Billionaire recognizes that ‘global warming’ won’t decimate civilization, and that our trillions should go to more serious problems, like improving agriculture and health in poor countries
By Bill Gates, Gates Notes, Oct. 27, 2025
There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:
In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.
Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.
Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.
The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.
It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change. Next month’s global climate summit in Brazil, known as COP30, is an excellent place to begin, especially because the summit’s Brazilian leadership is putting climate adaptation and human development high on the agenda.
Improving lives more important than carbon emissions
This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.
Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.
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.
To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. 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.
[Climate Realists note: Gates still erroneously believes carbon emissions are the “control knob” of climate. In fact, the carbon atmospheric spectrum is “saturated” and any additional warming from increased CO2 emissions will be minimal. You can test this for yourself by using the online calculator at the Heritage Foundation, which shows, using the IPCC’s own model, how much “warming” will be prevented even by very severe carbon reductions—a fraction of a degree Celsius.]
I’ve been learning about warming—and investing billions in innovations to reduce it—for over 20 years. I work with scientists and innovators who are committed to preventing a climate disaster and making cheap, reliable clean energy available to everyone. Ten years ago, some of them joined me in creating Breakthrough Energy, an investment platform whose sole purpose is to accelerate clean energy innovation and deployment. We’ve supported more than 150 companies so far, many of which have blossomed into major businesses. We’re helping build a growing ecosystem of thousands of innovators working on every aspect of the problem.
My views on climate change are also informed by my work at the Gates Foundation over the past 25 years. The foundation’s top priority is health and development in poor countries, and we approach climate largely through that lens. This has led us to fund a lot of climate-smart innovations, especially in agriculture, in places where extreme weather is taking the worst toll.
COP30 should aim dollars at poverty, not climate
COP30 is taking place at a time when it’s especially important to get the most value out of every dollar spent on helping the poorest. The pool of money available to help them—which was already less than 1 percent of rich countries’ budgets at its highest level—is shrinking as rich countries cut their aid budgets and low-income countries are burdened by debt.
Even proven efforts like providing lifesaving vaccines for all the world’s children are not being fully funded. Gavi (the vaccine-buying fund) will have 25 percent less money for the next five years compared to the past five years. We have to think rigorously and numerically about how to put the time and money we do have to the best use.
So I urge everyone at COP30 to ask: How do we make sure aid spending is delivering the greatest possible impact for the most vulnerable people? Is the money designated for climate being spent on the right things?
I believe the answer is no.
Sometimes the world acts as if any effort to fight climate change is as worthwhile as any other. As a result, less-effective projects are diverting money and attention from efforts that will have more impact on the human condition: namely, making it affordable to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions and reducing extreme poverty with improvements in agriculture and health.
In short, climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems. We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause. And we should use data to maximize the impact of every action we take.
Three truths about ‘climate change’
I believe that embracing the following three truths will help us do that:
- Climate change is serious, but we’ve made great progress. We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions.
- But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
- It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
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