would make the politics a lot easier — especially if climate policy recedes into the background and gets a broader multi-partisan buy-in around the world.
I’ll stop there. Again, appreciate the nuance, pushback and groundedness of your thinking on this.
Reality is so menacing, they prefer hiding behind stupid maga billionaires fantasizing and let their own children face the consequences.
Have to ask who the "they" is here.
Gates is just another techno-optimist who doesn't want to understand the full impact of climate. The best, most accurate climate scientists now show with 95% certainty that doubling CO2/CO2-e will result in +4.8°C (+/-1.2°C) - which we're currently on track to do in the mid-2060s.
We've passed +1.5°C and we're going to hit +2.4°C around 2040, and +3.0°C around mid-2050s, no matter what we do because of systemic momentum, aerosol reduction, albedo crash, carbon sink collapse, and the fact that we're still mitting record amounts of CO2, CH4, NOx and the F-gasses, and feedback loops that are accelerating and tipping - and will ALL tip by +2.4C.
Tragically, Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Theil, Zuckerberg, et al have the power, resources, and scientific background to help humanity to make massive transformations and transitions - but they'd have to admit they screwed up and give up their techno-optimist dreams and get super practical and real about the existential threat facing human civilization, humanity, and life on Earth before it's too late.
I'm sad that I'm not one of the "most accurate climate scientists", given that my work suggests a 95% chance of ECS between 2C and 5C ;-)
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019rg000678
Jonathan Wood Logan exemplifies exactly the type of mentality that Gates is pointing out. I'm not sure how climate communicators don't understand this, and thus cast blame on Gates himself rather than taking some responsibility themselves, but the total distortion is counterproductive and deeply disturbing. In fact, it’s only since Gates’ memo that I’ve noticed more nuanced discussion emerging from the usual voices, and for that, we owe him credit. Initiatives like Covering Climate Now, which aim to make climate a part of every story, are in reality undermining objective perception and fostering a kind of collective delusion, zealotry, and catastrophe fetish. Kids in the global north literally believe they have no future based on exposure to classroom materials. How on Earth can citizens make rational decisions under such conditions.