Bill Gates stirred controversy this week with an open memo urging world leaders to “pivot” their approach to climate change. Instead of obsessing over emissions targets, he argued, we should focus on improving human welfare — a message that echoes his dual identity as philanthropist and tech investor.

In the memo, Gates insisted that while climate change “will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” He added, “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

That may sound reassuring — though “most places” leaves a lot of room for suffering. Gates went on to argue that a “doomsday outlook” is distracting the climate community from more practical efforts to help people adapt and prosper in a warming world.

His comments landed on the same day the UN Secretary-General issued a stark warning that humanity has already missed its 1.5 °C target, and that crossing this line risks triggering irreversible tipping points in the Amazon, Greenland, Antarctica, and coral reefs.

Gates, who has spent two decades working on global health and development, framed his argument around the same principle: “Our chief goal,” he wrote, “should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”

Climate leaders react

Climate leaders didn’t take kindly to Gates’s “pivot.”

Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who helped broker the Paris Agreement, drew a sharp contrast between Gates’s memo and the real world. As Hurricane Melissa battered the Caribbean with Category 5 winds, she posted:

“Sorry Bill Gates, no amount of human welfare in Jamaica would have stopped, prevented or reduced the impact of Category 5 Melissa. She got to that intensity because of abnormally warm waters on her path.”

Her point was simple: the best poverty program in the world can’t stand up to a 300-kilometre-an-hour storm.

Others criticized the way Gates framed the issue as a choice between climate action and human development. Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, told Axios that climate change isn’t a competing priority — it’s the underlying threat to all others.

“People often think of climate change as a separate bucket at the end of a long row of other buckets of problems we’re trying to fix,” she said. “The reason we care about climate change is that it’s the hole in every bucket.”

Bill McKibben, the writer and activist who helped launch the modern climate movement, was blunter. In a Substack post titled Climate Gates, he quipped, “Maybe we don’t need billionaire opinions on everything,” and laid out Gates’s shaky record on climate over the past two decades.

Until 2006, McKibben noted, Gates thought the whole thing was “a crock.” And when he finally weighed in with his 2021 book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, he argued renewables were too costly — just as solar and wind became cheaper than coal, oil, or gas.

Playing to populists

Gates’s memo caused such a stir because it played neatly into a familiar narrative — the one that casts climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” as Donald Trump recently put it.

Right-leaning commentators in the U.S. and U.K. seized on his words as validation that the climate agenda is exaggerated, alarmist, and ideologically driven. The Daily Telegraph ran a piece titled “Bill Gates Has Just Demolished the Fallacy at the Heart of Net Zero,” praising his call to focus on “human welfare rather than a narrow temperature-target mindset.” The Wall Street Journal offered similar praise with headlines like “Bill Gates Rethinks Climate Catastrophe” and “Bill Gates Apologizes for Earth’s Survival.”

Business-friendly outlets also applauded. The New York Post declared that “business leaders cheer Bill Gates ditching climate doom,” framing his memo as a triumph of pragmatism and innovation over “climate hysteria.”

And, of course, Trump himself was gleeful, seizing on Gates’s comments for a victory lap.

“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

The comfort of being told “it’s fine…”

Perhaps the most troubling part of Gates’s message isn’t how it plays to right-wing populists — it’s how easily it resonates with everyone else. The idea that we can relax about climate change, that we don’t need to push quite so hard, is deeply appealing.

Climate action is hard. It requires urgency and constant attention. So when someone with Gates’s stature says it’s okay to ease up, that reassurance carries weight. It gives permission to look away.

Several people sent me articles celebrating Gates’s statement this week. No one said they agreed with him — but no one disagreed either. Sending an article without comment can amount to a kind of unspoken endorsement.

Not one person sent me the UN Secretary-General’s speech from the same day — the one urging us to redouble our efforts to avoid “devastating consequences.”

That contrast says a lot about what we want to hear, and what we’d rather not.

The world we’re actually living in

Honestly, I, too, would love to believe Gates. I’d love to relax — to stop worrying about climate change and trust that, as warming doubles or worse, everything will be fine.

