I think one of the most important things the "message" has gotten wrong is that you personally need to make big sacrifices and suffer: Buy a worse/more expensive car. Stop eating meat. Don't use disposable plates. Stop travelling. This is the stuff that fuels reactionaries.

Really the most impactful stuff is at the margins anyway: Whether your electricity comes from coal or solar. How many rare earths can we mine and recycle? Do you have a lawn or xeriscape?

The story here is not really that Gates has changed his mind (he never got rid of his private jet after all) it's the emphasis that doomscrolling is counterproductive.

> "All greenhouse gas emissions come from one of five sources" > (Graphic shows electricity generation 28%, transportation 16%, agriculture 19%, buildings 7%, manufacturing 30%)

There's another large source of human greenhouse gas emissions that will perhaps be the most difficult to do anything about and which as far as I know we don't have much in the way of hard numbers about, and that is emissions from military activity. Not just wars, but ordinary peace-time training, patrol operations, hauling stuff around, and so on.

getting the whole world to agree on climate accords didn't work. we blew past the 1 degree allowance we had budgeted for ourselves, so global action together is off the table. What will work, is extraordinary efforts by smaller groups. There's a lot of hard work by tiny groups and individuals to technologies that don't need the whole world to agree to collective action in order to save the planet. The obvious science fiction idea is to put sunglasses between the Earth and the sun, which is a ludicrous idea, because you'd need an insane amount of capability to lift things into space and place them far away from Earth. Once there, you'd just blackmail all the Earth's governments into paying you so the solar panels they rely on will work in order for your venture to be profitable.

The important thing to remember is that some of those bad parts where people will die from heat have nukes. Like Pakistan [0].

[1] https://www.arabnews.com/node/2352831/pakistan

Bill Gates gets attacked by both the right and the left. But the truth is that he has made huge progress for human welfare in working to eradicate serious diseases as well as by bringing practical solutions to climate issues.

I’m not sure this article is especially helpful. It’s addressed to the attendees of COP, but the attendees of COP already believe (almost unanimously) that adaptation has equal importance to mitigation. And it’s one of the only forums where poorer & disaffected nations are given a real opportunity.

I’m also not sure that anyone anywhere earnestly believes that climate change is an extinction level event that’ll render the entire planet unliveable. Certainly not the people at COP.

The piece seems unnecessarily broadly combative and contrarian.

> So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare.

Like addressing the exponential growth of income inequality? Unsurprisingly not mentioned at all. Might mean that billionaires have to give up their carbon credit purchases and then how could they be dismissive about their own emissions?

Bill is one of the better ones with his personal capital allocation. He could've just tried to create the fastest sailboat racing team or something. But I find it extremely difficult to take the wealthy seriously when they speak about carbon emissions and climate change. It’s like hearing an arsonist lecture on fire safety.

> Thirty years ago, when I was running Microsoft, I wrote a long memo to employees about a major strategic pivot we had to make: embracing the internet in every product we made.

Is this the one that lead to the term "embrace, extend, extinguish"?

Curious to see who are the first who will boycott MS/Azure/etc because of this.

He is mentioning geologic hydrogen as a new energy source. Surely that is a fossil fuel?

You cant throw money at the problem and buy your way out of damaging the environment by participating in carbon credit scams. Plus the whole write up feels like a giant opinion piece designed to maintain the status quo. Thats what you want if you're one of the richest in the world right?