By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
Bill Gates recently wrote a memo that has received more responses than readings. He is arguing for placing the climate issue in perspective, a view I have long maintained. Climate change advocates accused him of backing off concern about climate change at a time when climate policy and the green economy are under attack. He did no such thing. Gates continues to believe that climate change is a serious and dangerous environmental problem. And no, President Trump, it is no hoax. Perhaps when the President’s own waterfront properties are subjected to damage from extreme weather events, he will come to understand it.
As a political problem, climate change differs from other environmental issues, and as an environmental problem, it is also relatively unique. The political issue is complex because it is caused everywhere on earth, and its impact is also global. No single nation can prevent it on its own, and in a world of sovereign states, that is a deep problem. As an environmental problem, it has the virtue of being relatively simple. We know its causes, and we know how to stop it. Most environmental problems are far more complicated. Biodiversity loss is caused by an intricate and poorly understood set of relationships within interconnected ecosystems. The transport of toxic chemicals through land, air, and water, and their impact on people and the planet is also incredibly complicated. Invasive species and the transport of disease are also difficult to understand and address. Many of these other environmental issues have global impacts, but also often demonstrate local causes and impacts. They can be controlled to some degree by national and local public policies. National and local climate policies are also vital, but they can’t do much of anything without the participation of many nations.
The Gates memo simply says that improving human welfare should be a higher priority than reducing global warming. He does not minimize the climate crisis but simply says that it is not our only problem, and sometimes it should receive a lower priority than more immediate threats to human wellbeing. I made the same point when I mentioned that New York City’s Local Law 97, decarbonizing large buildings, must be carefully implemented to ensure that it does not exacerbate the costs of shelter for working people and increase the city’s already profound homeless crisis.
Over the years, I’ve found that many climate advocates lack perspective on the issue and consider it not simply the most important environmental problem, but in some sense the cause of all other problems. The connections between climate and food, climate and water scarcity, and climate and poverty have been the subjects of quite a bit of scholarly and activist attention. The connections are there, but climate is not typically the central cause of those problems.
Let’s look at the issue of hunger in America. When the Trump administration decided to cruelly eliminate SNAP or food stamp benefits for 40 million Americans, it caused an immediate food crisis here in the United States. That had nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with our dysfunctional government in Washington. When ICE enforcers bully immigrants, that too has nothing to do with climate change. When USAID was shut down and grants to provide nutrition and health care abroad were eliminated, that increase in human suffering was unrelated to climate. In all cases, these issues are at least as important as decarbonizing our economy. Addressing those immediate crises correctly demands and commands our attention.
As a long-time student of environmental policy, I have been impressed by the ability of climate change to dominate the environmental agenda. Part of it is the vigilance and advocacy of experts concerned about the purity of the message communicating the “existential threat posed by climate change.” In one sense, they have a point. While it is clear that President Trump did not read the Gates memo, he claimed incorrectly that the memo backed up his absurd conviction that climate change is a hoax. On the other hand, the climate issue has been presented in a way that both contributed to and has been the victim of political polarization. The problem is that policy prescriptions such as taxing fossil fuels, attacking private jets, and banning internal combustion engines directly attack America’s lifestyle choices. Advocating that people sit alone in the dark, reading by candlelight, was never a useful way to sell a policy. Instead, we should be advocating for modernizing our energy system to lower costs, increase reliability, and reduce pollution. We should be subsidizing renewable energy rather than taxing fossil fuels. We should communicate that environmental sustainability improves our quality of life. But the urgency of the issue drove analysts and advocates to propose solutions that underestimated the importance of energy to the standard of living and lifestyle of many Americans. Forcing people to adopt new technologies is a policy asking for a backlash, particularly if those new technologies are not yet cheaper, more convenient, and more effective than existing technologies.
The solution to the climate crisis will be through the development and diffusion of new technologies that make our energy systems, agricultural systems, and manufacturing systems cleaner and more productive. The Gates memo makes this point explicitly:
“Although wind and solar have gotten cheaper and better, we don’t yet have all the tools we need to meet the growing demand for energy without increasing carbon emissions. But we will have the tools we need if we focus on innovation. With the right investments and policies in place, over the next ten years we will have new affordable zero-carbon technologies ready to roll out at scale. Add in the impact of the tools we already have, and by the middle of this century emissions will be lower and the gap between poor countries and rich countries will be greatly reduced.”
The Gates memo was directed toward the climate industry trade show gathering in Brazil, entitled COP30. As I’ve often observed, these conventions have the value of focusing attention on climate change, although their downside is that they often raise expectations due to the incorrect assumption that they are policymaking bodies that can directly impact the behavior of nations and companies. If the other 29 climate COPs did not end climate change, I suspect number 30 will have about the same impact. I would not, however, underestimate the importance of the awareness built by these meetings.
Public policy is inherently incremental, making problems less bad while never truly “solving” them. Here in New York City, homicides have been reduced from over 2,000 at their peak in the 1990s to 377 in 2024. A much safer city, but not for the 377 people who were killed in 2024 and for their families. Policy implementation is slow, remedial, and serial. It’s often two steps forward and one step back, as we learn what works and what doesn’t. Decarbonization will follow the same path. In my apartment, our clothes dryer, stove, and oven used to be powered by gas and are now electric. Con Ed refused to replace a deteriorated gas line in our apartment building, part of a New York State policy to electrify buildings. But a second gas line heating our water and radiators is still in place. Eventually, that too will go. The transition was inconvenient. For a year, as the building was renovated, we used hotplates, microwaves, and toaster ovens to cook. Our university landlord even reduced our rent during this period to compensate tenants for the inconvenience. This policy will only gradually lead to decarbonization as the grid decarbonizes, but without this step, nothing can happen. When you add many small actions together, over a decade or so, we will finally see reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, if you believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, slow and steady will not win the race. On the other hand, if you believe that the only truly existential threat to humanity is a global exchange of nuclear weapons, then gradual decarbonization is an acceptable response to the climate crisis. In any case, it is the only way that a change this important can take place. Energy is central to the modern economy, and a sudden and rapid change to our energy system would have unanticipated impacts that could be avoided by a more incremental approach. A gradual approach also has the benefit of avoiding over-investment in early technologies that might work but will be less effective than those that follow.
I am under no illusion about the dangers of climate change. But there are many other threats to our safety and well-being. We need to work on as many of these problems as we can, recognizing that many require immediate response while others can only be addressed over time. I applaud Bill Gates for his thoughtful analysis and for providing needed perspective on the problem of climate change.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
