A Tale Of Two Bills

Bill Gates’ rebuke to climate catastrophism has thrown the NGO-corporate-industrial-media-academic-climate complex into a sphincter-puckered snit. Why? Follow the money.

The Bill on the left claims you should ignore the Bill on the right. Credit: Wikimedia

This is a tale of two Bills. Both Bills went to Harvard. Both have Harvard-size egos. Both are published authors and have large audiences. Both are Baby Boomers. (Bill McKibben is 64. Bill Gates is 70.) And both Bills are among the highest-profile Americans in the debate over climate and energy policy.

But the two Bills aren’t friends.

Last week, Gates published a 5,600-word essay, “A New Approach For the World’s Climate Strategy,” in which he declared that the “doomsday view of climate change” — Gates’ words, not mine — is “wrong.” He continued, saying that the doomsday outlook and claims that “cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization” are misplaced because people will “be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Then, the kill shot: Gates said climate activists are putting too much focus “on near-term emissions goals” and that effort is “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Thus, Gates is saying that McKibben’s catastrophist narrative about climate change — the narrative McKibben has been peddling for decades — should be discarded, and that policymakers should adopt a humanist approach to energy and climate issues.

To be clear, that’s a very abbreviated summary of Gates’ essay. For one of the best analyses, read Roger Pielke Jr’s. Substack piece, “Bill Gates Shakes Up the Climate Discussion,” which was published last Thursday. Pielke’s said Gates’ essay is a “a welcome contribution to a growing chorus of climate realism and energy pragmatism.” I completely agree with that summary.

But as you might imagine, the response — or rather, the outrage — from the climate Left has been telling. Indeed, Gates’ essay has sent McKibben, climate activists, academics, and climate reporters into a sphincter-puckered snit.

Jeffrey Sachs, an academic at Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, called Gates’ essay “vague, unhelpful, and confusing.” He went on to claim that proverty reduction and climate transformation are “utterly feasible…if the Big Oil lobby is brought under control.”

A headline published in Politico claimed that Gates “soft-pedals climate.” In the New Republic, Laura Mauldin, an academic at the University of Connecticut who works in the department of “social and critical inquiry,” declared that Gates’ essay was a “great example of why we shouldn’t be listening to people like him.” She continued, “Reporting the thoughts of billionaires as news is as grotesque as the amount of wealth they’ve been allowed to accumulate.” Michael Mann, the climate catastrophist at the University of Pennsylvania, who may be the most discredited academic in America, told CNN that Gates “got all this backwards” and that there is “no greater threat to developing nations than the climate crisis.”

Why are the catastrophists so upset? Follow the money.

Remember, the first rule of the bureaucracy is to protect and extend the bureaucracy. And that’s what the NGO-corporate-industrial-media-academic-climate complex is — a vast bureaucracy that employs tens of thousands of people, many of whom are taking home hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in compensation. If policymakers adopt Gates’ humanist view — and recognize the world’s poor need hydrocarbons, and lots of them, to escape poverty — then catastrophists like McKibben, Mann, and myriad climate-focused NGOs could see their budgets shrink or disappear. In fact, that’s already happening. In February, one of Gates’ philanthropic arms, Breakthrough Energy, announced that it would reduce the grants it was providing to climate policy and advocacy groups.

On Friday, McKibben wrote an indignant response to Gates’ essay in which he declared, “I feel quite strongly that we should pay less attention to billionaires” and that “It was wrong of him to write it because if his high-priced pr team didn’t anticipate the reaction, they should be fired.”

The conflict between the two Bills provides a good opportunity to take another look at the staggering amounts of money that climate activists and climate NGOs are spending to promote the doomsday, anti-energy/anti-hydrocarbon agenda that Gates is now saying should be abandoned.

Thus, I’ve compiled four new or updated charts that detail some of the richest anti-energy NGOs in the US, the lucrative pay packages awarded to their leaders, and the staggering increase in revenue that is going to anti-hydrocarbon groups like the Climate Imperative Foundation and Rocky Mountain Institute. Let’s take a look.