Bill Gates just flipped the script and changed the rules of the climate change debate. Well, not for us, of course.

We’re just going to keep on doing the things we’ve always done and saying what we’ve always said. But for the climate true believers, the world just changed in a big way. The Overton window of acceptable public opinion just got blown to pieces as Bill Gates himself wrote a lengthy opinion piece that sounds more like the pragmatism of Bjorn Lomborg than the doom mongering of the Bill Gates of old. Whatever you may think of Bill Gates, and I don’t think very highly of him at all for the record, but whatever your opinion, he holds a lot of sway within the climate change religion because he is a huge source of an enormous amount of their money either directly via his foundation or indirectly because he has so much influence over where others including governments send their money. So when he comes out with not a backflip, not on the issue of climate change itself at the very least, but very much a backflip on what we should do about climate change, well then it is wise for us to pay some attention.

His entire piece is 5 a half thousand words long, and I’ve read it so that you don’t have to. Now, I’m not going to read the whole thing in this video, but you do need to hear parts of it. Because when Bill Gates is finally saying these things, you know that you can say them louder than ever before. And more importantly, that true believers can no longer dismiss your words as denier nonsense because one of their prophets, one of the high priests of the climate religion, has now spoken. We’ll get into it in just a second, but first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around us. And Bill Gates certainly changed the entire climate debate with his recent piece.

I am 100% viewer supported. So please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books about government power and civil disobedience, as well as my DVDs, t-shirts, and hoodies. All available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. Okay, let’s get to the highlights of what Bill Gates said. He wants everyone to know before the COP 30 climate doom-mongers conference in Brazil. Firstly, notice that he claims in the headline here that this is a new way to look at the problem, which is ridiculous because as we go through, you’ll realize that he’s saying a lot of what’s being said by people who were never conned by the climate cult in the first place. But anyway, it is nice of Bill Gates to finally catch up.

There is a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this.

In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us. Just look at the heat waves and the storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature. Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences, particularly for people in the poorest countries, it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.

Right from the outset, Bill Gates is putting an end to the doom mongering. He’s calling out the doomsday view. Bill Gates is telling people to stop treating climate change like it’s an existential threat. Now, I can’t imagine how many people choked on their smashed avocado when they woke up and started reading that from Bill Gates. Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.

Um, what’s that, Bill? You’re saying we should focus on adapting to the climate as it changes instead of trying to stop it from changing, which is exactly what I said in my 50 to1 project 13 years ago, which is exactly what experts around the world have been cancelled and fired for saying, like what Bjorn Lomborg has been saying all along with his Copenhagen consensus centers, which were so politically incorrect that the University of Western Australia was bullied by the media into back flipping and not setting one up in Australia. Bill Gates has just said that Bjorn Lomborg was right all along and that Australia should have listened to him. It has to be a cold day in hell because I’m finding myself in agreement with Bill Gates. Ew, I am definitely going to need a shower after this.

Back to it. Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them, it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they have always been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people. This paragraph is a total realignment of focus back to where it should always have been, which is making people’s lives better. Now, whatever your views on climate, whatever your views on the role of human emissions of CO2 on the climate, we should all be able to come together around the goal of making life better for as many people as possible. And finally, belatedly, that’s where Bill Gates is now at.

Now, Bill Gates is not walking away from the climate religion or the belief that man’s emissions are a primary cause of it.

Please don’t misunderstand me. He reaffirms his belief in anthropogenic climate change multiple times throughout this piece, as you’ll hear in this next bit. But I’m focusing on the areas where he’s shifting the Overton window and announcing a dramatic change in his approach. So, I urge everyone at COP 30 to ask, how do we make sure aid spending is delivering the greatest possible impact for the most vulnerable people? Is the money designated for climate being spent on the right things? I believe the answer is no.

That’s Bill Gates saying no. The money designated for climate is not being spent on the right things. Continuing, sometimes the world acts as if any effort to fight climate change is as worthwhile as any other. As a result, less effective projects are diverting money and attention from efforts that will have more impact on the human condition. Namely, making it affordable to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions and reducing extreme poverty with improvements in agriculture and health. Now, notice the mention of affordable elimination of greenhouse emissions. Yes, he is regurgitating his belief in the climate change religion, but he’s walking away from the zero emissions at any cost dogma, which has dominated the climate change discourse for 20 plus years.

He mentions the fact that according to the models, for what that’s worth, the world is likely to end up about 3° warmer than it was in 1850. Now again, I’m putting aside what we know about how temperatures are measured, the artificial lowering of past temperatures, the way that new technologies are tending to increase measured maximums today. We’re putting aside all of that. In this video, I’m only focused on the shift in position that Bill Gates is articulating. He says that we’re probably going to end up with 3° of warming. But notice there is no apocalyptic response to that prediction.

Let’s read. That’s well above the 1.5° C goal that countries committed to at the Paris COP in 2015. In fact, country between now and 2040, we are going to fall far short of the world’s climate goals. One reason is that the world’s demand for energy is going up more than doubling by 2050. From the standpoint of improving lives, using more energy is a good thing because it’s so closely correlated with economic growth. This chart shows country’s energy use and their income. More energy use is a key part of prosperity. Now, this is the chart that he then shows which makes it very clear. Energy consumption equals prosperity.

