Bill Gates's stunted political vision
Bill Gates went full Lomborg. Never go full Lomborg.
There is a stunted type of political vision that can only ever imagine the world getting better through the cognitive largesse of the power elite. This vision begins from the bedrock beliefs that (a) there is a social hierarchy, (b) it is basically meritocratic, and (c) it produces a rising tide that lifts all boats.
The cognitive largesse can take two forms. (1) Geniuses can innovate, gifting us with new technologies or business ideas, or (2) Geniuses can make large, magnanimous gifts to the less-fortunate.
If one buys into this political vision, then it stands to reason that you should never do anything to make the rich and powerful uncomfortable. Taxes and legal restraints and unions just slow them down and make them feel less generous. The path to building a better world necessarily runs through the better angels of their nature.
(I wrote about all this in my 2020 essay about the Clock of the Long Now. It’ll also be in the forthcoming book.)
In 2021, Bill Gates wrote an entire book titled How To Avoid a Climate Disaster. He took seriously that climate change was a generational threat. The better angels of his nature were up to the challenge. And he indicated in the book that he knew this would be a long, hard slog.
It has only been four years. By some measures, we have seen remarkable progress. The cost of renewable energy has plummeted. If we just have the political will to prevent fossil fuel companies from extracting market-bending favors, the trajectory of the energy sectors would look pretty damn promising right now.
But the politics of 2025 couldn’t be much farther from the politics of 2021, particularly in the United States. The Trump Administration has declared climate change a hoax. They are defunding scientific research and canceling already-existing clean energy projects. They are weaponizing the IRS to pursue political enemies, a list which includes the climate movement.
And meanwhile, centrist pundits from the “popularist” school of thought have decided that climate is a bummer of an issue, and are telling Democratic elected officials that the electoral cost of taking the climate crisis seriously outweigh the benefits.
This is a time when your fair-weather-friends flee to the hills.
And now it seems that Bill Gates has gone full Lomborg.
Bjorn Lomborg has been a mini-celebrity for around 25 years. His schtick, in a nutshell, is as follows:
Climate change is real, but it won’t be all that bad.
There is a finite and fixed pool of resources that humanity can spend making things better.
So the responsible thing to do is to apply cost-benefit analysis and make sure our money does the greatest good for the greatest number.
Aw shucks. It turns out that we can do way more good by focusing on mosquito nets and world hunger! Inaction on climate change is downright responsible, when you think about it!
Think of this as proto-effective altruism. Lomborg has been banging this drum since before William MacAskill hit puberty. He figured out long ago that there is money and fame in telling the rich and powerful, “everything will be just fine.”
But the other thing about Lomborgism is that it is always only just for show. His contribution to the public discourse has only ever been concern-trolling via white papers. It’s the equivalent of the “Firebombing a Walmart” meme.
Say what you will about Effective Altruists (minus SBF), but at least they actually raised some money for some worthy causes. The Bjorn Lomborgs of the world only ever bother to stand athwart social movement progress, yelling “no, not like that!”
Gates’s climate memo can only be read as a strategic retreat. He knew in 2021 that this would be a long, tough slog. But now it’s 2025 and he didn’t realize it would be this long or this tough.
He states that the effects of climate change will not be evenly distributed. That’s true, but it also has been well-known and well-established for decades. Everyone already realized this, and was saying it from the diaphragm, when he wrote his book in 2021.
He says climate change is real (gee… thanks Bill.), but we can’t cut funding for health and development. It isn’t the climate movement demanding cuts to health and development funding though. It’s Trump and Elon and the DOGE wrecking crew.
He insists that we’ve made real progress, all thanks to the cognitive largesse of technological innovation and the development of new markets. But he worries that the focus on carbon emissions will get in the way of economic growth and technological deployment. (We wouldn’t want climate targets to get in the way of AI deployment, would we? Heavens forfend!)
So now he thinks the best thing we can all do is keep the innovation engine humming, while turning our philanthropic eyes toward more-deserving causes.
Read between the lines, and you can spot the real concern: Bill Gates made a lot of bets on clean energy technology companies when the United States still operated under the rule of law. Under the Trump regime, the fate of Gates’s investments is tied to how Donald Trump and his close advisors feel about Gates himself. It’s a pattern we’ve seen from all the other tech billionaires: Make nice with Trump, give him gold trinkets, and publicly distance yourself from all inconvenient previously-held beliefs. Better to publicly break from the climate movement, and urge the delegates at COP30 to abandon their climate commitments, than to stand with the climate movement when the going gets tough.
It’s all ludicrous, of course. If Bill Gates succeeds in convincing the COP30 delegates to prioritize “human flourishing” over carbon emissions, that isn’t going to result in more dollars flowing to global poverty or public health. There isn’t a finite and fixed pool of resources to be distributed. More or fewer resources are spent on a variety of causes based on collective political will! Does he really think Trump et al are going to say “ah yes very good, now we will stop wreaking the global economy and public diplomacy and international aid efforts. What very wise points you all have made.”?
It’s pathetic, but it isn’t the least bit surprising. The fight against climate change was always going to require technologies and markets and a social movement with the political will to make inconvenient demands upon the powerful. This was never going to be easy, nor was it ever going to be quick.
Bill Gates and his pals were never going to be anything but fair-weather-friends to the climate movement, because they lack the political vision to imagine that the problems of global climate change are also problems of the global social hierarchy that they sit comfortably atop.
It’s a reminder of a basic truth about political contestation: power yields nothing without demand. We won’t create the world we want to live in by relying on the cognitive largesse of philanthropic tech billionaires. We’re going to have to build it ourselves.
Before one can dispense cognitive largesse, one must possess a cognitive surplus; and yet the cognitive poverty of the power elite continues to astonish. You know what has a finite and fixed number of places? The top of a social hierarchy. A revolution that overturns the political order will inevitably fill many of those top spots with its own people. No amount of grovelling can get around that arithmetic.
The link in this phrase link doesn't seem to be what you want:
"my 2020 essay about the Clock of the Long Now."
It points to a story about Tim Cook's tacky gift to Trump.
Maybe this was supposed to be where the link in your first sentence pointed (to your article in Wired), and this second link was supposed to be first? ("stunted type of political vision" is the phrase associated with the first link.)
[Added] I see now the phrase "give him gold trinkets", which links to the Tim Cook article, which is almost certainly what you wanted, so ignore the previous guess, I guess.