What Billionaires Know About Climate Change

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Bill Gates, Harvard dropout, founder of the most important software company in history, and major philanthropist, claims to know much about climate change. He recently told CNBC from COP28: “Fortunately, we’ve made enough progress that we’re not going to have the extreme cases like of 4 degrees [Celsius] warming, but we’ll sadly probably even miss the 2-degree goal. So, we’ll have adaptation as a priority.” But, he is not a climate expert, academic, or scientist among the leaders who work primarily on climate change issues.

Gates, as with other issues like vaccines, to which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives billions of dollars, is not a medical expert in terms of his expertise on that subject. He is well-informed because he has access to many of the world’s most brilliant people who study these issues all the time. However, they do not need him to speak on their behalf.

French officials would quarrel with, for example, the Gate’s assumption about 4°C. Environment minister Christophe Béchu told Euronews that his government has begun preparing for that day. He added France had decided to side with climate change pessimists. Béchu said, “In truth, we should call it realistic.” This is just one case in which people who know more about climate change than Gates have different opinions.

Gates is not alone among billionaires who finance projects to slow climate change. For example, Jeff Bezos created the Bezos Earth Fund, which will spend $10 billion on climate projects before the end of the decade. Bezos also speaks about the climate crisis in public. His credentials to do so are no better than Gates’.

Gates and Bezos never talk about the real contributions of billionaires to the climate crisis. Only a year ago, Oxfam released its “Carbon Billionaires” study. The most stunning point from that research was that “ Oxfam calculates that the annual carbon footprint of the investments of just 125 of the world’s richest billionaires in our sample is equivalent to the carbon emissions of France, a nation of 67 million people.”
Gates traveled to COP28 to offer his opinions about the crisis. In an opinion piece in The New York Times, he wrote, “If you fly in a private jet, as I do, you can afford the extra cost of sustainable aviation fuel made from low-carbon crops and waste.” If he cared, he would have stayed home.