Bill Gates Has a Point
Nov. 2, 2025
By Stephen Lezak
Dr. Lezak is a researcher at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the politics of climate change.
On Tuesday, after picking up strength in an abnormally warm ocean, Hurricane Melissa tore through Jamaica, wreaking havoc and eventually claiming at least 50 lives across the Caribbean. Hours before Melissa, a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall, Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, released an audacious memo arguing that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
For almost two decades, many environmentalists have argued that the burning of fossil fuels poses an existential threat to all of human civilization. As a result, much of the conversation about global warming has become steeped in the language of extinction and planetary catastrophe.
But these dark visions ignore a simple fact: Climate change is not a giant meteor crashing into Earth. We will not all suffer equally.
Those whose lives are threatened by climate disaster are not merely the victims of bad luck. When heat waves strike, the dead are predominantly people who are unhoused, older or living alone in substandard housing. Around the world, the neighborhoods that repeatedly flood are disproportionately home to poor families who lack the means to evacuate, fortify their homes against worsening storms or permanently move out of harm’s way.
With over $100 billion to his name, Mr. Gates is arguably one of the least appropriate people to police language on the climate crisis, given that he won’t shoulder the worst consequences. His memo also glossed over the possibility of runaway warming within our lifetimes and the destruction of nature.
A changing climate, a changing world
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Climate change around the world: In “ Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.
The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.
What people can do: Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey describe the types of local activism that might be needed, while Saul Griffith points to how Australia shows the way on rooftop solar. Meanwhile, small changes at the office might be one good way to cut significant emissions, writes Carlos Gamarra.
Yet he is generally correct when he writes, “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.”
When pundits, journalists and scientists talk about the climate crisis as the dawn of a new era in history, they plaster over the long-simmering injustices that create climate vulnerability in the first place: poverty, oppression, conflict and colonization. Whether...
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