The thing is, the natural world doesn’t care what Bill Gates thinks — and the events unfolding before us refute his message so completely it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

In the very same week that Gates urged us all to ease up, Hurricane Melissa — one of the most powerful storms ever recorded — tore through the Caribbean. When it hit Jamaica, winds were clocked at more than 300 km/h. Without climate change, scientists estimate a storm like Melissa would occur once every 8,000 years. Now, events like this are at least four times more likely.

More than 50 people were killed, many of them children. The economic toll is estimated at $50 billion. For Jamaica — a country with a GDP of about $20 billion — that’s not a disaster, it’s an obliteration. “We are seeing a country devastated to levels never seen before,” said Dennis Zulu, the UN’s resident coordinator in Jamaica.

Meanwhile, a new Lancet report revealed that extreme heat is now killing one person every minute worldwide. The Countdown on Health and Climate Change, produced with the WHO, found heat-related deaths up 23% since the 1990s — now averaging more than half a million deaths per year. The average person has been exposed to 19 days of life-threatening heat annually, 16 of which would not have occurred without global warming. In poorer countries, the resulting loss of labour has wiped out roughly 6% of GDP.

And just last week, scientists confirmed that humanity has now crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries — the environmental guardrails that keep Earth habitable. From biodiversity loss to the destabilization of freshwater systems, we are pushing past the boundaries that make human life on Earth possible.

The common thread in all of this is greenhouse gas emissions that are warming our planet. How can focusing our attention elsewhere be the best way to solve this problem?

Accepting warming is flawed and dangerous

And remember: there are the impacts that are happening now — in a world that has warmed by just 1.3 °C, roughly the amount scientists have described as the “safe level.”

Gates is right that we’re on track for +2–3 °C of warming by 2100 — but wrong to suggest we should be comfortable with that. Climate impacts don’t rise in a straight line; they compound.

Each extra fraction of a degree pushes us closer to thresholds that can’t easily be reversed: coral reefs that bleach and die, permafrost that releases methane, ice sheets that begin to collapse. Those aren’t gradual changes; they’re tipping points.

And when these shifts collide — heat waves worsening droughts, droughts fuelling wildfires, fires destroying forests that once absorbed carbon — the effects multiply. The same holds true for societies: every new shock hits harder as infrastructure, food systems, and public health are already stretched thin.

In other words, the damage won’t just double; it will accelerate. The curve of risk bends sharply upward the hotter the planet gets.

So when Gates says civilization will survive two or three degrees of warming, he could be right in the narrowest sense — but “not ending civilization” is a very low bar for complacency.

And here’s the real irony: the urgency to tackle warming that Gates now dismisses is exactly what has delivered whatever progress we’ve made so far.

When global efforts to cut emissions began around 2009, we were headed toward 4–6 °C of warming. By 2015, the Paris Agreement had brought that down to about 3–4 °C. Today, thanks to cleaner technology, stronger policies, and shifting markets, we’re roughly on track for 2.4–2.7 °C — if nations meet their promises.

That narrowing didn’t happen by accident. It was the product of relentless focus, political pressure, and the collective determination not to relax. The problem is far from solved — but it’s proof that the urgency and focus are necessary.

With the world’s largest democracy and its richest nation backing away from the Paris Accord — and much of the rest of the world dragging its feet — this is not the moment to tell people to ease up.

Maybe Bill McKibben is right: we should stop taking our cues from billionaires.

Gates, like the product he launched, Windows, has done plenty of good for the world. But anyone who’s lived through a few Microsoft software updates knows the pattern — they promise to make things better, then slow everything down or crash the system entirely. That’s why most people learned to be cautious before installing the next big update.

We should treat Gates’s latest climate “update” the same way: with healthy skepticism. It might sound reassuring, but if we click “accept”, it could crash our entire operating system.

Here are the other major climate stories from the week of October 27 to November 2, 2025:

Extreme Weather

Hurricane Melissa delivered a devastating reminder of climate change’s growing fury.

• The Category 5 storm—the strongest ever to strike Jamaica—tore through the Caribbean, killing at least 50 people and leaving hundreds of thousands without power across Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti.
  
  
• Scientists say climate change made the storm four times more likely and far more intense, as warmer oceans supercharged its winds and rainfall, turning the region into a disaster zone now struggling to recover.

