I am strongly reminded of the famous Upton Sinclair quote: "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
A very large percentage of the people upset with Bill Gates are people who will see their income/funding disappear if people decide that there is no climate catastophe just a set of things being (slightly) worse
"What we can know is that whomever ends up being on the receiving end of the worst climate impacts is going to be much better off if they’re relatively richer than if they’re poorer."
If by "relatively richer" you mean that we should continue to emphasize economic growth in the near term, there are a couple of problems with that position.
The lesser issue is that economic growth per se has nothing to do with distribution of wealth. So there isn't any guarantee that most people will indeed be richer, even if we continue to grow our economies or the global one.
The greater issue is that the pursuit of economic growth itself has adverse impacts on the climate issue as well as on many other issues that intersect with it (biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, ocean deoxygenation, soil pollution, etc.). The aggregate impact of these issues makes it much less certain that people will be better off at all.
My suggestion: ask an LLM what the trend has been since 1900 for absolute poverty and for deaths from natural disasters. Everyone's richer and safer, economic growth does that
I think Ockham's Razor applies here. Gates is just reefing his sails in the storm, my friend. It's political expedience masquerading as the rational argument you describe (so well, thank you). He is trading in the precautionary principle for political capital on the good bet that we are on a much better path than we were ten years ago in terms of avoiding the worst case IPCC scenarios no matter what damage Trump's pro fossil fuel machinations do to the US's clean energy transition timeline. You're being way too generous. It's simply not a responsible course of action to take our foot off the gas, to use a horribly bad pun.
I will go to my grave not understanding the hostility to Bill Gates. Guy spends tens of billions of dollars trying to get health care to the poorest people in the world, and from that everyone concludes he's...uniquely cynical and self-interested?!
Possibly very self serving, but thinking about why I don't get this either as I see people react to this, it seems to me that I identify with Gates. I believe I could have done the same thing in another life
Of course, I seem to have the same attitude towards Justin Bieber, so let no one assume this belief of mine is very accurate on either count
You are a clown. If he cared about their health, the water would get cleaned up. Instead he uses them as guinea pigs for experimental injections.
Gates believes that YOU, without a “digital ID” that allows those of his “status” to track everything you do, from cradle to grave, should not be allowed to “participate” in society.
Gates is also a wicked eugenicist and believes that he somehow has the right to dictate who lives or dies. He’s psychotic. You are worshipping at the feet of a psychopath.
I take your point. I think the lion's share of suspicion about Bill has come after he got divorced from Melinda. I assume his odd inability to explain his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein may have been a marriage killer. Since the separation, he seems to be a rather different sort of person than his ex-wife. I can't prove this, it's just a feeling, in the way Zuckerberg always seems untrustworthy when he tries to sound relatable.
While I would agree with Gates' turnabout if he were a regular citizen like you or I, his sudden reversal implies a different sort of motive, after his years of scaremongering on the topic. Which is true of many of the climate-change illuminati, who have built fortunes upon haranguing mere mortals about the virtues of personal sacrifice, while traveling the world in luxury and owning multiple homes. Apparently people noticed.
To many of us plebeians, it's hard not to notice Gates' conflict between pursuing AI, which is a ravenous consumer of energy, and his former exhortations about the need to cut consumption at all costs. A man cannot ride two horses with one ass. For the average critical thinker, your analysis would be correct. Many of us used to be strong opponents of nuclear power, for instance, but we have since realized the error of our ways. Gates is in a somewhat a different category, and it's hard to imagine he thinks of himself as part of a big human family. His argument would come off as a bit more sincere if he were not shoveling billions into gigawatt data centers at this moment.
I am strongly reminded of the famous Upton Sinclair quote: "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
A very large percentage of the people upset with Bill Gates are people who will see their income/funding disappear if people decide that there is no climate catastophe just a set of things being (slightly) worse
"What we can know is that whomever ends up being on the receiving end of the worst climate impacts is going to be much better off if they’re relatively richer than if they’re poorer."
If by "relatively richer" you mean that we should continue to emphasize economic growth in the near term, there are a couple of problems with that position.
The lesser issue is that economic growth per se has nothing to do with distribution of wealth. So there isn't any guarantee that most people will indeed be richer, even if we continue to grow our economies or the global one.
The greater issue is that the pursuit of economic growth itself has adverse impacts on the climate issue as well as on many other issues that intersect with it (biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, ocean deoxygenation, soil pollution, etc.). The aggregate impact of these issues makes it much less certain that people will be better off at all.
My suggestion: ask an LLM what the trend has been since 1900 for absolute poverty and for deaths from natural disasters. Everyone's richer and safer, economic growth does that
I think Ockham's Razor applies here. Gates is just reefing his sails in the storm, my friend. It's political expedience masquerading as the rational argument you describe (so well, thank you). He is trading in the precautionary principle for political capital on the good bet that we are on a much better path than we were ten years ago in terms of avoiding the worst case IPCC scenarios no matter what damage Trump's pro fossil fuel machinations do to the US's clean energy transition timeline. You're being way too generous. It's simply not a responsible course of action to take our foot off the gas, to use a horribly bad pun.
I will go to my grave not understanding the hostility to Bill Gates. Guy spends tens of billions of dollars trying to get health care to the poorest people in the world, and from that everyone concludes he's...uniquely cynical and self-interested?!
I. Don't. Get it.
Possibly very self serving, but thinking about why I don't get this either as I see people react to this, it seems to me that I identify with Gates. I believe I could have done the same thing in another life
Of course, I seem to have the same attitude towards Justin Bieber, so let no one assume this belief of mine is very accurate on either count
If you belieb it, you can make it manifest...
You are a clown. If he cared about their health, the water would get cleaned up. Instead he uses them as guinea pigs for experimental injections.
Gates believes that YOU, without a “digital ID” that allows those of his “status” to track everything you do, from cradle to grave, should not be allowed to “participate” in society.
Gates is also a wicked eugenicist and believes that he somehow has the right to dictate who lives or dies. He’s psychotic. You are worshipping at the feet of a psychopath.
I take your point. I think the lion's share of suspicion about Bill has come after he got divorced from Melinda. I assume his odd inability to explain his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein may have been a marriage killer. Since the separation, he seems to be a rather different sort of person than his ex-wife. I can't prove this, it's just a feeling, in the way Zuckerberg always seems untrustworthy when he tries to sound relatable.
While I would agree with Gates' turnabout if he were a regular citizen like you or I, his sudden reversal implies a different sort of motive, after his years of scaremongering on the topic. Which is true of many of the climate-change illuminati, who have built fortunes upon haranguing mere mortals about the virtues of personal sacrifice, while traveling the world in luxury and owning multiple homes. Apparently people noticed.
To many of us plebeians, it's hard not to notice Gates' conflict between pursuing AI, which is a ravenous consumer of energy, and his former exhortations about the need to cut consumption at all costs. A man cannot ride two horses with one ass. For the average critical thinker, your analysis would be correct. Many of us used to be strong opponents of nuclear power, for instance, but we have since realized the error of our ways. Gates is in a somewhat a different category, and it's hard to imagine he thinks of himself as part of a big human family. His argument would come off as a bit more sincere if he were not shoveling billions into gigawatt data centers at this moment.