Of Course Prioritizing Climate Change Means Deprioritizing Other Things
On the Backlash to the Gates Climate Memo
By Alex Trembath
Earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) eviscerated the budget of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Over 80% of USAID’s programs, some 5200 initiatives supporting tens of billions of dollars in aid, were abruptly canceled. Estimates of the effects of these cuts on human life are difficult, and varied. But for a horrifying sense of scale, a UCLA study projected that cutting USAID funding will cause 14 million additional deaths by the end of the decade.
Shortly after these cuts were announced, the Breakthrough Institute was informed we would lose a significant grant renewal from Breakthrough Energy. (Despite the common confusion, Breakthrough Energy and the Breakthrough Institute have no formal connection, save this now defunct funding relationship.) It was a large numeric hit to our overall budget, and doubly painful because the grant supported our food and agriculture work. Agriculture accounts for over 10 percent of global carbon emissions, and is overwhelmingly responsible for deforestation and land use change. Intensifying agricultural production is core to the ecomodernist vision of providing abundant affordable food while sparing more land for wild nature. Yet this work has always been harder to fundraise for than, say, our work on nuclear energy. Breakthrough Energy played a critical role in supporting these underfunded areas of research and advocacy, for us and for so many other policy organizations.
Still, it was hard for us at the Breakthrough Institute to get too bitter about it. The grant was part of a broad shutdown of Breakthrough Energy’s staffing and philanthropic giving, which seems to have been partially motivated by founder Bill Gates’s desire to backfill much of the canceled USAID funding. We have long argued that climate change is one among many challenges facing human society, not the existential threat it’s often described as. In poor countries especially, poverty and public health are by far more serious concerns, where the best defense against climate change is economic development, not emissions reductions. So the moral calculus was eminently fair, from our perspective as a loser in Gates’s transaction.
Here we had the Trump Administration canceling billions of dollars in funding for health and development for the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. Gates, uniquely in possession of his own billions of dollars and already deeply embedded in the global health and development funding network, shifted his support from long-term innovation towards more immediate life-saving programs. It’s a zero-sum calculus, and a defensible one at that.
Gates more recently articulated his updated views on climate change, an issue that has occupied much of the back half of his career. As he wrote last month in a widely covered memo, climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.”
It’s understandable that Gates’s memo caused a conniption among climate advocates. But their chief complaints, thus far, are particularly unpersuasive. Having spent the last 20 years or so convincing policymakers to prioritize climate change, they’re now insisting that doing so need not come at the expense of other issues like public health. It’s magical thinking, and easily falsified by policymakers’ real-world decisions.
Surrounded by Straw Men
In a press briefing hosted by Covering Climate Now, the climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe pushed back on Gates’ assessment of climate risk, arguing “I have not seen a single scientific paper that ever posited that the human race would become extinct … it’s a straw man, the way he’s proposing it.” My former colleague Zeke Hausfather also called this a “straw man,” arguing at his blog that the memo “needlessly sets up a conflict between laudable goals: we can both mitigate emissions and alleviate poverty, disease, and hunger.”
First of all, one should always be skeptical of arguments in which tradeoffs don’t exist.
Additionally, and to be a bit pedantic about it, I’ve seen more than one scientific paper positing that the human race could become extinct due to climate change. This 2022 paper, published in the prestigious Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences, describes the possibility of “potential human extinction” due to climate change as a “dangerously underexplored topic.” The authors aren’t obscure cranks: they include Johan Rockström, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Will Steffen, and other architects of the extremely influential “Planetary Boundaries” framework that Hayhoe has elsewhere endorsed.
I asked ChatGPT for 25 more examples of scientific papers positing that the human race would become extinct due to climate risk. After thinking for one minute and forty nine seconds, it readily provided these examples.
And that’s because the idea of climate change as an existential threat to humanity is incredibly widespread, within the scientific literature and especially outside of it.
Covering Climate Now, which hosted the webinar with Hayhoe and Hausfather, describes climate change as an “existential threat” on par with nuclear war. Hayhoe herself has argued that “Humans cannot survive without the rest of the ecosystems on this planet that provide everything we use.” In 2018 Greta Thunberg famously quoted a scientist who argued that climate change would “wipe out all of humanity,” arguing elsewhere that “there are no gray areas when it comes to survival.” One of the best-selling climate books of the last decade is titled The Uninhabitable Earth. I could go on and on.
The function of this rhetoric has been to raise the salience of climate change among policymakers and the general public. After President Obama “placed energy second on the priority list, guaranteeing health care would occupy most of the year,” as Bill McKibben lamented in 2009, climate activists set about reversing this prioritization for the next incoming Democratic president. And it worked. “It is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change,” said President Joe Biden in 2023.
Now, it’s possible to argue abstractly that we can care about climate change without caring less about poverty and disease. But when we move from the abstract to the practical, these calculations become a lot more zero-sum.
And it’s not just Bill Gates. A 2023 analysis by CARE International found that “most of the public climate finance reported by wealthy countries is taken directly from development aid budgets.” The Breakthrough Institute’s Vijaya Ramachandran and her colleagues similarly found that most World Bank climate aid in poor countries goes towards mitigation, not adaptation. Tens of billions of dollars that could have gone towards infrastructure, development, and public health was instead spent on reducing emissions in the poorest parts of the world.
President Biden’s prioritization of the “existential threat” of climate change provides another illustration of the unavoidable tradeoffs involved here.
As I write this, Congressional Republicans have putatively committed to a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies as a concession for reopening the federal government, a vote few expect will succeed. Those subsidies were last extended by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. That law, of course, provided significantly more and longer-lasting funding to energy deployment and innovation subsidies. It ultimately included no federal funding for ideas like the child tax credit, which Democrats had been pushing throughout the negotiations that would lead to the IRA. Instead of their perennial priorities of health care and welfare, Democrats in 2022 chose to prioritize climate change.
One need not make any critiques whatsoever of the climate and energy provisions of the IRA in order to acknowledge the plain fact that they absolutely traded off against Democrats’ other priorities. Not only is this tradeoff very obviously not a straw man, it is the exact prioritization that climate advocates have advocated for years, framing climate change as an existential threat that supersedes other issues.
Zero-Sum
“What world do they live in?” a frustrated Gates asked Amy Harder recently, in response to climate advocates’ criticisms of his memo. “This is a numeric game in a world with very finite resources, more finite than they should be.”
Gates is asking the right question here. It’s one thing to claim to care about climate change and global poverty in equal measure. And we’re a wealthy country, with many wealthy people, capable of funding many different things. But when it comes to real-world philanthropic giving or public investments, the marginal dollar going to climate mitigation is in fact a dollar not going to public health, and vice versa. Philanthropists have to decide how much they care about each. The next time Democrats have the opportunity they will likely have to choose: restore the IRA, or fully fund the child tax credit. These tradeoffs were less stark last decade, when inflation was low and the Trumpian assault on spending and aid had not yet begun. But, to Gates’s question, we don’t live in that world any longer. And the fact that climate hawks are failing to reckon with these newer real-world tradeoffs is a further sign of their unwillingness to acknowledge the end of their era.