According to a once outspoken and highly resourced climate alarmist, you can hit the “snooze” button on the “Doomsday” alarm clock.
On Tuesday, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates released a memo not only suggesting the end of the world is not yet upon us – but that most of us enjoy the prospect of living in a prosperous era and place for years to come.
“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
The tech mogul’s admission stands in stark contrast to his years’ worth of warnings that we’ve all been on the brink of physical annihilation due to global warming.
“Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved,” Gates once warned. “It deserves to be a huge priority.”
For more than a decade, Gates has been using a portion of his fortune to invest in efforts to lower the emission of greenhouse gases. His goal has been to try and lower atmospheric temperatures, believing that by doing so we’d be able to either slow down or ward off certain catastrophe.
Because of his money and reach, the philanthropist’s words have carried significant weight.
It would seem Bill Gates remains committed to many of these same priorities, but he’s now acknowledging that our main focus shouldn’t be on lowering the air or sea temperatures a few degrees but instead helping people.
“Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries,” Gates wrote.
One of the saddest and most unfortunate ironies of the environmental extremist movement has been that in many cases, they’ve been pushing for policies that have hurt more people than they’ve helped.
Beginning in the 1960s, one of the worst offenders has been Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. He claimed that by the 1970s, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He predicted England would become “a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” The environmental extremist also suggested “all important life in the sea will be extinct.”
Ehrlich has been so wrong for so long that you’d think his words wouldn’t be heeded anywhere anymore – yet he’s still regularly quoted and held in high esteem in media circles.
It’s one thing to make ridiculously uninformed and radically over wrought predictions, but it’s a whole other thing when those claims cause countries and people to change behaviors and lifestyles for the worse. The radical environmental movement has led to countries spending money they don’t have to make changes that won’t change anything climatologically.
Ehrlich has called on families to have fewer children because he sees large families as unduly burdening the environment and quickening its collapse.
“We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” he once wrote. “We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.”
Gates’ memo makes clear that he’s still all in on the climate change policy train, but with a twist, “In short, climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems. We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause.”
Though having grown up in a Christian family, Bill Gates has most recently described himself as being agnostic. At the same time, his philosophical shift here, at least at its edges, appears to comport with what we’re called to prioritize as believers when it comes to the environment. God calls us to be good stewards of His creation (Gen. 2:15) – but to also care for the poor and needy (Proverbs 19:17, Isaiah 58:10).
Christians can also rest easy, despite the claims of catastrophizers like Paul Ehrlich, that the earth’s end isn’t in mankind’s hands but rather a matter of God’s sovereignty and but one piece of His perfect plan.
Image from Shutterstock.
