What's Missing?
Bill Gates says we need a strategic pivot on climate change. But much is missing from his three truths. It's an old story, taking attention from the real pivots that could drive a true quantum leap.
Wordless
What can I say? There has been so much crazy news lately and so many opinions and insights are being shared that I’ve been feeling … wordless.
Wordlessly watching the recent U.S. election results come in, I found myself thinking about our shared potential for quantum social change, including how vital it is to show up, speak up, and act for what we care about.
Antonio Guterres has been persistently calling for a quantum leap in ambition and a change in direction to meet the climate challenge. As the UN Secretary General told two journalists interviewing him about the forthcoming COP30 meeting in Belém:
It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon.
His persistent calls to step up action tend to get drowned out in the media, most recently by Bill Gates’ Memo arguing for a strategic pivot on climate action. Gates feels that we should instead focus on investments that have the greatest impact on human welfare.
That sounds good, right? Or maybe not. Like an environmental Rorschach test, responses to the Gates Memo reveal different ways of thinking about climate change and its solutions. Since Gates can influence the climate discourse and funding flows, it’s important to look closer and consider where he’s coming from— and what’s missing from his argument.
At the risk of being wordy (and nerdy), I want to look more closely at the discourse expressed in the Gates Memo. As Robin Leichenko and I write in Climate and Society: Transforming the Future, a discourse is:
a system of representation that is made up of norms, rules of conduct, institutions, and language that influence and legitimize certain perspectives and meanings over others. Discourses include explicit and implicit values, judgments, and contentions that define the terms of discussion around a particular issue, as well as what is included and excluded from analysis and debate.
Discourses have power, and clues to climate discourses lie in the language and texts used to frame problems and solutions. Words matter, and so do memos.
Whose truth?
Let’s look more closely at the three “tough truths” that Gates shares with us in his memo and consider “what’s missing?”
Truth #1, “Climate change is a serious problem but it will not be the end of civilization.” Yes, but it’s also a threat multiplier that undermines human security and degrades nature. Climate impacts are changing coastlines, displacing communities, increasing extreme events, endangering species — and the list goes on. It’s already an existential threat for many people and species. Small changes can make a big difference, and even a half a degree of warming represents dangerous climate change impacts and threats to survival for those who are most vulnerable and have limited capacity to adapt.
Truth #2, “Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate change.” Indeed. Temperature is a much better measure of our lack of progress. Global average temperatures today reflect past emissions, not current progress, due to lags in the climate system. Carbon dioxide molecules can remain in the atmosphere for centuries, which is why cutting current emissions matters. Additionally, stopping emissions won’t immediately cool the atmosphere, as the oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess heat; this heat will be slowly released back into the atmosphere, continuing to warm the planet for decades or longer. Progress on climate change can be measured by emissions reductions and by the health of forests, soils, oceans, coral reefs, ice sheets, ecosystems, and people. This means that vulnerability reduction and adaptation are also part of the “progress” picture.
Truth #3: “Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.” Actually, health and prosperity are the best reasons to take action against climate change. The “develop first, then deal with climate change” argument has been around for decades, and many have argued that equity also has to wait. Most people who aspire to health and prosperity have contributed the least to climate change. Many of us who do enjoy health and prosperity have done so at the expense of others, including future generations. A recent study by Morrison and colleagues on wealth inequality concluded that policies that 1) directly regulate the most carbon-intensive forms of status consumption (such as private jet use) and 2) limit the influence of the wealthiest in politics, are effective ways to reduce emissions. Hmm…
What’s missing?
Bill Gates has “discursive power,” and to me, his truths align closely with what Robin Leichenko and I describe as the dismissive discourse on climate change. This discourse covers a variety of views that trivialize, deny, or minimize climate change as a problem that is linked to humans and their activities:
Instead of outright denial of climate change, the dismissive discourse can also support the notion of climate delay, which includes a variety of strategies to justify inaction or avoid mitigation activities.
To be clear, Gates is not denying climate change; but he does appear to be fortifying a dismissive discourse that influences political and cultural debates about climate change policy and action, and affects how climate change is portrayed in the media and in many educational settings.
So what’s missing? Three gaps stand out when I read Gates’ list of truths:
Awareness and attention to global tipping points, as emphasized in the recent Global Tipping Points 2025 Report and articulated in the Dartington Declaration: Tipping the Future:
Every fraction of a degree of additional warming increases the risk of triggering further damaging tipping points. These include the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that would radically undermine global food and water security and plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters.
Gates misses the point that mitigating climate change is the best development strategy when it is coupled with transformative changes that are equitable and sustainable.
Recognition of the limits to adaptation. It may be possible for some people and communities to adapt to climate change, as Gates suggests: “Some outdoor work will need to pause during the hottest hours of the day, and governments will have to invest in cooling centers and better early warning systems for extreme heat and weather events.” There are, however, barriers and limits to adaptation, and research shows that these are contextual, dynamic, and often linked to social inequities. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is critical to successful adaptation, and for some this means adapting to the very idea that we are influencing the global climate.
Gates overlooks the fact that climate change affects what people care about, including the social and cultural context, introducing subjective limits to adaptation.
