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.
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.
HI Art, Thanks for sharing these thoughts -- and pointing out that certain discourses are literally worldviews apart. When writing the second edition of Climate and Society, Robin Leichenko and I added the eco-centric discourse as a fifth discourse on climate change (the other discourses we distinguish are biophysical, critical, integrative, and dismissive). It's promising that the eco-centric discourse has become so much more prominent over the past 6 or 7 years - as you point out, it represents a deep shift. The ranking and prioritizing of problems like climate change and poverty misses the point that they are interconnected and share underlying causes, including the disconnection from and domination over nature and people and the concentration of power and wealth. Technical solutions don't get to these... Best, Karen
Thanks for a wonderful post, once again, Karen! And Art for your perspective. Your point about "because people like Gates are intelligent and well-informed, it creates the illusion that genuine understanding can emerge simply by exchanging ideas" is so on point. Society tends to think billionaires in general are the holders of all knowledge. Somehow, we need to be louder to rise above their media attention but that's no small feat!
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.
Thanks Anne - I love those images and analogies and share your concerns. It is promising to see people opening up new discourses that are not based on assumptions that have outlived their usefulness and are no longer valid in today's context. I also think it's good that Gates' Memo has revealed the way he thinks; for over a decade he has been promoting technical solutions to climate change and investing in geoengineering. As you say, it's a good time to look beyond vested interests that harm the whole. Best, Karen
Indeed, IQ is not at all the same as EQ. Gates is a prime example of how our culture, which elevates the rational over the relational, lauds (and trusts) “smart” people over systems thinkers. He literally can’t see the forest for the trees. And by the way, since trees aren’t human they don’t really count as much.
Yes, IQ is not EQ, absolutely! What, however, time and again baffles me and renders me speechless is the failure of the I Q bit of reportedly high IQ, highly influential and powerful people. I shouldn't think that you need any EQ to see that infinite growth on a finite planet with finite resources is impossible. Any basic cognitive, cause-and-effect and reasoning skills -- in short, IQ capabilities -- should suffice for seeing and acknowledging that, shouldn't they? (Most kindergarten kids would be able to arrive at this conclusion, I strongly suspect: you can't build a house with more building blocks than are available to you.) Or that when the planet's heating up -- and hence average temperatures are rising year after year in comparison to past levels, a purely quantifiable and quantified, statistical relationship visible and graspable by pure and basic IQ skills -- temperatures are a failsafe measure for gauging how much the planet's heated up already and hence how far the climate has already changed in one basic marker. It's t h i s , basic I Q failure that I find so mindboggling, not any possible EQ deficits. People who are admired and looked up to as an authority by others because of their IQ fail on the exact mark which makes them an authority -- and nobody seems to notice, let alone draw attention to this fact. I find this really interesting.
(I think the IQ is brushed aside / overruled in these cases by suppression, fear, anxiety, trauma -- whatever strong emotion(s), and t h a t ' s where it becomes really interesting, in my eyes: this explains why decades of scientific, rational -- IQ -- arguing and warnings have failed and continue to do so: IQ is not what runs us humans, it's other things, and we will need t h e m and address t h e m too, if we want to successfully get our act together in the climate and other crises of our time.)
Fascinating. I hesitate to suggest this but some high-IQ folks are overbalanced towards the rational, and research has shown, the more education, the greater susceptibility to confirmation bias— sooooo, they only factor in elements that fit in their worldview. People with power and privilege don’t necessarily see marginalized folks. Our centuries of western modern human-centrism tends to discount all the other beings who live here with us. Rationality and economics is just too small to conceptualize the problem and therefore the solutions.
