On Oct.28, 2025, Bill Gates had an epiphany. Humanity will not be wiped out by climate change. Diseases and poverty will do it.
In a 22-page, 5,591-word memo, the Microsoft founder declared: “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.”
The world’s 15th richest billionaire ($118 billion net worth) junked the doomsday climate change scenario: “In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us – just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.”
“This view is wrong,” Gates now asserts.
“ Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further,” he writes in his memo published in his gatesnote.com.
“Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” Gates laments. “It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change.”
The billionaire wants to refocus climate change activism to alleviating poverty, producing more food, fighting diseases. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”
To be clear, Gates clarifies in bold face, “Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.”
Gates now thinks huge amounts have been wasted fighting climate change, money that should have produced better results for mankind were it invested in say, vaccines, producing food, improving health.
The doomsday global warming scenario is earth’s temperature should not be 1.5°C higher than it was in 1850. “In fact, between now and 2040, we are going to fall far short of the world’s climate goals,” Gates warns. “By 2100, the Earth’s average temperature will probably be between 2°C and 3°C higher.”
The main reason: energy demand is doubling, by 2050. “From the standpoint of improving lives, using more energy is a good thing, because it’s so closely correlated with economic growth.”
Argues Gates: “The global temperature doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of people’s lives. If droughts kill your crops, can you still afford food? When there’s an extreme heat wave, can you go somewhere with air conditioning? When a flood causes a disease outbreak, can the local health clinic treat everyone who’s sick?”
Frankly, the cheapest way to produce more energy is tapping fossil fuels – like coal, crude oil and natural gas – a concept hated by climate change activists.
In the Philippines, from September 2024 to August 2025, per lowercarbonpower.org., 76 percent of our electricity consumption came from fossil fuels, with coal contributing 61 percent and gas 16 percent. Low carbon energy sources contributed 23.5 percent – hydro 11 percent, geothermal eight percent, solar 3.5 percent and biofuels barely above one percent. However, the “green premium” or additional cost on clean energy is 50 percent, Gates estimates.
Manila could probably cut its high electricity rates by 30 percent if use of coal, especially imported, were given a free rein. Imagine saving P4 of every P12 per kwh of electricity used. That’s saving P1,500 of your P5,000 average monthly Meralco bill – money you could use for food, transpo, tuition and medicines. For a better quality of life.
The government bans new coal-fired plants – a crazy policy. As a result, coal generation growth has slumped from seven percent per year in 2018-2024 to four percent in 2025-2027. Coal as baseload power is very reliable. You don’t get brownouts or blackouts which cause huge economic losses. A blackout lasting eight hours means an economic loss of P100 billion.
Is the money designated for climate being spent on the right things? “No,” says Gates. “Less effective projects are diverting money and attention from efforts that will have more impact on the human condition: namely, making it affordable to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions and reducing extreme poverty with improvements in agriculture and health. Climate change, disease and poverty are all major problems. We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause.”
For example, global warming kills 500,000. But cold kills ten times that.
You need fossil fuel to industrialize. “Cement and steel are key to modern life, and they’re hard to decarbonize on a global scale because it’s so cheap to make them with fossil fuels,” notes Gates.
With travel booming, airplane emissions will double by 2050, says Gates. But jet fuel comes with 317 percent green premium.
He notes: “Nearly one in four cars sold in 2024 was an EV, and more than 10 percent of all vehicles in the world are electric. In some countries, including the US, they still have disadvantages, such as long charging times and too few public charging stations, that keep them from being as practical as gas-powered cars. In addition, cars and trucks are just one part of this sector, which also includes tough-to-decarbonize activities like shipping and aviation.”
There is a single formula to approach both warming and the scourge of poverty and diseases – innovation.
That is where all of the climate change money should go – innovation.
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