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Posted by ezequiel-garzon 2 days ago

Tough truths about climate(www.gatesnotes.com)
102 points | 122 commentspage 3
globalnode 2 days ago|
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?
Mistletoe 2 days ago||
Fourth tough truth about climate change: humans need LLM AI like a fish needs a bicycle and Microsoft is helping burn down the world to give it to them, reversing any progress that was made in reducing emissions and climate change in order to pump the stock price in the AI bubble.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

>Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.

GaryBluto 2 days ago|
Gates isn't involved in M$ anymore last time I checked.
incomingpain 2 days ago||
I actually really liked the article.

I'm rather shocked because this article reads very similar to the messaging Jordan Peterson and Bjorn Lomborg for like 2 years.

czottmann 2 days ago||
Unasked-for meta complaint about the site, not the article itself:

I hate that thing where you visit a blog post (judging from the URL) yet the blog post is seemingly endless (judging from the scrollbar), and when you scroll down you hop into the next blog post (URL just changes).

The scrollbar is useless in that case, I can't gauge the real length of the article. The Gates Foundation has more money than God, maybe spend a tiny little bit of it on a good UI designer, yeah?

tasuki 2 days ago|
> The Gates Foundation has more money than God, maybe spend a tiny little bit of it on a good UI designer, yeah?

I think it's precisely the problem: they hired an expensive designer, and the designer, for the obscene amount of money they were getting, felt like they had to do something special...

card_zero 2 days ago||
It specially crashes my browser when I try to read it, and specially fails to save to the Wayback Machine (the captures there are blank pages). However I found Gates making what looks to be the same argument on a different site:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/06/1124265/bill-gat...

superultra 2 days ago||
This feels like someone in a marathon deciding to quit because they just ran really well for the last 10 minutes, with the assumption that since they were running really fast there’s no reason to think they won’t keep running fast. It’s deeply flawed logic.

The other issue is that while he might be right, the worst and biggest consequences of being wrong will not affect Bill. Or, frankly, anyone reading this comment.

It’s such a complicated problem for us humans because we often struggle to conceptualize beyond our own tribes, let alone humans who won’t exist for decades.

But the problem is that IF climate scientists are right - and other than a few cheery cherry picked stats, Bill has no evidence saying otherwise - then the longer we do nothing the bigger the impact.

Will humanity die? Probably not. But will it drastically affect QoL for nearly all humans on the planet save the 1%? Probably.

mlrtime 2 days ago|
Right, but he knows this and he's drawing up his knowledge and solutions. You can point this out, but what solutions do you offer? And I'm sure you can paste some articles with solutions, but I mean actual solutions that people would be willing to change for, not hypotheticals.
andsoitis 2 days ago||
”Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”

How do we change incentives to be long-term aligned rather than counter-productive, anxious short-termism?

mlrtime 2 days ago||
>How do we change incentives to be long-term aligned rather than counter-productive, anxious short-termism?

Easy? You develop technology that makes it win-win for everyone. If you give me a choice to improve my QoL or reduce my cost AND reduce my carbon footprint at the same time, I make that choice.

If I have a choice between reducing carbon footprint, but my QoL goes down or costs go up, I won't choose it.

ACCount37 2 days ago||
I'm afraid that humanity doesn't have sufficiently advanced incentive-engineering technology for that.

Solving climate change is really really hard. Solving mass media being biased towards alarmism and allergic to nuance, decision-makers in politics and at corporations favoring short-term thinking? Hard enough to make solving climate change look easy.

lucabs 2 days ago||
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NedF 2 days ago||
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p1dda 2 days ago||
Gates, who is not a climate scientist, not even a scientist, spreading misinformation to try to make money for his investments just like he always does.
kamranjon 2 days ago||
He really was one of the first techies to project genius when he really just had antisocial behavior - sort of paving the way for folks like Musk and Thiel. There is such a distortion field around Gates that has been meticulously crafted for years, really since his rebranding after those antitrust trials that ruined his image.
p1dda 2 days ago||
'Investing' in mass media outlets helped craft his image and you're right, he's not a genius in any way shape or form. Antisocial is the perfect description.
mk89 2 days ago|||
He is saying: instead of focusing on climate change which is not killing anyone today, let's focus on vaccines against diseases, which are still unfortunately killing people. Today. Apparently countries are less willing to spend $ for organizations providing vaccines.

Questionable how efficient these orgs are, etc., but data shows that more people than ever are being vaccinated and this helps [0].

You can like it or not, but a vaccine against measles helps more than a solar panel to keep a child alive and costs way less.

[0]: https://www.who.int/news/item/24-04-2024-global-immunization...

Yiin 2 days ago|||
can you elaborate what part of his post is misinformation and why? I'm no fan of the dude for many reasons, but making money doesn't seem to be on his priority list as of lately
p1dda 2 days ago||
try googling Gates investment climate change
fragmede 2 days ago||
I did, it says Gates has invested in companies and stands to make money. Specifically Breakthrough Energy, a venture capital firm backing clean energy startups, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, his philanthropy foundation. Is it supposed to something about scientists and how he can afford some really good ones to tell him sciencey things about science so when Bill Gates says something sciencey, we should probably pay more attention to it than random HN comment that presented no credentials?
grebc 2 days ago|||
So you didn’t read the article?
wiredpancake 2 days ago||
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raffael_de 2 days ago|
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tomhow 1 day ago||
Please don't post flamebait or take threads off on generic tangents on HN. We're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tzs 2 days ago|||
> @BillGates: Tell us some tough truths about Epstein island!

There's no evidence Gates was ever on Epstein's island, so it is unlikely he has anything interesting to say about it.

The only known connection Gates has to Epstein is a few business meetings.

> But Kudos on acknowledging the growing evidence that the climate change movement is mostly about ideology, money, power and redistributing wealth.

The article did no such thing.

JumpinJack_Cash 2 days ago||
> > Tell us some tough truths about Epstein island!

Rich people want to get laid with young , attractive girls who are also well mannered and somewhat cultured and socially mature

Epstein was the curator of that list, kinda like an elite's elite escort agency.

Is the above so hard to grasp and reconcile with? The whole thing has been blown way out of proprtion