From Tilak’s Substack
Tilak Doshi
The climate alarmist establishment is in veritable disarray, as one of its most influential patrons appears to have defected from the faith. Last week, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates wrote a long missive from his digital pulpit GatesNotes, titled ‘Three tough truths about climate: What I want everyone at COP30 to know‘.
What upset devotees of the Church of Climate was Gates conceding that climate change will not cause humanity’s extinction:
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.
This departure from the apocalyptic fervour that once aligned Mr Gates with the high priests of environmental doom — figures like Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Michael Mann and UN Secretary General of “global boiling” fame António Guterres, who prophesied planetary demise unless humanity submits to the ironclad dogma of ‘Net Zero by 2050’ — was met with righteous indignation by upholders of the faith.
Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, who concocted the infamous global warming ‘hockey stick’ chart, wrote to HuffPost that he observed “an alarming shift in Gates’s rhetoric on climate change in recent years”. The reliably Leftist-progressive outlet quoted Mann’s accusation:
It was hardly surprising to me to encounter Gates’s dismissive recent words downplaying the threat of climate change and the need for urgent action. They simply reinforce the fact that he has been misguided on climate for some time now.
PBS reported that Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, called Gates’s essay “pointless, vague, unhelpful and confusing. … There is no reason to pit poverty reduction versus climate transformation. Both are utterly feasible, and readily so, if the Big Oil lobby is brought under control.” Robert Bryce refers to Laura Mauldin, an academic at the University of Connecticut, who writes in the New Republic that Gates’s essay was a “great example of why we shouldn’t be listening to people like him”.
Bill Gates was on the right side until he wasn’t, and one can imagine Mann, rather Greta-like, spluttering indignantly, “How dare you?”
It must be particularly inflammatory to the climate industrial complex for President Trump to have proclaimed in his usual rumbunctious style on Truth Social: “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.”
Why the Pivot and Why Now?
Gates now urges a pivot away from climate alarmism toward human welfare: vaccines to combat disease, resilient agriculture to feed the hungry and a pragmatic acknowledgment that fossil fuels aren’t vanishing anytime soon. This is no minor tweak. It is a tacit admission that the climate models, once touted as gospel, have diverged wildly from empirical reality.
But why this shift, and why now? Is it the dawning of reason amid mounting scientific evidence against modern day Lysenkoism, or a calculated repositioning by one of the world’s shrewdest investors, perhaps hastened by the counter-revolution in American politics under President Trump?
To grasp the magnitude of Gates’s volte-face one must revisit the historical arc of climate alarmism, a movement that has morphed from scientific inquiry into a quasi-religious crusade. For decades, Gates was a fervent acolyte, pouring billions from his foundation into initiatives that amplified the direst projections of the climate industrial complex. His 2021 book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, read like a manifesto for technocratic salvation: massive subsidies for renewables, carbon taxes to punish emitters and a global mobilisation akin to wartime efforts. The blurb to the book declares: “In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical — and accessible — plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.”
This echoed the Malthusian warnings of arch-doomster Paul Ehrlich whose 1968 Population Bomb predicted mass starvation by the 1980s — prophecies that crumbled under the weight of economic growth, widespread use of agricultural fertilisers, relatively free markets for food and bountiful natural resources. Similarly, the climate models Gates championed relied on implausible worst-case scenarios, assuming hypersensitivity to CO2, projections that have consistently overshot observed global temperatures.
As I noted in my 2021 review of Gates’s book, these models ignored the adaptive ingenuity of human societies and the economic folly of mandating a rushed transition away from fossil fuels, which still power over 80% of global energy. The evidence against such alarmism has accumulated, eroding the foundations of the alarmist narrative. An independent assessment by a panel of experts untainted by the climate-industrial complex, commissioned by the US Department of Energy under Secretary Chris Wright, has authoritatively debunked the notion of imminent catastrophe. The July 2025 report concludes that while greenhouse gas emissions warrant attention through innovation and adaptation, the risks to human existence are exaggerated and are not borne out by rigorous scientific analysis.
Energy consulting giants like Wood Mackenzie, who have been eager participants in the Net Zero mantra for the past decade, now belatedly forecast that fossil fuels will dominate the global energy mix well past mid-century, rendering ‘Net Zero by 2050’ not just prohibitively costly — with trillions in stranded assets and disrupted supply chains — but technologically infeasible. The International Energy Agency under Director Fatih Birol, long a cheerleader for renewable energy, has now reversed its previous ridiculous call to stop all fossil fuel investments:
I want to make it clear… there would be a need for investment, especially to address the decline in the existing fields. There is a need for oil and gas upstream investments, full stop.
Has Gates changed his mind when the facts change? Surveying the empirical wreckage of the climate alarmist narrative, perhaps he has embraced a Keynesian humility. Alas, if only that were so. To begin with, the facts have not changed as much as scientific objectivity has had greater access to alternative media. With President Trump’s energy dominance agenda and his executive order to ‘Restore Gold Standard Science‘, contrarian scientists and sceptics have been able to pierce through the veil of Leftist-progressive media censorship that was a defining feature of the climate-industrial complex.
