Bill Gates has hit back at Donald Trump after the president took a victory lap over the billionaire philanthropist’s new controversial climate memo.
"It's a gigantic misreading of the memo," the Microsoft co-founder told Axios Tuesday.
Trump, conservatives and anti-climate activists lauded Gates’ 17-page memo as what they saw as a rebuke of the climate crisis. Trump wrote on social media that he had “just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax” because Gates had “finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.”
But Gates’ memo, issued last Monday, said that climate change was a “serious” issue that needs to be mitigated — which also calling for a revised outlook on how to respond to the global threat.
Gates, who has spent billions in the fight against climate change, also told Axios that his funding in the climate and public health sectors is increasing.
"I didn't think the memo was going to convert the non-believers into believers, and sure enough, it didn't convert them," he said.
But while Gates garnered praise from Trump and his supporters, scientists and conservationists blasted the memo as dismissing the seriousness of the climate crisis and ignoring the reality that climate and health issues are inseparable.
But Gates brushed off the criticism. “What world do they live in?” the Microsoft co-founder asked, referring to those who claimed he was setting up a false dichotomy by pitting efforts to tackle the climate crisis against foreign aid.
Gates told Axios that foreign aid budgets for poorer countries often choose between climate and health.
"This is a numeric game in a world with very finite resources, more finite than they should be," Gates said. He added that it was hard to get “nuanced positions” across and said that he was “glad people are listening.”
In the new memo, Gates wrote that the current “doomsday outlook” for Earth’s future is causing people to focus too much on near-term emissions goals and is “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” such as improving agriculture and health.
The billionaire claimed that climate change wouldn’t lead to “humanity’s demise” or “the end of civilization” and said that temperature is not the best way to measure climate progress.
Gates said he’d “let the temperature go up 0.1 degree to get rid of malaria” — despite the fact that global heating is largely responsible for extending the reach of malaria- and other disease-carrying mosquitoes.
“People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote. “Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.”
Climate scientists say that unless humanity can stop producing atmosphere-warming fossil fuel emissions, the Earth will experience extreme weather and other changes faster than humans are able to adapt.
“It’s pathetic but predictable (given his past pattern of refusing to engage with actual climate experts) that he would double down on this,” climatologist Dr. Michael Mann told The Independent in an email on Tuesday. “It’s particularly galling to see him repeat the myth that we cannot actually walk and chew gum at the same time.”
“If Gates really cares about the health of poor and downtrodden people in Africa, he should be providing more support for the needed clean energy transition, not less support,” Mann added.
Climate scientists are hosting a briefing Tuesday to discuss Gates’ memo and whether or not he is right.