I've just started to dig into Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World," which takes a thoroughly resarched deep-sea dive into this tilt towards the rational, tracing its ramifications on many levels. Turns out we're overusing and overprioritising left brain hemisphere activities in Western society, having lost touch with the greater whole(s) and relationships our right brain hemisphere puts us in contact with. An absolutely fascinating and inspiring read for me, connecting many dots in many directions. The confirmation bias you write of was the topic of discussion in a passage I read a few days ago: it's a left hemisphere tendency which, in a society balancing brain hemisphere activities, would be framed and held in check by the right hemisphere's wider perspectives and outlook, but this does not happen in Western society – with all the lamentable consequences we find ourselves in today.
“Climate change is a serious problem but it will not be the end of civilization.” Yes, but? At +3.5C, which we are well on course to exceed during a child's lifetime, we lose the ability to grow crops at scale. How does civilization survive the inability to feed the masses, exactly? I'd love to hear Gates explain that one. Can we really grow meat in laboratories to feed 10B people?
Thanks, Zhiwa - I fully agree! It hit me some years ago when writing a paper on winners and losers that some people simply do not care about the so-called "losers" -- they are considered expendable. Fortunately, the rule of law supports life for all. As we published in a letter in Nature Sustainability today: "The advisory opinions by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2025 mark a turning point in aligning international law with climate science. Both affirm climate change as a human-caused existential threat." (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01700-y). Best, Karen
I see it both ways. A sort of worldwide quantum superposition in a manner of speaking. I can see spooky actions at a distance playing out that satisfy all of the items laid out in the Gates memo. Unfortunately, all of this is hidden behind a “science / engineering” and most certainly an NDA wall that most people cannot see through it.
In other words, I would say that I agree with your assessment but caution you and your readers to also consider the fact that appearances are generally deceiving (miss information is everywhere).
Thank you for not eulogising Gates' 'charity' donations and work with vaccines as Zeke did on Climate Brink. Both the GMO 'revolution' in India and the attempts to 'eradicate' polio- were disasters for India.
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
HI Art, Thanks for sharing these thoughts -- and pointing out that certain discourses are literally worldviews apart. When writing the second edition of Climate and Society, Robin Leichenko and I added the eco-centric discourse as a fifth discourse on climate change (the other discourses we distinguish are biophysical, critical, integrative, and dismissive). It's promising that the eco-centric discourse has become so much more prominent over the past 6 or 7 years - as you point out, it represents a deep shift. The ranking and prioritizing of problems like climate change and poverty misses the point that they are interconnected and share underlying causes, including the disconnection from and domination over nature and people and the concentration of power and wealth. Technical solutions don't get to these... Best, Karen
Thanks for a wonderful post, once again, Karen! And Art for your perspective. Your point about "because people like Gates are intelligent and well-informed, it creates the illusion that genuine understanding can emerge simply by exchanging ideas" is so on point. Society tends to think billionaires in general are the holders of all knowledge. Somehow, we need to be louder to rise above their media attention but that's no small feat!
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.
Thanks Anne - I love those images and analogies and share your concerns. It is promising to see people opening up new discourses that are not based on assumptions that have outlived their usefulness and are no longer valid in today's context. I also think it's good that Gates' Memo has revealed the way he thinks; for over a decade he has been promoting technical solutions to climate change and investing in geoengineering. As you say, it's a good time to look beyond vested interests that harm the whole. Best, Karen
Indeed, IQ is not at all the same as EQ. Gates is a prime example of how our culture, which elevates the rational over the relational, lauds (and trusts) “smart” people over systems thinkers. He literally can’t see the forest for the trees. And by the way, since trees aren’t human they don’t really count as much.