Bill Gates is (still) all for solar and wind power, battery storage and EVs. In this, Gates is unlike Energy Secretary Chris Wright who is aware of the need to curb Western carbon colonialism that seeks to keep African countries from exploiting fossil fuels for cheap energy. Gates wishes for the Global South have not changed:
All countries will be able to construct buildings with low-carbon cement and steel. Almost all new cars will be electric. Farms will be more productive and less destructive, using fertiliser created without generating any emissions. Power grids will deliver clean electricity reliably, and energy costs will go down.
Like his 2021 book, Gates still hankers for a technological cornucopia with a long list of ‘exciting innovations’ such as zero emission steel, clean cement, geologic hydrogen, carbon capture, sustainable aviation fuel, synthetic zero-emission fertiliser, feedstock additives and vaccines to curb cow-burped methane and the like.
What can policymakers do? Well, Democrats in the US, EU bureaucrats in Brussels and Energy Secretary ‘Mad Ed’ Miliband in the UK will be pleased to note that Gates still recommends that policymakers “protect funding for clean technology and the policies that promote them”. A tiger cannot change its stripes!
Expediency and Opportunism Perhaps?
In a satirical barb, the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins Jr captures the irony: “Bill Gates Apologises for Earth’s Survival: The science never said humanity was doomed. Now, apparently, you’re not obliged to believe it is.”
Gates is now saying that we should be free from the paralysing fear he once peddled. His epiphany carries the whiff of opportunism, a strategic pivot masked as intellectual evolution — especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, which has unleashed a torrent of scrutiny on the climate-industrial complex. As Glenn Beck acidly observed, Gates’s sudden ‘climate reasonableness’ smacks not of science but of political survival, a hasty retreat from doomsday rhetoric now that Trump’s administration is dismantling the globalist grip on energy policy:
Bill Gates’ Sudden ‘Climate Reasonableness’ Isn’t About Science — It’s About Trump. For years, Bill Gates and the globalist elite pushed a doomsday climate agenda: shut down economies, ration energy and let the ‘useless eaters’ fend for themselves. The plan was simple — until Donald Trump won. Now, with the WEF and UN’s grip slipping, Gates is singing a new tune: ‘Maybe we should improve lives in a warming world instead of crippling them.’
Coincidence? Hardly.
Look no further than the Senate Judiciary Committee’s probe, led by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, into the Gates Foundation’s $11.7 million funnelled to arms of China’s Communist Government, including entities tied to the military and state-run universities bolstering Xi Jinping’s regime. In his letter to Mark Suzman, Chief Executive Officer of the Gates Foundation, Sen Grassley starts with these statement:
According to recent reports, the Gates Foundation, through grants and direct payments, has funded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies. I am writing today to ask you whether these reports are true or not and, if true, how your organisation’s conduct comports with 501(c)(3) requirements.
These funds, in turn, looped back to US climate NGOs, raising the possibility of influence-peddling. Rogan O’Handley, a lawyer and conservative political commentator with a combined five million followers on Facebook, Instagram and X as of March 2024, argues that this was no coincidence: Gates amplified climate hysteria to hobble American industry with regulations, while China ramped up coal-fired dominance, perhaps in exchange for favourable deals on his software empire.
With Trump vowing to unravel such entanglements, Gates’s pivot looks less like enlightenment and more like pre-emptive damage control. This scrutiny extends to the Gates Foundation’s broader role in environmental funding and NGO advocacy, now under the microscope of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE’s early findings exposed a web of public-private partnerships that channel taxpayer dollars to activist NGOs, amplifying agendas like ‘environmental justice’ and anti-fossil fuel litigation — networks in which Gates’s philanthropy plays a starring role.
For instance, DOGE slashed $67 million in EPA grants under the Biden-era ‘Justice40’ initiative, targeting recipients like the Institute for Sustainable Communities and the Deep South Centre for Environmental Justice for pushing ideological pursuits over practical protection. Elon Musk has branded US-funded NGOs the “biggest scam ever“, accusing them of fraud and graft that bankrupts America, while congressional hearings decry these as ‘slush funds’ advancing radical causes.
Although DOGE focuses on federal waste, its investigations indirectly implicate Gates. His foundation, with an endowment over $75 billion and annual grants exceeding $7 billion, supplements Government aid through partnerships like USAID’s $40 billion portfolio, which DOGE has disrupted by suspending officials and programmes. Gates has publicly decried these cuts, warning they endanger children’s lives in HIV/AIDS hotspots, but Musk retorts with accusations of fraud in philanthropies — perhaps a veiled jab at Gates’s networks.