Placing people at the center of climate and development strategies. Finally, Gates argues that “we should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature, and that our success relies on putting energy, health, and agriculture at the center of our strategies.” There is no doubt these sectors are important, but imposing strategies on people turns them into objects of development, not agents of change. Adaptation is a social process shaped by systems, values, and power relations that influence vulnerability and the capacity to act. People and their relationships matter.
Gates fails to acknowledge that development as usual is not enough, even in the name of maximizing human welfare. We need different approaches to securing human welfare in the context of climate change, and to move away from either/or dichotomies.
The dismissive discourse is powerful — not for what it says, but for what it does not tell us. Interestingly, DeSmog reports that “Bill Gates’ charity has donated more than $3.5 million to a think tank run by the Danish academic and climate crisis denier Bjørn Lomborg.” In short, the Gates Memo is being treated like “big news,” when in fact it is an old story, recycled and adapted to the current political context.
Good news
The good news is that other strategic pivots are underway — pivots that value equity, justice, inclusion, and compassion. For instance, Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City, did not campaign on the issue of climate change, yet he recognizes that “climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns.” Caring for human welfare, climate justice, and the well-being of nature and future generations is at the heart of quantum social change. People power matters more than we think. This may be a tough truth for Bill Gates to swallow.
Our world needs to move from managing crises to preventing them in the first place. Too often, the world responds too late and too little.
— Antonio Guterres
Thanks for this post, Karen.
Bill Gates is an example of the human-centered view of reality. It’s common among more self-aware reductionists who recognize that something is wrong but insist the problem is strictly human. In that frame, climate change ranks below disease or poverty, so those take priority. The assumption is that technology will handle the climate issue by default.
What’s missing is the planet-centered, systems view in which everything affects everything else. Human prosperity depends on ecological stability, on biodiversity, and on complex relationships we barely understand because their consequences unfold slowly and often invisibly.
This gap isn’t trivial. The reductive, convergent mind can’t grasp relationships that aren’t linear or directional. Gates becomes a kind of Captain Ahab figure who sees the world as an extension of himself: “The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab… all are Ahab.”
Because people like Gates are intelligent and well-informed, it creates the illusion that genuine understanding can emerge simply by exchanging ideas. But experience shows otherwise. The human-centered and earth-centered worldviews are worlds apart. They function like different languages. You can learn a second language, but only with sustained effort and a willingness to change.
These shifts are, at their core, psychological.
All the best,
Art Berman
Thank you for this, as always, insight-packed analysis, which I wholeheartedly agree with.
I'm time and again speechless at reportedly high IQ, very prominent and extremely influential, powerful people missing absolutely basic relationships. Like: there can't be infinite growth on a finite planet. Or: facts stay facts even if I choose to overlook or deny them. The stance of “If I refuse to look at what my lifestyle wreaks on other people, creatures, nature and the planet elsewhere than I am myself and where I choose to look, all's well.” is so at odds with an intelligent, responsible, adult reaction to life that I'm simply left speechless.
It reminds me of a passage in Douglas Adams's 1970s’ and 80s’ sci-fi radio and book series “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” a satirical tour de force strewing wry comments on so many real-life matters on its way. In it, Adams describes the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, a life-threateningly dangerous creature out to devour anyone it sets its eye on. Warding it off is suprisingly simple, though: you just need to wrap a towel round your head. Why? Because with a towel round your head, you can’t see the Beast any longer, and the Beast steadfastly believes in its turn that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, either (even if you’re in full view, just with a towel round your head), and will leave off.
There goes Bill Gates in his Memo, wrapping a towel round his head dismissing climate change – believing that climate change will turn away because he has blinded himself and his Memo audience to it and it will hence leave off and go away? Now how convincing and intelligent is that?
It also reminds me of the tobacco industry’s extremely successful lobbyism, which allowed it for decades to get away with the huge detrimental impacts of its products and stave off regulation and the reduction of tobacco in public life – just what the fossil fuel industry is still and continues to be extremely good at with its products, to the point of perfection.
And it reminds me of whistling in the dark. I think the opposites of what Bill Gates states in his “three truths” might rather be the case: #1. There are bright and clever minds arguing that we are in a collapse of civilisation right now – hence the coining and usage of such words as “polycrisis,” “metacrisis” etc. #2. Temperature is a surefire indicator of our planet heating up. #3. How can health and prosperity have a causal handle on climate change? What’s the definition of “prosperity” here, anyway? – I come away from the Memo reeling as from a statement of the fossil fuel industry or, some time ago, from a study of the tobacco industry for a time successfully covering unwelcome truths with layers upon layers of smokescreen.
“People power matters more than we think,” exactly. How to activate it? Here in Germany, the debate of a reintroduction of conscription featured prominently a short time ago. In interviews of young people, one voice still rings in my mind: a young man stating that he was not inclined to defend virtual borders drawn on someone’s maps by folks with their own ends in mind with his life. This statement gives me hope: here, it seems to me, is someone seeing past long-standing vested interests of individuals and groups harmful for the whole, refusing further compliance and “exmeshing” himself from their interests, thus opening new perspectives of how to see our current situation and new possibilities for meeting its challenges – he opened a new discourse on conscription stepping past the boundaries of the current, common and familiar ones, framing the topic in a new way and hence inviting new stances and possibilities to handle it.