Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who spent tens of millions of dollars funding far-left climate initiatives and authored a book warning of “climate disaster,” is now changing his tune on global warming and urging activists to divert their attention to other progressive causes.
In a lengthy blog post published Tuesday morning, Gates said climate change remains a serious issue, but that “it will not be the end of civilization.” Gates then bluntly said the money that has been designated for climate is not “being spent on the right things.”
“Sometimes the world acts as if any effort to fight climate change is as worthwhile as any other,” Gates wrote. “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 other words: Leaders need to focus less on fighting long-term global warming and more on near-term economic issues. That means Gates is prepared to divert millions of dollars in funding from climate issues to other social issues, a shift that could have significant reverberations across the American climate advocacy ecosystem.
It’s a stunning about-face for Gates, who himself has spent the last decade funding some of the most extreme climate initiatives. In 2021, he told CBS News the world must eliminate emissions soon or else “natural ecosystems will have failed.” Around that time, he released a book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster in which he argues for various climate solutions, such as investing in plant-based meats to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“This company, Nature’s Fynd, is using fungis [sic]. And then they turn them into sausage and yogurt. Pretty amazing,” he told CBS News, later adding that, if the world achieves zero emissions in the future, “it’ll be the most amazing thing mankind has ever done.”
Gates has funded environmental initiatives through his roughly $77 billion Gates Foundation and $149 million Breakthrough Energy Foundation. The Breakthrough Energy Foundation is a subsidiary of the firm Breakthrough Energy he founded alongside fellow liberal billionaires Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Tom Steyer during the 2015 United Nations climate conference, where world leaders signed the Paris climate accords.
“The Gates Foundation has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to totally reshape farming around the world in the name of saving the planet, and now Mr. Gates is coming forward to say that, actually, there is no existential threat and cooler heads must prevail,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, told the Washington Free Beacon.
“It’s a step in the right direction, but many of the organizations that Mr. Gates funds are the ones stoking the flames of the climate alarmism that he now denounces,” Thayer continued. “If he’s sincere in his beliefs, it’s time for him to look in the mirror and make some major changes at his foundation.”
According to a review of the group’s tax filings, Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Foundation spent a total of about $267.4 million funding various environmental and green energy initiatives between 2020 and 2023.
In 2023, for example, the foundation gave grants worth $565,000 to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a group that advocates for crackdowns on gas-powered appliances; $225,000 for the American Council on Renewable Energy, a green energy lobby group; and $1 million for the Clean Energy Buyers Institute, which advocates for a 90-percent carbon-free American electricity system by 2030.
The Breakthrough Energy Foundation also gave $200,000 to the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, a group linked to a Swiss billionaire environmentalist and whose mission is to create a “more just and equitable democracy” that helps “achieve meaningful progress on the climate crisis.” And it wired sizable eco grants for the National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Rocky Mountain Institute, Third Way, World Resources Institute, and Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Climate change is one of the most devastating problems humanity has ever faced—and the clock is running out,” the Union of Concerned Scientists states on its website.
The National Wildlife Federation similarly asserts that climate change “represents the most significant long-term threat to the survival of America’s wildlife.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council has helped lead lawsuits to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, block oil drilling, and electrify appliances. The group is involved in more than a dozen lawsuits against the Trump administration over actions like loosening power plant regulations and overturning electric vehicle mandates that the administration says will lower costs for Americans.
Gates’s comments, though, were immediately criticized by users of the liberal social media platform Bluesky.
“Bill Gates sure picked an interesting day to downplay the threat of climate change,” left-wing climate scientist and activist Michael Mann said in a post with a screenshot of a news article about Hurricane Melissa’s forecasted impacts.
“The hypocrisy of the man who rebranded tax evasion as charity is as bottomless as his wealth,” added activist Sarah Szalavitz.
“Um. Poor people bear the worst impacts & costs from effects of climate change, Bill…” said Lora Kolodny, a climate reporter for CNBC.
Sarah Goodyear, a writer for the New Yorker, wrote, “I hate these people,” in reference to Gates’s comments. Tim Dickinson, a political commentator, suggested Gates has pivoted “away from worrying about climate emissions” because of Microsoft’s increased development of power-hungry data centers. And other critics were quick to point to reports of Gates’s alleged ties to the infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Gates’s memo, meanwhile, comes two months after the Gates Foundation announced it would stop contributing to a network of left-wing funds that funnel $1 billion to a wide gamut of progressive causes, including climate initiatives, on an annual basis. The Gates Foundation has disbursed or pledged around $450 million to the funds over the past 16 years, the New York Times reported in August.
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