Bill Gates Wants to Set the Environmental Agenda Ahead of COP30: It’s Not Surprising

The Earth’s rotation was slowed by 0.06 microseconds because of the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei Province, central China. When filled, the dam can hold 40 cubic kilometers (about 10 trillion gallons) of water. According to a NASA paper, this redistribution of mass could shift the Earth’s rotational pole, causing a slight—and reversible—slowing of Earth’s rotation. It was later confirmed that this effect could also influence the seismic activity in the region.

There is no doubt that human action affects the planet. There is no doubt that our actions are altering the equilibrium of multiple ecosystems, and that this is having an effect on the environment. There is no doubt that through our actions we are making the Earth a less accommodating place for humans—and many other species—to live on.

Will we adapt and survive? Probably, as a species. Under what conditions—and at what human cost? Difficult to quantify, but most predictions say it could be severe. Can we reverse course and reduce that suffering? To a point. Are we doing enough? Most say no. Most people agree on these points, but not on how to proceed.

Bill Gates, the tech billionaire famous for his environmental endeavors, long urged cutting carbon emissions to avert worst-case scenarios. But in a recent post on his website, he reframes his outlook on the effects and prevention of climate change.

Now, he says, we should focus more on health and development than on stopping climate change: “This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives”, he writes.

Gates proposes refocusing attention and resources on development and preventive health, rather than exclusively on cutting emissions. He argues that temperature is “not the best way to measure our progress on climate,” challenging net-zero thinking and reversing his previous emphasis. 

“When you look at the problem this way, it becomes easier to find the best buys in climate adaptation—they’re the areas where finance can do the most to fight poverty and boost health”,h e says now. 

We could dismiss this as the opinion of a tech billionaire and self-styled philanthropist who flies by private jet (which he acknowledges, saying he offsets with credits). But we would be wrong to do that.

Bill Gates is proposing a potential change in the environmental agenda—one that, if adopted, would have wide repercussions. It means redirecting efforts and substantial funds, which could create new industries and displace others. The post is explicitly framed as: “What I want everyone at COP30 to know.”

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is the premier forum where decisions, objectives, and plans are set for the environmental agenda, which, in theory, nations should follow. Gates clearly wants to influence those decisions. He says COP30 is “an excellent place to begin” adopting “different views.” Having spent billions of dollars on programs aimed at preventing climate change, his influence is duly noted.

The post appeared days after the UN said humanity had missed its target of limiting warming to 1.5°C, with the secretary-general warning of “devastating consequences.” The timing could hardly be more apt, seemingly downshifting the UN’s warning.

To be clear, Gates does not reject reducing emissions. He says that while continuing to do so, we should focus more attention and resources on adaptation because: “Since the economic growth that’s projected for poor countries will reduce climate deaths by half, it follows that faster and more expansive growth will reduce deaths by even more,” he argues.

There is a logic behind that statement—one with which some would agree, especially in developing countries, and with which some would ferociously disagree—but there are also two tensions:

First, development and environmental care should not be contradictory. If they are, then there is something wrong with the concept of development, since the environment existed long before we “developed.” Secondly, it does not seem very logical to push for more of the same that brought us here—and which has caused havoc in the environment—as the most intelligent thing to do to care for the environment.

I am not sure what the best course is, but that is not my question here. There are ample resources to research individually. What I do want to note is that, if Gates’s strategy is applied, it would upend the net-zero emissions paradigm that has dominated the international environmental agenda.

This should not surprise us. The environmental agenda has often been set top-down, not bottom-up, despite the efforts of many respectable organizations—and with the interests of particular subgroups of society in mind.

Much of the modern environmental movement bears the mark of Maurice Strong. His rise from a junior UN security job in the 1950s to oil baron and head of the Canadian Development Agency is hard to understand without another figure: banker David Rockefeller, son of John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil.

According to Elaine Dewar’s Cloak of Green (a study of links among environmental groups, government, and big business), Strong and Rockefeller met through UN treasurer Noel Monod, with whom Strong shared a house while working at the UN.

When Strong left the UN and returned to Canada, he was offered a job by Standard Oil veteran Jack Gallagher to work on the Alberta oil patch. From there, his oil-industry career rose, with a Rockefeller-facilitated position at Caltex Oil in Kenya, and later as head of the Desmarais family Power Corporation in Canada.

From Desmarais’s Power Corporation, Strong led the Canadian International Development Agency, the Canada Development Investment Corporation, and the board of the International Development Research Centre, which received donations from the Rockefeller Foundation and Chase Manhattan Bank.

The list of positions Strong held is long. He was a longtime Foundation Director of the World Economic Forum, a Senior Advisor to the World Bank president, a member of Toyota’s International Advisory Board, the Advisory Council for the Center for International Development at Harvard, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund, Resources for the Future, and Eisenhower Fellowships.

In 1972 Strong organized and chaired the first UN Conference on the Human Environment. Before that, he was appointed a Rockefeller Foundation trustee. With Carnegie Fellow Barbara Ward and Rockefeller-funded ecologist René Dubos, he prepared Only One Earth, a foundational text for the environmental movement.

The 1972 conference created the first governmental action plans and a new UN body, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). In 1975, while heading UNEP, Strong also became the first president of Petro-Canada, the Canadian national oil company.

That was the 1970s, when oil drove the economic agenda. Over the last decade, technology and Silicon Valley have led U.S. growth. The largest eight companies by market cap are tech, followed by finance. If oil once shaped the UN environmental agenda, it is unsurprising that tech might seek to shape it now.

That is the purpose of Gates’s message: to redirect the agenda from emissions to “improving lives.” Until recently, tech firms were not directly linked to large-scale environmental harm, at least not on the scale of other industries, such as oil or transport. Microsoft, for example, began as a software company with a relatively small emissions footprint.

In 2020, Microsoft said it would be carbon-negative by 2030 and offset all historical emissions by 2050. Fast-forward to 2025: AI is the main objective of tech firms and a U.S. growth engine. Microsoft has planned to invest $80 billion in data centers over 2025, apart from other AI-related investments. AI needs data, data needs data centers, and data centers need electricity—a lot of it (not to mention water). UNEP notes:

“The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres will drive more than 20 per cent of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030. The global demand from data centres is set to more than double over the next five years, consuming as much electricity by 2030 as Japan does today, according to estimates. Data centres and data transmission networks were responsible for 1 per cent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, experts say.”

It is hardly surprising then that Bill Gates wants to shift the focus of the environmental agenda.