[Photo credit: Al Jazeera] I’m sorry, but billionaires have no excuse for promoting ignorance as knowledge. They cover their tracks well, but have all the access in the world to find the truth of anything. But that is not what their pontifications and prognostications are all about. As always, they are about their obsessive compulsive drive for ever more wealth and power, with rare exceptions. It is interesting to note that the more wealth they control, the more political and social power they typically seek. Narcissistic sociopathy rises to power when its ruthlessness remains unchecked.
The Bill Gates Conundrum
Why should anyone lend credence to the claims of a tech billionaire? Is it his wealth? Is it, as in Bill Gates’ case, his presumed intelligence as the retired CEO of Microsoft? Is it Gates’ conventional charity operations? Is it some kind of combined charisma? Regardless of his IQ score or corporate power, we have no basis for inferring he knows anything more about our global multi-crises than your neighbor who reads national newspapers. But he does play the role of tech wizard who knows more than you do.
Bill Gates’ latest political proclamation—couched in faux benevolent narrative—projects his continued refusal to face the full facts of accelerating carbon emissions and ecological destruction, by insisting that they will not lead to humanity’s demise. What does he know that we don’t? Nothing! Framed by the public nerd billionaire who seems to seek avoidance of disfavor by the con artist who would be king, this claim comes naked and baseless from the inextricably acclaimed Bill Gates.
Conveniently the other day, a White House official excused its refusal to send any high officials to the upcoming UN sponsored COP30 climate meetings, saying “the tide is turning on prioritizing climate change,” and citing Bill Gates’ new ‘memo’ shifting further away from emissions control to limit the already excessive and worsening heating of the planet. Why should anyone take such an assertion seriously? It contradicts the very best available information on the increasingly dangerous climate emergency, yet that seems not to matter, perhaps because of the charisma of the putative tech guru. Fear sometimes drives people to seek assurance from the powerful.
In that memo, really a political essay disguised as sage advice from an old expert on everything (which he is not), Gates claims that “Climate change is serious, but we’ve made great progress.” With carbon emissions accelerating instead of being reduced and ecological destruction continuing apace with the growth of the extractive and wasteful operations of the industrial-consumer global political economy, and public and private institutions doing little beyond empty gestures, where is the truth in that outlandish claim?
It is nowhere, consisting of vacuous claims framed as some inherent truth from on high. Nor is there any evidence that the accelerating destruction of ecosystems is slowing, quite the opposite. Gates goes on to characterize the dire warnings of science—including emergent tipping points in key Earth System component subsystems, which Gates never mentions—as being nothing more than a “doomsday narrative,” a mere “view,” as if it were an imaginary that somebody made up from nothing. Gates offers no evidence, only referring to “projections” of improved future emissions. However, scientific findings of fact are a cut above mere ideological claims. Gates goes on to say that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Well, if we listen to him, it certainly will.
Scientism is the practice of appearing scientific when one’s argument is nothing more than conjecture and speculation dressed up in the clothing of fact and the appearance of scientific method. You probably have seen this on the History Channel, in relation to so called investigations of UFOs or paranormal phenomena, or speculations about aliens having instructed the ancient Egyptians on how to build a pyramid. Whatever the facts, what is presented is conjecture based on wishful thinking, entertainment—or in Gates’ case, persuasion dressed up as science.
Scientism is framing the world in an authoritative sounding narrative that distorts or denies facts to claim the world is what the promoter wants it to be. January 6 insurrectionists were peaceful patriots. We can stop climate collapse by ‘greening’ business as usual. We can grow the economy to eliminate the poverty that results from the concentration of wealth through capital accumulation, gained in part paying poverty wages, which is inherent in uncontrolled economic growth. We can fix a compound fracture with a Band-Aid. If we were all engaged in critical thinking, Bill Gates would be collectively ignored.
Simply put, the billionaire pseudo-science claims are framed in scientism, not science; they are as false as they are bathed in the blarney that pervades the charisma of wealth and political power. With a tiny list of exceptions, the ultra-rich operate in the pathological interests of extending their greed, often under the cover of ‘charitable’ foundations. Bill Gates is not one of the exceptions.
Bill Gates is nothing if not annoying, and that is the kindest way I can put it. His entire career has been grounded in the exploitation of not only the Earth’s resources, but also the lives of its inhabitants. One of the world’s largest tech companies, NVidia is now said to be worth 5 trillion dollars—well, AI. Microsoft is now estimated as having a value of about 4 trillion dollars. But that is no longer the source of Gates’ new wealth. He cuts deals to enslave the peoples of ‘developing countries’ to industrialized farming methods and materials that must be bought from American corporations. His foundation’s charitable aid to health and subsistence of the world’s poor is one of those Band-Aids, and a great cover story; he calls it “development.”
Gates’ tech success relied on controlling and manipulating the creative work of others. His skills are not so much in software development but in financial manipulation, which seems to be involved in every project he touches—think Elon Musk. As with so many subsequent ‘tech-bro’ billionaires who have followed a similar path, his search for imaginary powers has reached an outer-orbit. His ‘retirement’ from Microsoft to pursue ‘charitable work’ through his private foundation, is nothing less than a strategy for extending power beyond corporate pursuits to the public sphere.
