Monbiot: Bill Gates Rejects Climate Action Because he is Rich

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… The richer they become, the more they can bend the state and economic system to their will …”

I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t

George Monbiot

Money talks – and his essay denouncing ‘near-term emissions goals’ at Cop30 mostly argues the case for letting the ultra-rich off the hook

Let’s begin with the fundamental problem: Bill Gates is a politics denier. Though he came to it late, he now accepts the realities of climate science. But he lives in flat, embarrassing denial about political realities. His latest essay on climate, published last week, treats the issue as if it existed in a political vacuum. He writes as if there were no such thing as political power, and no such thing as billionaires.

…

Yes, the funds available for any good cause are scarce, but that’s not because of some natural law, some implacable truth about human society. It’s because oligarchic power has waged war on benign state spending, leading to the destruction of USAID and drastic cuts to the aid budgets of other countries, including the UK. Austerity is a political choice. The decision to impose it is driven by governments bowing to the wishes of the ultra-rich.

There are truckloads of money available. Just after Gates published his new missive, Oxfam revealed that the net worth of the 10 richest US billionaires grew by $698bn in the past year. That money alone, the increment in the wealth of 10 people, is almost 10 times the annual amount required to end extreme poverty worldwide. How have they managed to channel so much of the world’s money into their pockets? And why can’t we get it back through effective taxation? The answer is their translation of economic power into political power. The richer they become, the more they can bend the state and economic system to their will, ensuring that they become richer still. But Bill Gates says nothing in his essay about how and where extra money for both climate action and poverty relief could be found.

…

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/08/bill-gates-climate-crisis-billionaire-essay-cop30

Poor Monbiot, still stuck in a 70s socialist time warp.

How many times has the idea of stripping rich people of their wealth been tested to destruction, only to end with some of the worst economic disasters and famines of the 20th century?

I’m not a fan of Bill Gates, plenty of times I’ve criticised his climate rants on WUWT. But whatever prompted his recent about face on climate change, any outbreak of climate sanity is something to be celebrated, not condemned.

In fairness, Bill Gates has given billions of dollars of his own money to trying to improve the lives of those poor people Monbiot claims to care about. Demanding Gates’ money be stripped from him because it is not being spent exactly how Monbiot would like seems a bit harsh. If Monbiot wants that kind of control over large sums of money, he should make his own money, instead of trying to take it off other people.