Yes, IQ is not EQ, absolutely! What, however, time and again baffles me and renders me speechless is the failure of the I Q bit of reportedly high IQ, highly influential and powerful people. I shouldn't think that you need any EQ to see that infinite growth on a finite planet with finite resources is impossible. Any basic cognitive, cause-and-effect and reasoning skills -- in short, IQ capabilities -- should suffice for seeing and acknowledging that, shouldn't they? (Most kindergarten kids would be able to arrive at this conclusion, I strongly suspect: you can't build a house with more building blocks than are available to you.) Or that when the planet's heating up -- and hence average temperatures are rising year after year in comparison to past levels, a purely quantifiable and quantified, statistical relationship visible and graspable by pure and basic IQ skills -- temperatures are a failsafe measure for gauging how much the planet's heated up already and hence how far the climate has already changed in one basic marker. It's t h i s , basic I Q failure that I find so mindboggling, not any possible EQ deficits. People who are admired and looked up to as an authority by others because of their IQ fail on the exact mark which makes them an authority -- and nobody seems to notice, let alone draw attention to this fact. I find this really interesting.
(I think the IQ is brushed aside / overruled in these cases by suppression, fear, anxiety, trauma -- whatever strong emotion(s), and t h a t ' s where it becomes really interesting, in my eyes: this explains why decades of scientific, rational -- IQ -- arguing and warnings have failed and continue to do so: IQ is not what runs us humans, it's other things, and we will need t h e m and address t h e m too, if we want to successfully get our act together in the climate and other crises of our time.)
Fascinating. I hesitate to suggest this but some high-IQ folks are overbalanced towards the rational, and research has shown, the more education, the greater susceptibility to confirmation bias— sooooo, they only factor in elements that fit in their worldview. People with power and privilege don’t necessarily see marginalized folks. Our centuries of western modern human-centrism tends to discount all the other beings who live here with us. Rationality and economics is just too small to conceptualize the problem and therefore the solutions.
Absolutely!
I've just started to dig into Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World," which takes a thoroughly resarched deep-sea dive into this tilt towards the rational, tracing its ramifications on many levels. Turns out we're overusing and overprioritising left brain hemisphere activities in Western society, having lost touch with the greater whole(s) and relationships our right brain hemisphere puts us in contact with. An absolutely fascinating and inspiring read for me, connecting many dots in many directions. The confirmation bias you write of was the topic of discussion in a passage I read a few days ago: it's a left hemisphere tendency which, in a society balancing brain hemisphere activities, would be framed and held in check by the right hemisphere's wider perspectives and outlook, but this does not happen in Western society – with all the lamentable consequences we find ourselves in today.
Thank you for the reminder of this book. I need to read it!
“Climate change is a serious problem but it will not be the end of civilization.” Yes, but? At +3.5C, which we are well on course to exceed during a child's lifetime, we lose the ability to grow crops at scale. How does civilization survive the inability to feed the masses, exactly? I'd love to hear Gates explain that one. Can we really grow meat in laboratories to feed 10B people?
Thanks, Zhiwa - I fully agree! It hit me some years ago when writing a paper on winners and losers that some people simply do not care about the so-called "losers" -- they are considered expendable. Fortunately, the rule of law supports life for all. As we published in a letter in Nature Sustainability today: "The advisory opinions by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2025 mark a turning point in aligning international law with climate science. Both affirm climate change as a human-caused existential threat." (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01700-y). Best, Karen
I see it both ways. A sort of worldwide quantum superposition in a manner of speaking. I can see spooky actions at a distance playing out that satisfy all of the items laid out in the Gates memo. Unfortunately, all of this is hidden behind a “science / engineering” and most certainly an NDA wall that most people cannot see through it.
In other words, I would say that I agree with your assessment but caution you and your readers to also consider the fact that appearances are generally deceiving (miss information is everywhere).
Brilliant. Thank you for this clear dismantling of Gates’ dumb memo. It belongs as a permanent companion piece to Bill McKibben’s earlier takedown.
Thank you for not eulogising Gates' 'charity' donations and work with vaccines as Zeke did on Climate Brink. Both the GMO 'revolution' in India and the attempts to 'eradicate' polio- were disasters for India.
Addressing the climate crisis would of course be a number one priortiy in addressing human health. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/piss-off-out-of-africa-bill-gates?utm_source=publication-search