Gates’s Breakthrough Energy arm, committing over $2.5 billion to climate tech and NGOs like the Rocky Mountain Institute, amplifies clean energy advocacy but, amid DOGE’s pressure, has curtailed grant-making in 2025, signalling retreat. For Gates, DOGE’s axe threatens a legacy built on blended philanthropy — potentially exposing mission creep where private agendas leverage public funds.
Vaccines and Genetic Engineering
Gates’s priorities in health and development — vaccines for health and ‘resilient’ agriculture — align with his vast investment portfolio and influence networks. Consider his fixation on vaccines. Empirical history tells us that the lion’s share of human health gains over the past century stems not from pharmaceutical miracles but from foundational public health infrastructure — clean water, sanitation, nutrition and hygiene.
Plummeting child mortality in the developing world correlates with economic growth and urban sanitation, although vaccines do have an important role to play. Why, then, does Gates’s foundation channel billions into vaccine development, often at the expense of these basics? The Gates Foundation, as the WHO’s second-largest funder (providing 9.5% of its income from 2010-2023), has skewed priorities: out of $4.5 billion contributed, 82.6% targeted infectious diseases, with 58.9% ($3.2 billion) funnelled to polio alone. In 2024, Gates poured $889 million into polio eradication — roughly $3 million per each of the 289 confirmed paralytic cases worldwide — despite the vast majority of outbreaks now being vaccine-derived polio from live-attenuated vaccines, rendering eradication an impossible goal. Dr Robert Malone argues that this focus ignores root causes like poor sanitation, which historically drove polio’s decline, and perpetuates a cycle where vaccines infect people with both asymptomatic and paralytic forms.
Even more damning is the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) vaccine saga, a vaccine which was phased out in the US in the 1980s for causing brain injury or death in one in 300 children. Yet Gates’s initiatives continue administering it to more than 160 million African kids annually. This is negligence writ large, prioritising patentable interventions over proven public health initiatives. This pharma-centric worldview extends to Gates’s outsized role in the World Health Organisation (WHO), where he ranks as the second-largest funder after the US Government.
The WHO, recipient of hefty donations from pharmaceutical giants, has faced accusations of corruption and capture, particularly in its bungled Covid response. Overnight in early 2020, the WHO jettisoned decades of pandemic wisdom favouring targeted protections for the vulnerable, as articulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, in favour of draconian lockdowns that ravaged economies, livelihoods and mental health across much of the world.
Turning to agriculture, Gates’s proposals evoke similar scepticism. He advocates ‘resilient’ crops, genetic engineering and even whimsical interventions like inoculating cows to curb methane burps — framed as a climate imperative. But with his newfound doubt on planetary doom, why persist in demonising bovine flatulence? The real levers for feeding the world’s poor lie in time-tested investments: irrigation networks, affordable fertilisers, rural extension services and pest-resistant seeds tailored to local ecologies.
Lab-grown meat and synthetic biology, cornerstones of Gates’ portfolio, smack of hubris. In sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria claims hundreds of thousands of lives annually, Gates’s malaria vaccine push diverts from proven mosquito control via improved drainage, insecticides and insecticide-treated bed-nets — interventions that eradicated the disease in many parts of the world without a single jab. Why the aversion to these fundamentals?
Perhaps because they offer scant patentable profits, unlike the biotech ventures in which Gates holds stakes. As David Blackmon astutely observes in his Substack analysis, Gates’s dialogues with energy realists like Chris Wright reveal a man grappling with the unintended harms of green zealotry: soaring energy prices, food insecurity and stymied development in the name of emissions cuts. This is not to impugn Gates’s intentions outright — philanthropy on his scale has undeniable potential to achieve much good. Yet history abounds with cautionary tales of roads to hell paved with good intentions.
Can Philanthropy and Economic Development Go Together?
What, then, is the path forward? Genuine initiatives in philanthropy would embrace the basics of economic growth and human flourishing known since the birth of classical liberalism, although Adam Smith had “never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good”.
Good governance and measured efforts toward verifiable public health basics, the fostering of energy abundance (including nuclear and fossil fuels) and adaptation to the natural variability of climate change make eminent sense. In the Global South, this could mean partnering with sovereign nations on local priorities — irrigation in India, use of hydrocarbons in Africa, flood control in Bangladesh.
Gates’s climate volte-face underscores a profound irony: the billionaire who sought to engineer the planet’s salvation may now recognise that human flourishing demands less engineering and more economic freedom.
If Gates truly means to pivot, he would begin by supporting what history has shown works: energy abundance, resilient infrastructure and economic freedom. The greatest leaps in global welfare occurred when energy, goods, ideas and people moved freely, not when elites sanctioned carbon markets or distributed patents to gene-edited crops and lab-grown food.
Whether the Gates turnaround on climate alarmism marks a true awakening or merely a tactical retreat amid the US Senate’s investigations and DOGE’s dismantling of NGO slush funds, it exposes the fragility of narratives built on technical fixes alone. The answer will shape not just climate discourse, but also the contours of global philanthropy.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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