When Bill Gates Yelled at Me Over Climate Change

Reposting this from David Fenton, a long time progressive activist, PR pro, Communicator, author of The Activist’s Media Handbook.

Framelab:

Bill Gates was yelling and screaming at me. Turning beet red. Waving his arms. Bullying, condescending, mocking. In public, no less.

It was August, 2010 at the Techonomy Conference at Lake Tahoe. The month before, I watched Gates acknowledge the problem of climate change for the first time at the Aspen Ideas Festival. 

This was most welcome, yet, curiously, Gates claimed that climate change was mostly a problem for poor people in the tropics. It would not affect North America and Europe very much. New York and Miami under water—not a problem. Heat wave deaths, fires, wildfire smoke in the Pacific Northwest, stronger hurricanes, ocean acidification—not to worry.

At the Tahoe conference, I told the head of Gates’ private office that this could be embarrassing to Bill. He encouraged me to talk to Gates about it, introducing us in the hallway between workshops.

“Thank you for getting involved in the climate issue. We need you,” I said. “I wonder if I could introduce you to scientists who study North American impacts. They will be quite severe, including to Seattle and the Cascades.”

Gates turned red and started waving his arms at me. In a loud voice, he growled “Who the hell are you? I talk to the world’s top climate scientists.”

“Well, a friend of mine, Dr. Heidi Cullen, for example, has just published a book about North American impacts. She’s also the chief climate scientist at the Weather Channel,” I responded.

“The Weather Channel! You get your information from the Weather Channel!” Now Gates was beet red, mocking and gesticulating even more. Heads were turning as people watched this spectacle in the hallway. “You should meet a real climate scientist,” he said while pointing to physicist David Keith, then with the University of Calgary, later with Harvard and the University of Chicago.

“Ok sure, I’ll do that, and send you more information,” I said, trying to get my heartbeat to slow after this outburst. I then went to David Keith and told him what had happened. 

“Yes, we’ve been trying to help Bill understand this isn’t just about the tropics,” Keith explained.

This was almost 15 years ago but, in his much-covered memo last week, Gates still doesn’t seem to get it. He is still claiming climate disasters will mostly affect poor people in the tropics. Parroting the climate “delayer” and Wall Street Journal editorial page favorite Bjorn Lomborg (who Gates funds), he insists we should focus on other “more urgent” issues like health and agriculture in Africa. 

In a quote right out of The Onion, he said “temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate” and we should not focus on short-term emission goals.

For a smart guy, who truly does care about the health and well being of people in poor countries, this is illogical. The higher temperatures go, the closer we get to people in the tropics literally dropping dead outside from “wet bulb” temperatures, making it hard to grow crops or even work in the fields. 

More mosquito-borne illness will hit people and at higher elevations. Meanwhile, it is precisely the emissions of the next several years that matter, because they risk putting us above the threshold for a livable climate for civilization, and for dangerous tipping points in the life support systems of our planet. (Carbon can last millennia in the atmosphere). 

Ok, so, as Gates claims, climate “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” ignoring all the suffering already here, and guaranteed to get worse as temperatures rise. Humanity may make it, but can our civilization survive the abandonment of the coastal cities of the world along with massive refugee flows it will cause? Can Europe survive the Gulf Stream shutdown likely to come if we keep polluting, making it too cold to grow food? Already, insurance markets are straining from the cost of extreme weather, and this is just the beginning.

As climate scientist Michael Mann puts it, “climate change is the greatest threat of all to people in the tropics.”

Is Gates really that clueless? Does he just have excessive faith in carbon-removal or sun-blocking technology that does not exist yet, while continuing as usual to dismiss the viability of solar/wind/water/storage? Or is he mostly responding to Trump, whose support Microsoft needs for its race to AI dominance?
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Recent Yale studies have shown that only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change on social media, where the majority now get their news. Sixty-six percent report they “rarely or never” see or hear anything about the issue in the media, or from their friends. A recent poll by the Forest Stewardship Council with polling firm Ipsos shows a decline globally over the past two years in the proportion of people rating climate as a top concern. Climate hushing has its consequences.

A recent analysis by the Washington Post of social media, podcast appearances and speeches by Congressional Democrats show that mentions of climate have markedly decreased since 2022. There are noteworthy exceptions, like the steadfast Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

And to top it all off, today’s parasocial influencer in chief, Joe Rogan, keeps spreading falsehoods to American men on his top-rated podcast. In a recent episode featuring, of course, the long debunked and cranky contrarian octogenarian Dr. Richard Lindzen, listeners heard the complete nonsense that there is “no correlation” between temperatures and CO2 levels in the atmosphere. 

Rogan repeated the usual trope that because the climate has changed before, this is nothing new, even though humans are now clearly in charge of the thermostat. Rogan apparently knows better than all the major scientific institutions in the world. He thinks scientists are in a conspiracy to make money, ignoring the real conspiracy by fossil fuel companies to knowingly ruin a livable earth for profit and lie about it since the 1970s.

So what should activists do in response to all this climate hushing?

TALK MORE ABOUT HOW CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS THE PEOPLE AND PLACES WE LOVE. Spend more time and money reaching the public with the truth. The right and its fossil-fuel backers have focused on marketing and communications. They have built a massive digital influence infrastructure. 

The climate movement largely has not, thinking that somehow smart policy and science are enough. Research from the Potential Energy Coalition shows that the public responds to climate messages that tell the truth about the risks we face The solution to climate hushing is climate amplification.

The Nation:

Multiple surveys, polls, and studies conducted over the past five years—from Yale, Gallup, Nature, Oxford, and the European Commission—indicate overwhelming global support for stronger climate action. Roughly 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to “do more” to address climate change, and nearly two-thirds are on board with that action costing them a bit. Yet most of the people comprising this overwhelming climate majority think they are the minority, telling pollsters they believe that only around 30 percent of their fellow humans also want stronger climate action. Researchers have defined this kind of systemic misunderstanding of how others think as a perception gap, and one result is that politicians calculate that they can continue to cater to corporate interests and preserve the fossil fuel status quo.

Now new research is highlighting the role the media plays in perpetuating this gap. Yale’s most recent climate opinion poll shows that while more than two-thirds of Americans want stronger climate policy, less than a third of them say they see coverage of the issue in the media at least once a week. That’s unfortunate, according to Max Boykoff, who runs the Media and Climate Change Observatory at University of Colorado, Boulder, because inconsistent coverage of the issue can lead to gaps in the public’s understanding of it. “Climate journalism is prone to an events-based model of reporting that often decontextualizes the climate crisis,” he said. “Extreme heat, floods, and storms tend to be reported as unique events as opposed to part of an unfolding and long-term crisis, which prevents a fuller understanding of the issue.”