RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Maldive Islands used up all their fresh drinking water in 1992 and are expected to retreat beneath the rising sea levels within the next 20 years. The Gaza Strip, already burdened by the war its terrorist government inaugurated, became ecologically uninhabitable in 2020. In 1985, air pollution halved the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. Children stopped remembering what snow even was sometime in the last decade. In 2013, the Arctic became irrevocably ice-free. The “world is going to end” before this decade is out, and every last human being will be dead by the end of next year.

To say that these predicted scenarios of imminent climatological catastrophe have become forgettable background radiation is too charitable. At least background radiation is actually harmful. Climate change, by contrast, is a manageable phenomenon that does not present an existential threat to humanity’s survival. At least, not according to Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote in an essay published this week ahead of the COP30 climate summit. Indeed, he observed, the eschatology to which climate change activists are inclined has contributed to negative outcomes, especially in the developing world.

“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” Gates added. He stressed the need for philanthropic endeavors to prioritize mitigating the effects of hunger, poverty, and disease over their myopic fixation with reducing heat-trapping emissions. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering,” Gates continued, “particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”

“People will be able to live and thrive on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates conceded, even in a “warming world.” This bit of apostasy from someone who was — or, at least, posed as — a true believer in the cataclysmic future that runaway climate change held in store for us has shaken the industry around environmental activism to its foundation. The memo sets the stage for a pivotal internecine conflict over the future of climate activism.

There has long been a debate within the climate change activist camp to which outsiders were not supposed to be privy. On the one hand, there are activists who emphasize meliorism. They believed that human activity caused climate change, but they also concede that human activity can stave off the worst of its effects and reduce the severity of its impact on individual lives. While dogmatic, their worldview is anthropocentric, and they seek to maximize outcomes for the greatest number of people.

On the other hand, there are the misanthropes. Those are the climate activists who struggle to see any redeemable features in modernity and humanity’s contributions to our present conundrum. They emphasize what they call “degrowth” — what the rest of us refer to as “deindustrialization.” Our path to salvation, with all its quasi-religious overtones, rests in our capacity to unshackle us from our machines, to return to a more organic relationship with our environment, to become smaller and less numerous.

If Gates’s memo proves significant, it will be in how it initiates a mad scramble over the cash that the donor class is willing to contribute to climate-related initiatives. That will put pressure on the individual components of this undifferentiated blob to distinguish themselves and accentuate their respective core competencies.

For much of this century, it was simply best practice for charitable groups to graft climate change onto their statements of purpose, irrespective of what that purpose happened to be. You name it: Save the Children, United Way, the Salvation Army, World Vision International — even the weepy-eyed house pets that Sarah McLachlan cradled for the ASPCA — have had to take a bite from the climate change apple. If they were to stay in their lanes, they would risk ceding precious donor funds to groups with a keener focus on the cause du jour. Gates’s admission threatens to upend this undesirable dynamic.

If Microsoft’s leader emeritus, himself a prolific donor, has signaled that it isn’t just blinkered but unscrupulous to pound the table with dire and baseless predictions of an imminent climatological reckoning, many more donors and organizations will take his lead. Indeed, Gates’s COP30 memo may just represent the permission structure they felt they needed to back away from doomsday predictions that have sapped so many climate-obsessed outfits of credibility.

That will put substantial financial pressure on the organizations that have crafted an identity for themselves as the most uncompromising and fatalistic within the climate catastrophism clique. Not all will survive the coming bout of natural selection. And perhaps not all will want to survive.

Those in the activist community who have been genuinely taken in and are possessed of a sincere, albeit faith-based, conviction that mankind is living on borrowed time will not follow Gates’s lead. They will argue that his betrayal is only a sop to the capital managers who are poisoning the planet. They will insist that he is a steward of an intolerable status quo, a peddler of the fiction that human productivity can progress apace without inviting horrible consequences. They will attack his motives and impugn his interests. At the very least, they will insist that those who take Gates’s admonition at face value don’t comprehend his full meaning, much less the nature of the climate threat. Indeed, they already are.

Gates’s memo establishes what the New York Times called a “false dichotomy,” according to Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer — one that is “usually propagated by climate skeptics.” If Gates himself is not betraying the movement, “his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change.”

In short, those who are desperate to preserve their access to capital will accuse those who fail to propagate climate-change apocalypticism of seeking only access to capital. It will be psychological projection of the highest order, but it’s the understandable sort. Those who retail that face-saving line are steeling themselves for a fight not with their critics but within their own movement. And a fight is coming. It will determine whether climate change millenarianism remains the altar to which all left-of-center activist groups must genuflect, or whether that preoccupation will be relegated to the fringes as the worlds of charity and philanthropy retreat back into their respective lanes.

The stakes are high, as that mournful shriek you hear just off in the distance suggests. The gravy train is screeching to an abrupt halt. A scramble to loot it for all its remaining worth comes next.