🔗 Share this article

Let's address the central dilemma: Bill Gates is a politics denier. Though he came to it late, he now accepts the realities of climate science. But he exists in stark, awkward denial about how politics works. His latest essay on climate, shared days ago, approaches climate change without political context. He composes text ignoring political influence, and as if extreme wealth didn't exist.

Primary Argument

His primary argument suggests that money is insufficient, so the representatives at the environmental conference in Brazil should direct money away from "short-term pollution targets" towards climate resilience and spending on poverty and disease.

Admittedly, resources for positive initiatives are insufficient, but it's not caused by inevitable rules, an unavoidable reality of communities. The reason is elite influence has declared war on benign state spending, causing the dismantling of aid agencies and drastic cuts to the aid budgets of various states. Financial restraint stems from policy choices. The selection to enforce it originates with leaders submitting to the preferences of billionaire class.

Current Funds

There are truckloads of money available. Soon after the billionaire released his essay, data indicated that the combined assets of the 10 richest US billionaires grew by $698bn over the last year. That money alone, the increase in a handful of billionaires' net worth, is nearly tenfold the annual amount required to end extreme poverty worldwide. What methods enabled such concentration of the world's money into their pockets? What prevents redistribution through effective taxation? The explanation involves their transformation of financial influence into governmental control. The richer they become, the more they can bend government and financial structures to their will, guaranteeing continued wealth accumulation. But Bill Gates says nothing in his essay about ways and locations for more resources for both climate solutions and hardship alleviation could be identified.

'His writing appears primarily as reconciliation with Donald Trump.' Gates photographed with the former president for corporate executives in the capital.

The Poverty-Wealth Connection

A clear connection exists between the economic hardship Gates professes to address and the wealth he fails to mention. In the US, homelessness is breaking records, and so is the share of assets owned by the top 0.1%. While this might not be Gates's own business model, by suppressing salaries, increasing housing costs, busting trade unions and winning tax and spending cuts, extremely wealthy individuals benefit from others' economic struggles.

Investigation Conclusions

A remarkable study in political science publications, among limited studies accessing this exclusive domain, found that the ultra-rich have radically different political views from the general population. The rich participants surveyed, completely unlike ordinary citizens, saw budget deficits as the most important of the issues it listed, and ecological crisis as insignificant. They were significantly more prone to argue that public retirement benefits and government medical care should be reduced, and significantly less prone to accept that the unemployed should have a "decent standard of living", or that there should be more regulation of oil companies, banks and health insurers. They were strongly against wealth redistribution.

Governmental Access

So whose views prevail? The small elite or the vast population? Though the study was conducted in the Obama years, it found that extremely wealthy individuals enjoyed greater political access than regular individuals. How about today? The situation hardly requires explanation.

Missing Elements and Presumptions

That's another telling absence in Bill Gates's essay: throughout thousands of words, Trump goes unmentioned. Were Gates to do so, he'd have to acknowledge that the second of his major assumptions is shaky: decreasing expenses for eco-friendly innovations automatically creates ecological advancement. Naturally, it's beneficial that renewable energy costs are dropping significantly than conventional power. But Trump and similar demagogues are doing everything they can to impede the transition.

Partly as a result, traditional energy sources stay very profitable. This could be why, despite Gates's claim that his foundation had divested all its "direct holdings in oil and gas companies" in 2019, its oil and gas financial assets have, actually grown.

Psychological Factors

To Gates, overthrowing the power of the ultra-wealthy may be unthinkable. It's not merely incompatible with his outlook. Based on his notable omissions regarding this topic, he could genuinely find it impossible to consider. Possibly this represents "extreme wealth mentality": a profound incapacity to see the world from other people's point of view. Even though billionaires present research challenges, extrapolating from research into how gaining wealth and status affects cognition could suggest that acquiring huge amounts of money is like taking a blow to the head. Wealth seems to scramble certain cognitive functions, notably those concerning understanding and outlook.

Strategic Considerations

However, strategic thinking might also be involved: his writing appears primarily as reconciliation with the former president. Trump definitely understood it as such: "We've defeated the climate change falsehood." The billionaire has acknowledged his complete error. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!"

Background Information

The billionaire has consistently been incorrect on this topic, though not for the reasons Trump imagines. He has consistently lagged behind the curve, reciting fossil fuel claims (clean technology could decrease pollution only through enormous spending) well after their refutation. He has disseminated uncertainty and false information, such as the groundless assertion in his new essay that the intention behind Sri Lanka's failed prohibition on chemical fertilizers involved emission reduction.

Further Difficult Realities

The billionaire titles his piece Three Difficult Climate Realities. Thus, here's another difficult reality he carefully avoids. If, as currently expected, essential environmental mechanisms pass turning points and suddenly collapse, the impact on humanity, ignoring the persistence of additional organisms (an issue he regularly neglects), would destroy the smooth and steady progress he foresees. Because environmental change is likely to proceed not in gradual and linear ways, but through rapid shifts, the possible impacts on human wellbeing are extremely hard to predict. His argument that we should align all funding to current "data-based analysis" of improvements in human welfare, even if it seems logical, introduces in the face of systemic change a profound irrationality, {prompting us to ignore the greatest