In his ‘retirement’ from running Microsoft, which he had co-founded with Paul Allen, Gates has only gotten worse. I never followed Gates’ maneuvers very closely when he ran Microsoft. But I never bought or recommended a Microsoft product until it had been released for at least a year—they were consistently ‘buggy,’ when frequently rushed to the market he virtually monopolized before they had been adequately beta-tested. He preferred to let the customer do much of the testing, which yielded a greater profit.
I was aware, however, that his success in getting his MS-DOS operating system into IBM personal computers when they were first introduced and became the standard for personal computing, resulted not from personal programming genius, but from his gaining control of an existing robust operating system and claiming it as his own.
Before the IBM personal computer was first released with “PC-DOS,” IBM’s name for its leased copy of MS-DOS, I had been using that same operating system on a Japanese NEC-8000 personal computer for a year or two. I was amazed when I discovered later that my ‘older’ PC’s operating system worked exactly like that of the IBM-PC—it had all the features of PC-DOS. That is because Bill Gates bought it from Seattle Computer Products for a flat fee of $50,000-. It was a derivative of the CP/M operating system in wide use at the time. Gates promoted it to IBM as the latest most powerful OS, which it already was before Bill Gates ever got hold of it. That is how IBM caused Microsoft to become one of the biggest corporations in the world, via Bill Gates’ clever move to lease its use to IBM who then put it inside every IBM PC, which dominated the personal computer market. That meant all those ‘IBM clones’ had to use it too in order to be compatible with all the related application software.
Billionaire Bluster and Climate Catastrophe
But what really got my attention and irritation much later, was when Gates formed what I call “Gates Billionaire Boys Club,” his “Breakthrough Energy Coalition” of wealthy investors he hoped to organize around high-tech “climate solutions,” to be also funded by nations, focused on technological innovation in energy production—a field with great profit potential for Tech Bro’s. That effort began around the time of COP 15 and the international agreement to keep the rise above preindustrial average temperature levels below 1.5ᴼ Centigrade. Well, how has that worked out?
Gates’ overly flashy website for Breakthrough Energy explicitly asserts the necessity to respond to an asserted growth in energy demand from 26k Twh in 2023 to 66 TWh in 2050. That is what all the evidence indicates would be an ecological disaster, as much unattainable as unsustainable. Starving climate refugees will not be using all that electricity.
Gates’ approach to climate action was at first denial. Only around 2006 did he recognize the opportunity in generating clean energy. However, like many others, his focus is more technology, more energy use, and the proliferation of both across the globe. In 2015, he organized a group of 28 billionaires to pressure municipalities, state governments, and national administrations to pay for highly industrialized tactics for carbon capture and storage, and new nuclear power plant designs and deployment. More economic growth was, and is, treated like a given; for him it was and is his goal.
Twenty Fifteen plus Ten is Less than Zero
Today, we have clearly broken through the 1.5ᴼ C goal agreed to at the 2015 UNITED nations sponsored Climate Change Conference, and carbon emissions keep rising as ecosystems deteriorate and courageous scientists and climate activists fight the good fight to repair, restore, and prevent the world’s rainforests from experiencing further destruction, and to forestall the Amazon jungle basin from becoming a desert, among many other ecosystems. However, without some form of social mobilization for genuine full-scale climate action, the billionaire class that drives the global political economy will continue to destroy natural systems faster than it can create any human value.
The immediate target of Gates memo shifting attention away from the climate goals of emissions reduction, carbon capture, and ecological restoration, to that of economic development of the poorest nations, is the upcoming Climate Change Conference (COP30), which will convene in remote Belém, Brazil, on November 10. Gates has shifted from his approach of combining hi-tech energy innovations with poor-nations development, to a position closer to the new “mainstream” anti-climate-action strategy, since the current autocratic attempt in the U.S. has shifted the “mainstream” to the extreme right.
Now, Gates claims, without a thread of evidence, that what he calls the “doomsday view,” which is how he characterizes the present fact-based strategy favored by scientists and anyone else who looks at the current climate and ecological trends, is misguided and that we must now focus on public health and human development instead. More either/or thinking. Well, of course, even he recognizes that the worst disasters will hit the poor nations first. But these are not ‘just’ narratives; they are scenarios one of which is grounded in fact and the other in profitable conjecture. Yet, Gates would have us shift from what has so far been a near complete failure of focusing on carbon emissions reduction and ecological damage and repair, to a more “developmental” approach.
“Do as I do!’ I can hear him say, ever drawn to opportunity to profit financially if not ecologically. Donate billions of dollars to projects in developing countries that will tie poor farmers to the agricultural products and practices that are failing to produce nutrition amid the forced-growth crop yields that are sold and weaken health around the world, for a profit. Somehow, he imagines, mainstream business-as-usual “green” climate inaction, the Band-Aid approach, will take care of what is fast becoming a race among catastrophic tipping points, points of no return to stability. This will all lead, if we allow it, to the ironic outcome of not only civilizational as well as ecological collapse, but also to the loss of almost all financial wealth, including his.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 