Instead, Gates argues, the world’s philanthropists must increase their investment in other efforts aimed at preventing disease and hunger.
Climate change is not going to wipe out humanity, he argued, and past efforts that strive for achieving zero carbon emissions have made real progress. But Gates said that past investments fighting climate change have been misplaced, and too much good money has been put into expensive and questionable efforts.
Although Gates said investment to battle climate change must continue, he argued that President Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID threaten a more urgent problem, inflicting potentially lasting global damage to the fight against famine and life-threatening preventable sickness.
“Climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems,” Gates wrote. “We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause.”
The Trump administration’s funding cuts, Gates argues, necessitate an immediate and larger focus on investment and resources to support those abandoned efforts.
“Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “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.”
Climate change is not going to wipe out humanity, he argued, and past efforts that strive for achieving zero carbon emissions have made real progress. But Gates said that past investments fighting climate change have been misplaced, and too much good money has been put into expensive and questionable efforts.
Bill Gates is full of shit, this is dangerous misinformation. He has no evidence for this and yet naive people will believe him.
We should stay focused on climate change.
For one, did Gates and his baby Microsoft DO ANYTHING to resist Trump’s power? No, and worse Microsoft has profitted hugely off of selling Israel the means to commit the Palestinian Genocide.
Take this billionaire asshole’s money away and feed people with it, fine, but stop giving him a microphone like he has anything to add with his words.
Exactly this. Bill isn’t a scientist. He knows fuck all about this subject, but there are experts out there building on a wealth of knowledge and data gathered over decades, and their opinion is starkly contrasted against his.
Bill is just another nepo-baby turned billionaire. He’s not exceptional, just happened to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth and put down the path of success his parents paved for him.
I get the point he’s trying to make, but there’s no reason we couldn’t do both. The billionaire class could easily pay for everything, but they choose not to.
Bill…what happens when the oceans acidify to the point that they stop producing oxygen? 98% of the oxygen in the world is produced by the ocean, Bill. As it stands currently, roughly 1/3 of all calories consumed on Earth are produced from petroleum derived nitrogen, much of which further pollutes the ocean due to agricultural runoff into the oceans, causing a cascading problem of worsening the acidifation of the oceans.
Climate Change will not only kill off all humans, but anything that relies on oxygen to breath…Bill. You might want to reword your statements to be more realistic like, “We might as well do right by our fellow man in our final moments and feed those who are worse off than us. At least we can provide this small comfort in our final moments.”
But we all know you’re not going to say that Bill.
Bill Gates has a lot of money wrapped up in oil fields in North Dakota and other states.
As written by 80000 hours:
To maximise your impact, work on areas (1) that are large in scale, (2) that others neglect, and (3) where it’s possible to make progress. Many people fail to compare the scale of different problems, work on the same problems as everyone else, and support programmes with no evidence of impact. Link
So yeah, global warming is important, but so are other issues, eg preventing disease and hunger.
What I find interesting, that isn’t mentioned in your quote by Bill: There’s other threats that I’d find to be more important though, e.g. threats from AI/AGI, bioweapons, nuclear weapons, pandemics… but perhaps these don’t need capital as much as they need to have people working for organisations that try and solve these issues.
It’s just a prioritization thing. He’s not disagreeing with climate change as a critical issue, but that there are more urgent immediate needs already causing harm and death
USAID was never enough and shutting that down is a huge humanitarian crisis
I wonder if it’s due to his investments in big pharma. With his enormous funding of the WHO, he had total control over them and was the primary reason why vaccine patents were never released to the rest of the world.
Maybe, but his charities were heavily focused on human lives and health from the beginning
He’s making all the right noises toward distributed his wealth to do good, rather than continue to grow it.
That person has some very strong opinions for sure. However of the things she states that are actual facts, I come up with a very different opinion
Poverty and famine are because of choice, and he’s part of the class that consistently enforce that choice.
As the climate goes tits up we’re going to return to a time where famine isn’t a failure of policy, but something unavoidable.
If he truly wanted to make a change he’d wipe out his own class.
