Debatable: How to fight climate change

Gates wrote in his memo ahead of the UN climate summit, COP30, that funding should be targeted to mitigate the effects of climate change on the world’s poor:

“I urge everyone at COP30 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.

“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.

“In short, climate change, disease, and poverty are all major problems. We should deal with them in proportion to the suffering they cause. And we should use data to maximize the impact of every action we take.”

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, argued that Gates’ logic is out of step with reality:

“The notion that the world should shift away from curbing climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions is extraordinarily divorced from the basic facts of the present moment. The last three years have been the warmest in recorded human history, and by a considerable margin — rather than slowing, as some have claimed, the pace of warming has likely increased over the past two decades.

“The real question then becomes: What will we do next? Real progress has undoubtedly been made in the clean energy sector, to the point that renewable energy is now often the cheapest form of electricity. But that is not nearly enough, as projected further greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades are still on track to cause approximately double the amount of warming we’ve seen thus far. And the societal and ecological impacts from that doubling would be profound. The worst consequences would indeed befall the global poor — but it would also be dangerously hubristic to assume that wealthy nations would avoid human suffering and great economic harm in a 3°C-warmer world.

“When it comes to the perceived tension between climate adaptation and climate mitigation, the simple reality is this: It’s not a binary choice. We can, and must, do both.”

Jason Walsh, executive director of the environmental and labor group BlueGreen Alliance, said targeting short-term emissions reductions is important for innovation, but that prioritizing that over the economic well-being of poor communities would be a “moral failure”:

“Targeting emissions sets goals that sends a clear message to all actors that we are heading toward a carbon-constrained future, and it helps incentivize investment in all sorts of low-to-zero clean technologies and business models. They are a powerful tool for countering short-term status-quo thinking that treats lowering emissions as someone else’s problem. It’s also hard for me to imagine a world in which policymakers ignore greenhouse gas emissions and don’t talk about them but still make emissions reduction and policies a priority.

“All of that said, emissions aren’t the only thing we should target. The political sustainability of the energy transition depends on diverse constituencies seeing themselves in a low-carbon future. If there is a trade off between the fastest conceivable emissions reductions and the economic well-being of large numbers of people, and if we choose the first, it’s not only a moral failure — but we are also likely to end up with fewer emissions reductions in the long-term because the politics of it just don’t work.”