Canada Policy

Canada’s new budget is expected to reveal Prime Minister Carney’s vision for growing the economy while protecting the climate, offering long-awaited clarity on how his government will balance competitiveness with emissions cuts.

• Leaks suggest that Canada’s new climate competitiveness strategy will hinge on industrial carbon pricing to balance emissions cuts with investor certainty. This as new modeling shows that Canada’s economy could shrink by 21% by 2070 due to the effects of climate change.
  
  
• At the same time, critics accused Ottawa of fast-tracking LNG projects that undermine its goals, questioned transparency around Carney’s “grand bargain,” and warned of lobbyist conflicts that blur the line between polluters and environmental advocates.

COP

With COP30 set to begin November 10, global climate politics are fraught—but not without hope.

• The UN warns the world has already missed the 1.5°C target, as most countries have failed to update their climate plans. António Guterres called for urgent emissions cuts to limit the damage.

• Bill Gates drew criticism for calling for “a pivot” in global climate strategy—arguing that efforts should focus less on strict temperature or emissions targets and more on improving lives in poorer nations through adaptation, health, and economic development, a stance many fear could weaken global climate ambition.
  
  
• Gates’s comments contrasted sharply with a major report warning that climate change is already causing record harm to human health—driving millions of deaths from heat, wildfires, pollution, and disease, with the poorest countries suffering most as global leadership and funding fall short.
  
  
• This, as an Oxfam report called out U.S. billionaires as outsized carbon emitters, burning through carbon emissions at 4,000 times the speed of the world’s poorest 10%.

• Washington’s decision to skip COP30 is being welcomed by some, as it may spare the talks from U.S. obstruction and give other nations room to push for real progress.

Nuclear Power

• The U.S. made a major commitment to new nuclear power to meet soaring data center energy demands, signing an $80-billion deal with Canadian firms Cameco and Brookfield to build reactors across the country.

• In Ontario, the province’s nuclear-heavy strategy came under fire as electricity generation costs jumped 29% on November 1, forcing the government to boost subsidies to shield consumers and contain backlash.

Finance

Climate finance brought both setbacks and signs of progress this week.

• The Net Zero Asset Managers coalition is fighting for survival, relaunching without its 2050 net-zero pledge after political pushback and exits like State Street’s.
  
  
• In contrast, a coalition of UK universities led by Cambridge unveiled a $660 million fossil-free cash fund—the first of its kind—showing that ambitious, values-driven climate investing is still gaining ground.

Carbon Pricing

India and the EU are edging toward a trade deal that could bolster global carbon pricing.

• The two sides agreed to deepen talks on steel, autos, and the EU’s carbon levy—areas of tension but also potential alignment—at a time when U.S. opposition threatens to weaken international efforts to price carbon fairly and consistently.

Electric Vehicles

• China continues to surge ahead, unveiling an 800-mile solid-state battery and dominating global EV markets with cheaper, cleaner cars.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Volkswagen broke ground on Canada’s largest battery plant—a rare bright spot in a sector shaken by tariffs and investment uncertainty.

Air Transport

This week, momentum continued to build around cleaner aviation fuels.

• The head of the International Renewable Energy Agency signalled that biofuels and sustainable aviation fuel will take center stage at COP30, with a global pledge likely in the works.
  
  
• Meanwhile, United Airlines expanded its SAF partnership with Neste to three major U.S. airports, advancing efforts to decarbonize flight operations.

Business Emissions

This week’s corporate climate news showed the widening gap between leaders and laggards.

• Meta deepened its clean-energy commitment with a $900 million Texas solar deal powering its data centers.
  
  
• European and Chinese automakers joined forces to pool carbon credits and dodge EU fines.
  
  
• Meanwhile, investors like Amundi pushed for stronger corporate disclosure in Canada—just as Exxon sued California to stop it.

Legal Challenges

Courts weighed in on climate responsibility this week.

• In Canada, four young plaintiffs launched a lawsuit against CPP Investments, accusing it of mismanaging climate risk and backing fossil fuel expansion — the first legal challenge of its kind.
  
  
• Meanwhile in Europe, the continent’s top rights court dismissed a youth-led challenge to Norway’s Arctic oil policy, underscoring the legal hurdles facing climate activists worldwide.