By Jim Miller, The Jumping-Off Place & SD350 Board Member
Article by The Jumping Off Place
From San Diego where Mayor Gloria has ousted the city’s climate and sustainability leader and California where Governor Newsom and the Democrats are tossing their role as climate leaders into the dustbin of history and reembracing the fossil fuel industry, to the national level where the party has summarily abandoned all climate talk, doomerism is definitively out.
And why not, when our dear friend Bill Gates has given us the good news in a memo he crafted just in time for COP30 which argues that the doomers are wrong: “Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.” Technological innovation and philanthrocapitalism to the rescue!
Whew! Just when I thought we were cooked as the Trump administration has dismantled all meaningful climate action at the federal level and taken the United States out of international climate accords, it seems my worries were misguided. If only I had realized that all we needed to do was be happy that humanity was not ending, I could have spared myself a boatload of anticipatory grief. Who knew the bar was so low? OK, reset: “humanity’s demise” not happening. Check. Thanks Bill!
There I was stuck thinking that that we only had three years left before we blew past several key tipping points and that evidence of coral reefs going extinct, temperatures rising dangerously, and catastrophic storms hitting more frequently and costing us exponentially more was bad news. So much for all my concern about mass extinction, the degradation of the ecosystem, and the plight of the global poor. What, me worry? Not anymore.
Apparently, all my fretting about the fact that in the wake of the Trump administration the US Climate Action tracker shows America’s overall rating as “critically insufficient” was useless handwringing. If only I had learned the central lesson of the Trump era along with Mr. Gates and Democratic leaders: that when a problem is inconvenient, the best course of action is not to face it but to simply reconfigure your position, or, better yet, just contest the significance of the facts. Ignore at best, acknowledge and trivialize when forced to deal with the truth. That’s the ticket!
Of course, there are still some of those doomer-friendly folks who haven’t gotten the memo, like the New York Times that cynically quoted a critic who said of Mr. Gates’ repositioning from supporter of climate action to critic of alarmism, “One could imagine this being a continuation of not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.” That same doomy Times article then goes out of its way to note that:
Many scientists believe that the planet’s rapid warming could bring about a series of irreversible tipping points that could have cascading impacts. These scenarios include changes to ocean currents, the disappearance of ice sheets and the mass death of coral reefs.
Mr. Gates did not address any of those scenarios in the new memo, though he has discussed them before.
“There are points at which when the corals die off, they never come back,” Mr. Gates said in 2021. “This is acidifying the ocean, and all the aqua ecosystems die off as that acid level goes up. As forests dry out, they are subject to both fires and infestations that kill all the trees, so you get a lot less trees. As the sea level goes up, the beaches go away.”
Hey, take a chill pill New York Times! You seem to have missed the part in the text where Mr. Gates points out that the world’s energy demands will only be getting greater. And with all the money he and the other tech oligarchs have invested in AI, that surely will be true for the foreseeable future. Why would they let a little thing like climate catastrophe pee on their party? No good reason. Sure, it will be happening, but only in parts of the global south where we can just make sure the poor folks have enough to eat, and they’ll be fine. “Most places” will be fine. Read the damn memo. We won’t all die, bro!
In fact, folks like Mr. Gates and his cohort won’t be sweating much at all. They are thriving, living large one might say. As the Guardian pointed out last week:
The US’s super-rich are burning through carbon emissions at 4,000 times the speed of the world’s poorest 10%, according to an analysis provided to the Guardian.
These billionaires and multimillionaires, who comprise the wealthiest 0.1% of the US population, are also running down our planet’s safe climate space at 183 times the rate of the global average.
The data, produced by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute ahead of the Cop30 climate summit, highlights the chasm between the carbon-guzzling rich, who are most responsible for the climate crisis, and the heat-vulnerable poor, who suffer the worst consequences . . . The inequality creates dangerous feedbacks: the more wealth is accumulated in a few hands, the more responsibility for the climate crisis is concentrated among a small number of powerful individuals, who use their money and influence to deny, delay and distract from emissions reductions.
Don’t worry, be happy. We’ll all thrive, just like them.
Now if only we could permanently get rid of the bummer-in-chief at the UN, Antonio Guterres. As the Guardian observed, he just can’t stop harping on that doomer shit:
In his only interview before next month’s Cop30 climate summit, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement, with “devastating consequences” for the world.
He urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realise that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans.
“Let’s recognize our failure,” he told the Guardian and Amazon-based news organization Sumaúma. “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.
And then, predictably, he pivoted to his tired anti-capitalist BS, noting of the alternative to climate action:
“The alternative is a free-for-all,” he said. “And we know what free-for-all means. Free-for-all means that there will be a small, privileged elite, people and companies that will be able to always protect themselves, even if disasters will spread. Floods will spread, communities will be destroyed, but there will always be a group of rich people and rich companies that will be able to protect themselves as the planet is being progressively destroyed.”
Thank God we are done with all that crazy talk here in the U.S.A. Not even the Democrats will bother us about it now. Let’s stop blaming the poor little fossil fuel industry for everything. Time to let go of our worries and love the big, beautiful future of innovation that lies ahead.
Thanks Bill, thanks a lot.
Postscript
As is my usual practice, I wrote this column during the week before my usual Monday morning deadline. This week, I finished up on Friday morning only to have Bill McKibben’s excellent Substack post on the same subject drop a few hours later. In it, he shares Trump’s response:
“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” said Mr. Trump in a Wednesday post on Truth Social. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”
If there was any doubt what the impact of Mr. Gates’ gesture would be, there no longer is. History will surely place him in the Trump era hall of shame along with sycophantic law firms, university presidents, and multiple other cowardly actors who bent the knee and curried favor when it was time to stand up and fight for a genuinely better future.
Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is clearly emboldened, as evidenced by Exxon’s lawsuit against California that claims that our state’s accountability laws, which require them to report their emissions and climate risks annually, are a violation of their free speech that force them, as The Guardian reports “to be a mouthpiece for ideas with which it disagrees.”
Apparently, the corporate person that is Exxon doesn’t like having to tell the truth about climate change anymore than President Trump or Bill Gates do. So it goes.