Delegates from Canada and nearly 200 other countries gathered in Brazil this week for COP30, the United Nations’ 30th annual climate change conference.
Ahead of the conference, Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates published a letter calling for a shift in how countries approach climate policy.
“It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies,” he wrote in the Oct. 28 letter published on his site, Gates Notes.
The letter has received significant attention internationally, but muted coverage within Canada.
This is unfortunate. We would love for Gates’ thinking to permeate the climate policy debate in Canada as well.
In our view, Gates has earned the right to be listened to on climate policy. Over the past 25 years, the Gates Foundation has spent a staggering US$100 billion on solving some of the world’s most intractable problems — including poverty, disease and climate change. His separate venture, Breakthrough Energy, has invested billions more in 150 companies focused on clean energy innovation.
From this front-row seat to climate developments, Gates has arrived at a critical conclusion: that climate change is serious, but will not end civilization.
“Even if the world takes only moderate action to curb climate change, the current consensus is that by 2100 the Earth’s average temperature will probably be between 2°C and 3°C higher than it was in 1850,” he writes.
(Interestingly, climate advocate Mark Carney voiced a similar conclusion in a podcast interview before becoming prime minister.)
Warming of 2°C to 3°C will result in what Gates refers to as “latitude creep” — where a northern U.S. state like Iowa starts to feel more like the southern state of Texas, for example, and Texas more like northern Mexico.
These shifts will require governments to invest heavily in climate adaptation, such as better land management, more fire-resistant materials and sturdier infrastructure.
As experts have previously told Canadian Affairs, climate adaptation has been a woefully neglected area of Canada’s climate strategy so far. Hopefully, the Carney government — which is prioritizing infrastructure development as a vehicle for economic growth — makes climate adaptation a key part of its investment and climate strategy.
Of course, not all countries are as well-equipped as Canada to adapt to climate change — and not all citizens have the opportunity to migrate in response to latitude creep, Gates notes.
But this makes it important to be informed about the true effect of climate change on human suffering.
Contrary to the impression one gets from much of the media, extreme heat now causes about 500,000 deaths a year — a decrease from earlier periods, primarily due to more people being able to afford air conditioners, Gates says.
Similarly, deaths from natural disasters such as floods have also fallen dramatically. Annually, natural disasters now claim between 40,000 and 50,000 lives a year, Gates writes, due to better warning systems and more-resilient buildings.
These are of course still tragic figures. But it is worth putting them in perspective. Tuberculosis, by contrast, claimed an estimated 1.23 million lives last year, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. And that’s just one preventable disease of many.
Gates’ position, which we second, is that such numbers underscore the importance of continuing to prioritize development aid that maximizes human welfare.
“Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he writes, noting the Gavi vaccine alliance (to which Canada has contributed about $1 billion) saves a life for a little more than $1,000.
But here, Canada may be moving in the opposite direction. The 2025 Budget released last week revealed cuts to development aid of $2.7 billion over four years, on total spending of about $8 billion a year previously.
“There will be reductions in development funding to global health programming, where Canada’s contribution has grown disproportionately relative to other similar economies,” the budget says in a section briefly explaining the cuts.
Gates’ other key takeaway, which we also endorse, is that governments must be rigorous about evaluating the impact of their climate spending.
His point in particular is that countries must focus on bringing down the “green premium” — that is, making the cost of producing something through clean methods equal to or less than the cost of producing something with dirtier methods.
As Gates says, countries and companies have already succeeded in driving down global projected emissions by an astonishing 40 per cent over the past ten years due to clean energy innovations.
“Ten years ago, the International Energy Agency predicted that by 2040, the world would be emitting 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Now, just a decade later, the IEA’s forecast has dropped to 30 billion, and it’s projecting that 2050 emissions will be even lower,” he writes.
“This progress is not part of the prevailing view of climate change, but it should be,” he adds.
If countries are to further limit warming, they must reduce the green premium in the most emissions-intensive sectors — namely, electricity, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and buildings. Countries should evaluate all climate spending through the lens of whether their dollars are helping do so.
Here again, Canada’s recent track record is worrisome. A new report from Canada’s environment commissioner says Ottawa is not doing enough to measure the impact of the $100 billion worth of federal climate measures it has announced since 2021.
Specifically, the commissioner flagged concerns with low uptake of clean economy investment tax credits and ongoing federal investments in oil and gas sector projects.
“There was also a lack of transparency of expected emission outcomes and insufficient systems for measuring results,” the report says.
At the end of his letter, Gates urged the global climate community to make a “strategic pivot” toward prioritizing human welfare. We couldn’t agree more. That means directing funds to welfare-maximizing causes, and being ruthlessly analytical about what all those dollars are getting us.
The biggest green thing is the money. I could not agree more with Mr. Gates.
I do not agree with
Bill Gates on this issue. I know he is a great humanitarian but reducing pollution and having climate controls are more important for human health and the health of the planet than spending more on foreign aid.
Bill Gates is not the Humanitarian written above. Specifically, he is an eugenist “wanting a smaller carbon footprint”. This means less people, not CO2. Rockerfeller really got the environments (climate change) moving, as a founding director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Conference on the Human Environment, the world’s first international environmental conference, in Stockholm in 1972, the 4th World Wilderness Congress, the First Earth Conference in Rio in June 1992 with representatives from 166 countries, 130 heads of state and 15,000 non-governmental organizations.
Gates followed up on this.
At the same time, Gates basically took over WHO. Major contributors were the Gates foundation and GAVI, a consortium of pharmaceutical companies that discovered treatments and created diseases to profit from the treatments.
Under WHO, Gates inoculated and killed thousands of children in India, Africa and Bangledesh (and to a lesser degree, Philippines, South America.) He was run out of India because of the children’s deaths.
Gates is NOW speaking of climate change as not so important because he is pushing inoculations through biometric passes. (He says it would make it so easier to know who might receive more “life saving” drugs).
It also opens the world to control from the inoculations to biometric being used for bank accounts, to driver licenses, to passports, to….
Won’t happen. Anybody associated with truckers’ convoy to Ottawa has accounts frozen; China biometrics is used so extensively that bad behaviour or challenging the government means no work, no apartment, no travel (especially on national holidays).
WHO is a supranational organization trying to control countries. Recent proclamation (which Canada signed, the fools) is that any “pandemic” style health outbreaks (and it doesn’t even have to be health) proclaimed by the WHO, and countries are under WHO authority and citizens are mandated (not voluntary) to get whatever inoculation is called for.
Health is a provincial authority, and places like Alberta are using a “notwithstanding” clause to fight against this control.
This rant is so false that it is not even worth a comment, grow up and get an education.