\n<\/p>\n
When Bill Gates published his latest essay on climate change, the response was immediate. Many critics accused him of defeatism or saw the memo as another example of billionaires bending a knee to the climate denialism of President Donald Trump. (Trump himself was a fan.) Others told him to stop opining about climate change. \u201cRespectfully, Bill Gates Should Shut Up,\u201d read a headline by the online magazine Slate<\/em>.<\/p>\n In his memo, the billionaire who once urged the world to \u201cinnovate our way out of a climate disaster\u201d now seemed to be lowering the bar\u2014arguing that global warming, while devastating, \u201cwill not lead to humanity\u2019s demise,\u201d and that the world’s climate-change strategy should focus on human welfare over temperature or emissions goals. That message struck a nerve in a movement that has fought for decades against the oil and gas industry\u2019s multimillion-dollar campaign to fund climate denial and delay.<\/p>\n Gates released the memo as a message to \u201ceveryone at COP30,\u201d the United Nations\u2019 climate conference, which began Monday; one of the gathering\u2019s key goals is to push nations to follow through on their existing emissions commitments. Gates didn\u2019t say they shouldn\u2019t bother, but he did suggest that focusing heavily on near-term emissions reductions may not help\u2014especially for poor countries\u2014as much as other strategies.<\/p>\n Gates would be wrong on that front; for some small island states, which face the imminent threat of being submerged by rising seas, climate change is<\/em> humanity\u2019s demise. But by dismissing his argument, many critics ended up downplaying a different kind of truth: Making emissions reductions the core climate strategy is not serving many of the people most affected by climate change.<\/p>\n Gates\u2019s message is far from radical. In fact, leaders from the global South have been making a similar case for decades. Even the Association of Small Island States has argued that global climate commitments must prioritize human welfare alongside ambitious emissions reductions, especially from rich countries. Its representatives recognize that net-zero trajectories alone won\u2019t help people survive the next storm or rebuild their home. They also need the resources\u2014primarily the funding\u2014to live through climate disasters and adapt to climate change\u2019s consequences.<\/p>\n In wealthy countries, adaptation is often seen as a technical or an engineering fix: installing air-conditioning, restoring wetlands, building seawalls. In many places, though, climate adaptation is indistinguishable from efforts to improve human welfare. Better health care, for instance, can reduce deaths and disease after floods; diversified agriculture helps rural families withstand droughts. \u201cAdaptation is not only about restoring riparian forests or seeking nature-based solutions; it\u2019s also about adapting investments: exploring new credit lines, rethinking insurance, and declaring emergencies,\u201d Brazil\u2019s minister of the environment and climate change, Marina Silva, said at an event earlier this year. Gates puts it a bit differently: For poor countries, \u201cdevelopment is<\/em> adaptation.\u201d<\/p>\n Several prominent climate figures argued that this view, at least as Gates articulated it, creates a false binary between cutting emissions and improving human welfare. The climate scientist Michael Mann and the writer and activist Bill McKibben both accused Gates of downplaying the threat that missing climate goals poses to developing nations and of privileging technological optimism. The climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, while agreeing with some of Gates\u2019s points, argued that climate and development aid are not \u201cinherently zero sum.\u201d<\/p>\n Even if they aren’t inherently in competition, in practice, they often are. This year\u2019s COP is meant to be as much about adaptation funding as about emissions reductions in part because climate funding, especially for adaptation, faces a crisis. Less than 10 percent of global climate finance went to adaptation in 2022, an analysis by the Climate Policy Initiative shows. But, although funding emissions-mitigation efforts anywhere in the world benefits the countries paying for that work, funding for local adaptation efforts has consistently been a challenge, Andr\u00e9 Corr\u00eaa do Lago, the COP30 president, has noted.<\/p>\n International aid more generally is also in crisis. Official development assistance fell 7 percent in 2024, and likely more this year, because of the disastrous demolition of USAID. Adaptation is sometimes forced to compete for limited funds: The $100 billion that developed countries provided in 2022 to help developing countries address climate change came with catches, such as diverting other development aid for this purpose. Much of that money also comes as a loan\u2014in some cases only adding to vulnerable countries\u2019 debt crisis. (For every $5 that developing countries receive, they send $7 back in repayment.) Barbados\u2019s prime minister, Mia Mottley, has been especially vocal about this inequity, calling for global development finance to be restructured so that the climate-vulnerable countries that need it most aren\u2019t being held back from, in her words, \u201ccreating decent opportunities for billions of people.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of Gates\u2019s critics, including McKibben, also pointed to Hurricane Melissa, which slammed into Jamaica right when the memo came out, to suggest that climate change is the defining threat to developing nations.<\/p>\n Every tenth of a degree of warming will compound the damage from climate change. \u00a0But, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes, climate disasters don\u2019t devastate in a vacuum. Rising emissions create conditions that intensify storms (Melissa was a textbook example), but their human toll is amplified by factors such as the lack of health care, insurance policies, and other social protections\u2014in other words, measures related to development and human welfare. Disasters hit poor economies 10 times harder than rich ones, relative to GDP. Of course, GDP is a poor indicator of the human suffering and inequality caused by these storms. Then again, so are measures of the carbon in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n Reducing emissions globally is crucial to minimizing the impacts of climate change, but so, too, is spending more money on improving agriculture, or waste management, or rural access to health care. These measures will make places like Jamaica (which contributes just 0.02 percent of global emissions) more effective at weathering the storms to come than reducing their relatively tiny fraction of global emissions will, particularly as countries such as the United States and China continue to release greenhouse gases at massive scale. Yet even in less developed countries, more than half of climate funds can end up going to mitigation, Mizan Khan, a former leader of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, has pointed out. \u201cThis should not be our priority, as we are nano-emitters,\u201d Khan said in 2024.<\/p>\n Although Gates argued for human welfare as a climate strategy, he stopped short of what a growing movement is now demanding. Leaders such as S\u00f4nia Guajajara, a global environmental activist and the minister of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil; the UN; and organizations such as the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Alliance are advocating for a rights-based approach to climate policy, one grounded in legal protections and obligations, not just technical or financial fixes. A rights-based approach means ensuring that Indigenous communities are not displaced by green energy projects, and that labor protections guarantee that workers won\u2019t have to toil in deadly heat waves.<\/p>\n What Gates\u2019s memo does ignore, somewhat glaringly, is power and politics. Investments in climate tech don\u2019t work when your president scraps the Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest public investment in U.S. history in both emissions reduction and renewable energy jobs. The inequities baked into global finance, agribusiness expansion, and fossil-fuel dependence are not peripheral to the climate crisis; they define it. Without confronting those asymmetries, even human welfare risks becoming another hollow metric.<\/p>\n Gates\u2019s argument may unsettle those who see progress only in gigatons and degrees. But the world\u2019s poorest nations have long defined success in more human terms, even as they have pushed for ambitious emissions cuts from rich countries. This is the framework that matters most immediately to those most vulnerable to a rapidly heating world: how to endure, recover, and build more stable lives. For decades, they have been saying the same thing\u2014but few listened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Bill Gates published his latest essay on climate change, the response was immediate. Many critics accused him of defeatism or saw the memo as another example of billionaires bending a knee to the climate denialism of President Donald Trump. (Trump himself was a fan.) 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