Bill Gates’ renunciation this week of his past climate doomsaying has drawn a lot of attention and a wide range of responses. President Trump posted on social media: “I (WE) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax.” A prominent climate doomsayer reacted by saying: “Bill Gates doesn’t have any expertise in climate science.”
Gates wrote that he still believes that “climate change” is a “very important problem” and it will have “serious consequences.” It’s just that he now believes those consequences won’t be catastrophic and people will be able to thrive in most places. The focus on emissions and temperature change should shift to “improving lives,” he wrote. But he nevertheless added that: “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 also stated: “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.”
While Gates is certainly a climate hypocrite (even with whatever dubious climate credits he purchased), that’s not really his problem.
I went back and watched his climate alarmism coming out party at his 2010 TED Talk, titled “Innovating to Zero!” in which he recited the climate mantra about emissions causing warming, cited an Al Gore book, arrogantly dismissed climate skeptics and called for zero emissions by 2050.
In the 15 years since Gates’ TED Talk, the climate hoax has unraveled in ways completely foreseeable at the time. Warming didn’t happen as predicted or for the reasons predicted. No sort of extreme weather event can yet be associated with emissions or warming. We are using more fossil fuels than ever and there is no technology that will supplant them any time soon. His notion of “zero emissions,” also known as “net zero,” is not on anyone’s calendar.
Gates has spent billions of dollars of his own money on various climate projects, including nuclear technology, none of which have produced anything remotely useful. As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to make billions marketing personal computer operating systems than it is to understand the atmosphere and to replace the global system of energy production and use.
While President Trump was probably just trolling him with his declaration of victory, Gates’ rambling memo signifies nothing about the continuing struggle against the climate hoax and the Green New Scam. Gates doesn’t seem to realize that the framers of climate alarmism have always understood their con likely lacked scientific merit but was exceedingly valuable as a doomsday scenario. As former Sen. Tim Wirth told CNN in 1989: “What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Climate has indeed been the left’s most successful scheme to seize control of the economy and our lives. Over decades, many people have been brainwashed into believing that emissions of a ubiquitous, colorless and odorless plant nutrient (carbon dioxide) are somehow wrecking the planet. During the Biden administration, the con reaped more than a trillion dollars in funding through the Inflation Reduction Act. Many Republican politicians have been purchased with this money and that has made it difficult for President Trump to terminate the Green New Scam.
And Communist China has learned that it can use climate and green energy to nonviolently subvert our economy, while skirting emissions cuts in pursuit of its explosive and carbon-intensive industrial growth.
Sure, Gates may stop claiming that planetary catastrophe is in the offing, but the rest of Team Climate is not going away. Climate hoaxers may have to sit tight and bite their lips during the Trump years, but, like the Chinese, they are patient and play the long game. Both have spent too much time, money and effort, with a great deal of success, to just walk away.
What the Trump administration needs to do is to proceed expeditiously with its energy and environment policy changes and also make reversal of them as difficult as possible in the event of future regime change. Concurrent re-education of the public on climate would also be a good idea. To that end, Bill Gates’ backtracking is a positive public relations blip on the long road ahead.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and a lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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