👀 Let’s unpack Bill Gates’ controversial new take on climate change 👀

✉️ Gates' letter "Three Hard Truths About Climate Change" is certainly making the rounds in my circles. I have some important observations:

👎 Climate and aid budgets are NOT zero sum. Between 2015 and 2024, aid grew 60% ($132B → $212B). In the same period, total global investment in climate solutions more than doubled, from roughly $600B to over $1,300B a year. Pitting the two against each other is not just unhelpful, it is unfounded.

🌎 Tipping points matter. Gates assumes that humans can adapt to the changing climate, even at 3 degrees warming or more. However, this would entail crossing certain climate tipping points - not mentioned once - such as an AMOC reversal which will cause exorbitant human and economic damage.

🏛️ Green premium reductions require industrial policy. I fully agree with Gates on the need to lower green premiums across the board. Gates assumes that this can be driven almost entirely by private capital. History teaches us that we will primarily need billions, trillions of public investments for this to happen, the exact funding Gates is suggesting to reduce/cut.

👍 Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that resonate in this letter (and I highly recommend reading it in full - see comments): I share Gates' enthusiasm for innovation, find his wide-ranging examples hope-inducing, and agree that it makes no sense to place the decarbonisation burden on least-developed countries.

Still, I do not think Gates did anyone in climate a service with this. I keep asking myself why a thought leader of his calibre and intelligence decided to write such a piece. Two possible explanations:

👉 The more benign is that Gates is desperate to save the small aid budgets that are still left, operating under the believe that taking out climate will give him/us the best shot at this.

👉 A more cynical view is that this is the latest effort of a leading figure in the U.S. succumbing to political anti-climate pressure to safeguard their own economic interests.

⁉️ What is your take? What impact will this piece have on our sector?

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