Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, said climate change’s “doomsday scenario” is wrong, and advocated for continuing reductions in carbon emissions while accelerating aid to countries most affected by the Earth’s warming climate, he said during a talk at Caltech on Monday, Nov. 3.
“Fortunately, although climate is an extremely serious problem, it is not of that nature: it will not end civilization. It’s a very serious threat to human welfare but in most locations it is not the biggest,” he said.
Gates touched on the theme that the energy industry has made tremendous progress in developing affordable clean energy. While that should continue, he wants the emphasis turned toward helping the people in countries who are most vulnerable to climate change.
“While we should continue to reduce temperatures as much as we can, we need to help the most vulnerable people on the planet,” he added.
The billionaire-turned-philanthropist founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife in 2000 with an initial endowment of $20 billion. The Gates Foundation gives grants to third-world countries to eradicate diseases, fight poverty and support education.
For example, in Kenya the foundation is working on healthcare and gender equality. In Nigeria, it is moving toward eradication of polio. And in South Africa, the emphasis is on HIV and tuberculosis prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
In 2023, the Gates Foundation handed out $6.1 billion in grants.
Gates spoke of a 17-page memo he wrote recently about what some called a dramatic shift from working on reducing temperature rise to helping prevent starvation and death by preventable diseases in poor countries.
“Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote in the memo published last week, stunning the environmental activist community.
A decade ago, the world agreed in a historic pact known as the Paris Agreement to try to limit human-caused warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. The goal: to stave off nastier heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts.
In a 2021 book, Gates laid out a plan for reducing emissions to avoid a climate disaster. But humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas by early 2028 that scientists say crossing that 1.5-degree threshold is now nearly unavoidable.
Gates said the pace of innovation in clean energy has been faster than he expected, allowing cheap solar and wind energy to replace coal, oil and natural gas plants for electricity and averting worst-case warming scenarios. Artificial intelligence is helping accelerate advances in clean energy technologies, he added.
He gave an example in his talk Monday of using AI to send information to small farmers in India that helped them better prepare their fields for the coming monsoon. “That saved 1 million acres,” he explained.
Also, the Gates Foundation has funded development of a drought-resistant form of maize or corn.
At the same time, money to help developing countries adapt to climate change is shrinking. Led by the U.S., rich countries are cutting their foreign aid budgets. President Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax.
In a roundtable with reporters last week, Gates criticized the aid cuts. He said Gavi, a public-private partnership started by his philanthropic foundation that buys vaccines, will have 25% less money for the next five years compared to the past five years. Gavi can save a life for a little more than $1,000, he added.
Gates spoke to an audience of about 1,000 people for more than an hour at the famous Beckman Auditorium on the western side of the sprawling Pasadena university’s campus.
Caltech is one of the leading science and engineering institutions in the world. The faculty and alumni have earned 48 Nobel Prizes. Gates encouraged the students to continue research that will help less-affluent countries with what he called a “green premium.”
He envisioned a world in which “everyone gets a change to live a healthy life no matter where they are born,” he concluded.
The university recently hosted prominent leaders in science, medicine, business and philanthropy, including Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company; Katherine Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust; and David Ho, prominent AIDS researcher who was instrumental in anti-retroviral therapy for HIV treatment.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.