When historians look back on this decade, the most important moment is unlikely to be the raging ongoing brouhaha over whether to release the U.S. government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the highly connected late millionaire who sexually abused young women and girls.
It is unlikely to be the latest battle between Republicans and Democrats over keeping the government funded. And however serious global crises such as these are, it is unlikely to have anything to do with the war of extermination in western Sudan or the grinding conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
When historians look back on this decade, the most important moment is unlikely to be the raging ongoing brouhaha over whether to release the U.S. government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the highly connected late millionaire who sexually abused young women and girls.
It is unlikely to be the latest battle between Republicans and Democrats over keeping the government funded. And however serious global crises such as these are, it is unlikely to have anything to do with the war of extermination in western Sudan or the grinding conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Bigger than any of these is something that has captured remarkably little of the global bandwidth, especially when measured against the potential long-term consequences: a poorly attended global summit in Brazil recently, followed by the United Nations’ ongoing climate conference there, known as COP30, to address the carbon-driven crisis of global warming.
Based on current projections, scientists believe that the average global temperature will rise by 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
Faced with such a challenge, we are all captives of a kind of presentism that bedevils efforts to focus on anything perceived as a less-than-imminent threat, making it hard to commit political focus and resources to averting the catastrophic effects of climate change. There are just too many shorter-term crises and distractions, which leave too many people susceptible to the fantasy that whatever arises, new technologies will be invented in time to save the day.
The great, late Yale scholar James C. Scott warned of this human tendency, which he attached a memorable name to, writing that we are unable to resist making “heroic assumptions” about our ingeniousness as a species—while pointing out a historical record dating back to the earliest cities that shows that our tremendous inventiveness very often leads to ever more complicated and dangerous problems.
The most recent sign of succumbing to technological optimism came in a memo issued by Microsoft’s billionaire founder, Bill Gates, which urged a relative de-emphasis on climate change so that the world could focus its precious collective energies and resources on something that Gates has long been personally devoted to: alleviating global poverty and improving public health. Gates was not arguing that climate change isn’t real or that it doesn’t need to be halted. Implicit in his message, though, was that over time, technological solutions will be found to meet this challenge, and in the meantime, we should give priority to his own longtime concerns, which are not only urgent but, as he sees it, largely addressable.
In the era of U.S. President Donald Trump, Gates’s influence is not what it once was. The kind of entrée and intellectual cachet he once enjoyed has long since been surpassed by a younger generation of billionaires, led by Elon Musk, who are moved less by internationally minded idealism and philanthropy and more by futuristic ambitions and the unbridled pursuit of ever-greater fortune.
In its own strange manner, though, by way of unintended consequences, Gates’s climate-versus-poverty memo was extremely influential, at least in the short term. Conservative voices immediately seized upon it as support for their argument that the threat of climate change has always been exaggerated or even amounts to a “hoax” perpetuated by liberal internationalists. Here, after all, was a perceived lion of liberal technocratic opinion seeming to say, “Relax.”
For reasons I’ll make clear momentarily, I fundamentally disagree with Gates, but this is of course not what he was arguing. He was effectively saying, “Let’s do what we know how to do now vis-à-vis a problem we have ready solutions for, and in time, solutions will come for climate change as well.”
This bad-faith interpretation was apparent in the “Yay, the wicked witch of climate change is dead” chants in many of the op-eds and commentaries that followed the Gates memo. None more so, though, than in a BBC interview with an analyst from the Heritage Foundation. The think tank’s in-house climate expert, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, cited Gates as agreeing with the proposition that climate change was exaggerated and then trotted out a number of red herrings in support of the expanded use of fossil fuels.
Furchtgott-Roth brushed aside the interviewer’s citation of evidence that renewable energies are already considerably cheaper than traditional fossil fuels—and steadily growing more so—to claim that they are a fatally flawed source of power because the sun goes down at night and winds vary in intensity. Her supposed killer argument was that no heavy industries have ever risen on the backs of renewable energy for this reason. (Never mind that few rich countries still rely on increasing industrialization for their wealth.) Left unaddressed was the fact that renewables are rapidly becoming cheaper and more powerful and are increasingly capable of providing constant power at all hours of the day.
Furchtgott-Roth’s most cynical arguments lay elsewhere, though. These came in a racially tinged resort to xenophobia she delivered in two parts. First, she claimed that the world must commit to the future expansion of fossil fuel use because this is key to supporting the so-called developing world, where most of the planet’s oil and gas reserves lie. Preventing those countries from being exploited would, she argued, condemn the poor populations of the global south to poverty by denying them a crucial source of income and thus preventing them from industrializing.
It was with her next claim, though, that the cynicism of Furchtgott-Roth’s argument became breathtaking: Ensuring income from fossil fuels to countries in the global south was crucial to preventing migration from these countries to the rich and largely white West.
On reflection, it is hard for me to believe that this amounts to much more than flacking for the rich and powerful fossil fuel sector. That is because there is little evidence that oil and gas extraction in the past has lifted large numbers of people out of poverty in the global south. The huge disparities in power between major oil companies and poor countries that boast fossil fuel reserves is such that exploration and exploitation contracts ensure that most of the revenue flows to the rich world, not to local populations.
Furthermore, little of the refining and production of downstream petrochemicals, such as fertilizers and plastics, is performed in the producing countries. With whatever revenue is left, few of these countries have been able to bend the curve of development in favor of poverty alleviation or industrialization.
The ultimate counterargument to people like Furchtgott-Roth, though, is also a counterargument to Gates—and a return to the warnings of Scott. As powerful storms and devastating droughts increase in frequency, along with other transformations of global weather patterns, people in the tropics—where a disproportionate share of the world’s poor are concentrated—stand to be hit the hardest, despite having the least means to prepare for and mitigate the consequences of climate change.
Meanwhile, tropical coastal regions, which contain some of the world’s fastest-growing cities, will flood, and their croplands will turn to dust. It seems like an ill-intentioned fantasy to pretend that oil and gas income will adequately compensate for this—or worse, that the bogeyman of large movements of brown- and black-skinned migrants will be stemmed because of new wealth created from fossil fuels.
Gates, while almost certainly more sincere, seems somewhat deluded. The world, of course, needs to do far more to fight tropical diseases, such as malaria, and combine efforts to combat extreme poverty. But hoping blindly for a technological solution for climate change that may never come is no solution. Even malaria and similar old-world scourges are likely to increase as the world grows steadily warmer. And the devastation of the environments where the global poor live will only force them to seek shelter elsewhere.
