As 2025 was winding down, Bill Gates published this letter, explaining how his views on climate change have changed. And, this being the internet, it set off a swath of reactions and hot takes of varying quality. But at the heart of his argument was a provocative question. The climate movement is now about 45 years old, and the UN concluded its 30th climate change conference last year. Have we reached a point at which our focus should shift, even subtly, from emissions reduced to lives improved?
To be clear, Gates wasn’t advocating for completely abandoning emissions goals; rather, he raised the possibility of a shift in priorities. Here we consider some of the most interesting arguments for and against this proposition. We’ll put aside debate about Gate’s particular timing and tone as well as some of the obvious objections, like how we would ideally do both. We definitely should do both. But, in a world of finite time, funding, and attention, priorities matter.
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The case for focusing on wellbeing
1. Green tech has matured. In 2009, one megawatt-hour of solar cost more than twice that of coal. But in 2024, the two have switched places. Coal, at roughly $120, is the premium option while solar is only $60. And on-shore wind power is even cheaper. Electric vehicles, meanwhile, may be at the tipping point where they’ll start to squeeze out combustion cars. According to a recent Nature paper, for instance, there’s good evidence that as EVs become increasingly diverse, cheaper, and popular in the EU and Chinese markets, car manufacturers in other regions may feel the proverbial winds changing and switch to EVs to not be left behind. So even though the globe isn’t meeting emissions goals yet, it does seem like we’re beginning to get to the point where many types of green tech can stand on their own economically. And that creates a space to shift at least some emphasis (subsidies and investments) elsewhere.
2. The best climate adaptation may be prosperity. In 1970, a cyclone in Bangladesh killed 300,000 people. Fifty years later in 2020, another monster storm hit and killed less than 30. And this wasn’t a fluke. All around the world, the death toll from natural disasters has been going down, as Hannah Ritchie pointed out for Our World in Data. Much of that progress can be attributed to increased prosperity. As people move into the middle class and nations develop, they are able to invest in resilient infrastructure and electricity beforehand. They also have the resources (e.g., food and medicine) to make it through a disaster and bounce back afterward. Even if we were able to stop all emissions now, climate change induced storms will continue growing more intense and frequent. Focusing on prosperity-as-adaptation might be even more important as the temperature rises.
Source: Our World in Data
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3. Development’s benefits are huge, carbon costs are low. Here’s a though experiment. Take the 29 poorest nations on Earth and increase all their emissions by a staggering 8% per year, year after year (the US, for comparison’s sake, tends to bounce around plus or minus 1-2% emissions per year). After ten years, those 29 nations combined would still produce less than 2% of the world’s annual carbon emissions. So if poor countries want to emit more carbon in order to build up their infrastructure and economies, Arthur Baker and Vijaya Ramachandran make a strong case that they should. In a world focused solely on emissions, this does not make sense. A ton of carbon emitted by the UK is the same as one emitted by Bangladesh. But in a world where the goal is ending poverty, it can make sense. The benefits of cheap, reliable energy are enormous, and the carbon costs are low—especially if rich, historically polluting countries step up and take on the emissions-reducing slack.
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The case for focusing on emissions
1. The sting is in the tail. Governments, organizations, and individuals can (and should) build resilient infrastructure for the most likely climate disasters. But nature is often surprising and the true catastrophes may be the ones we didn’t see coming (two once-in-a-hundred-year-floods back-to-back, for example). The late climate economist Marty Weitzman called it “the sting is in the tail.” Zeke Hausfather echoes Weitzman in a thoughtful reply to the Bill Gates letter. Because emissions are the problem underlying every climate disaster, focusing on them means we can reduce the risk of all of them at the same time.
2. A problem that lasts generations. A new sea wall might last 50 years or so, but carbon emissions can stay in the atmosphere for as much as 1,000. This means that, if we’re comparing each focus, we shouldn’t just add up the cost of one sea wall (or any other adaptation) but the one after that, and after that… So if we want to improve the lives of both current humans and humans for generations to come, emissions may be the prudent thing to focus on.
3. We aren’t the only earthlings. A rainforest can be valuable not because of how it supports the local economy or the carbon it captures, but simply because it exists. While Gates explicitly frames his arguments around humanity—talking about the survival of the human species and what will make humans happy—the fast-growing rights of nature movement has successfully argued in cases from Ecuador to India that we have a duty to protect nature simply for its own sake. Reducing emissions (and thus limiting climate change) can help both humans and nature, while focusing only on human wellbeing might leave us with blindspots.
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What to Keep An Eye On
1. The death of nuance. As soon as Gates’ letter was published, he was accused of fanning the flames of climate denialism, and the letter was actually used as fuel for climate deniers. Give your attention to good faith discussions, such as The Climate Brink.
2. Key indicators—both of wellbeing and carbon emissions. A good place to start for wellbeing would be the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. For emissions, Climate TRACE, a coalition of academics and think tanks, believes they’re about to peak.
3. Dual-purpose tech. Many green technologies, like hooking the rural poor up with solar panels, can reduce emissions and improve wellbeing at the same time. And new ideas, like crops engineered to not need nitrogen fertilizers, which are both carbon-intensive to produce and which can be expensive for poor farmers, could push it further.
Top image ©Anthropocene Magazine