Now, again, this is something that we’ve known all along. I’ve done whole videos dedicated to this historical fact that it is energy availability and affordability more than anything else that has improved our lives from the subsistence farming of the 1800s to the astonishing wealth that we have today. Energy is life and affordable energy is lifestyle and Gates is admitting that right here in this piece. Now, he goes on to talk about how he’s investing in technologies to make zero emissions energy more affordable, etc. Of course, he does. But he arrives at another confession soon afterwards.

Even with these innovations, though, the cumulative emissions will cause warming and many people will be affected.

We’ll see what you might call latitude creep. In North America, for instance, Iowa will start to feel more like Texas. Texas will start to feel more like northern Mexico. Although there will be climate migration, most people in countries near the equator won’t be able to relocate. They will experience more heat waves, stronger storms, and bigger fires. Some outdoor work will need to pause during the hottest hours of the day, and governments will have to invest in cooling centers and better early warning systems for extreme heat and weather events.

Notice what’s not there. He doesn’t mention the fact that climate driven migrations have always happened, that Greenland used to be green, that wine grapes used to be grown in regions where they cannot survive today, or that the Temp’s River in London used to freeze over in winter to the point that people ice skated on it. But he is honest enough to admit that even these alleged extreme weather events, which aren’t actually happening by the way, global burned area is trending down. Global hurricanes are normal. As awful as they are to experience, I’m not trying to diminish the reality of having to go through something like that. The fact is that the data shows us that they’re not actually getting worse. But Bill does go on to admit that deaths from extreme weather events have dropped 90%.

We’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s first hear what he has to say about heat waves specifically. If I think if you ask most people how they think climate will affect health, they’ll talk about heat waves and natural disasters. So, let’s start there and look at the facts. Excessively hot weather now causes around 500,000 deaths every year. Despite the impression you’d get from the news, though, the number has been decreasing for some time, chiefly because more people can afford air conditioners. And surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier, killing nearly 10 times more people every year than heat does.

As for what will happen in the future, heat deaths will go up and cold deaths will go down. The best current estimates, again, according to Bill Gates, suggest that the net effect will be a global rise in temperature related mortality and that most of the increase will be in developing countries. Now, I’m going to pause there because I don’t know where he’s getting his estimates from or who funded them, but if 10 times more people are already dying from cold than from heat, you would have to torture the statistics pretty badly to come out with a prediction that a few degrees of warming will increase the overall temperature related mortality.

The story so far with natural disasters is similar. In the past century, direct deaths from natural disasters such as drowning during a flood have fallen 90% to between 40,000 and 50,000 people a year, thanks mostly to better warning systems and more resilient buildings. And that’s the key. Prosperity, energy availability. It enables human beings to better adapt to where we live, no matter how unstable the weather might be in that particular location. And people like me and many, many others have been saying that all along. And finally, hallelujah, Bill Gates has caught up.

He says in this piece that a few years ago, researchers at the University of Chicago’s climate impact lab ran a thought experiment. What happens to the number of projected deaths from climate change when you account for the expected economic growth of low-income countries over the rest of this century? The answer, it falls by more than 50%. Now, can we pause here and reflect on the fact that what that means is that the increased prosperity of people in low-income countries was not being factored in to the predictions of death from climate change until that study was done. That seems like an insane thing to omit and reveals really the intense dishonesty that lies at the heart of so much of these climate change predictions. And based on the real world evidence that we’re seeing around us every day, that number only falling by 50% is probably conservative.

This is why it never made sense to make people poorer in order to save them from climate change.

If we really truly believe that the world is getting hotter and it’s going to be an apocalypse, then the answer is that we need to get richer fast, cheap and reliable energy. It’s it’s why our lives have become so much better in the last 200 years. And making energy cheaper and more reliable is the number one way that we can protect people against whatever happens in our future.

This backflip from Bill Gates is long overdue and it doesn’t undo all the harm that’s been done to humanity in the name of saving us from climate change. Including, by the way, all the harm that Bill Gates himself has done. But it does mark a fantastic turning point in the debate. Bill Gates has finally admitted that Bjorn Lomborg was right all along. And that means that the next time someone wants to preach the climate religion to you and tell you that you don’t know anything, you can point them to this piece from Bill Gates and say, “Hey, that’s your high priest. That’s what he’s saying.”

I’ll put the link to Gates’s website in the description so that you can find that piece for yourself. Or you can Google three tough truths about climate and you’ll find it. It’s a long read, 5 a half thousand words, and I’ve only touched on a few key points throughout, but it is worth reading in my opinion because in this piece, Bill Gates has radically changed his position, and he’s moved the Overton window so far that it’s finally acceptable for people like me to keep saying what I’ve been saying the whole time. Focus on prosperity and creating cheap, abundant energy. And if we do that, everything else will take care of itself.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project, and this is what I do. I help busy Australians like you to keep up with the world as it changes around us. If you appreciate this video and what I’m doing with the Topher project, then please help me to keep going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books, DVDs, and merch, which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

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