Tough truths and resets

A provocative new climate memo gets attention at the expense of impact

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash

October 31, 2025 — Bill Gates’s latest memo, entitled “Three Tough Truths on Climate,” is getting a lot of attention. In it, the billionaire philanthropist and smartest guy in pretty much every room contends that climate isn’t an existential threat for most of the world’s population. He calls on the climate community to focus efforts on climate action with the greatest impact on the quality of people’s lives, particularly people living in the developing world.

Climate activists are going nuts.

In many ways, the memo has lots in common with Tony Blair’s introduction to his think tank’s Climate Paradox report earlier this year. In it, Blair argued that current climate policies are failing because they ignore political and economic realities, alienating the public and stalling progress. Blair also called for a reset, recommending a shift from idealistic protest to actionable strategies that harness technology and build a broad-based mandate for change.

Blair’s remarks drew fevered criticism from many quarters in the climate community, and climate sceptics seized on the report as a retreat by a high-profile climate action supporter.

Many (the vast majority of whom will not have read either piece) will doubtless see Gates’s memo the same way. And already there have been plenty of media headlines that will reinforce that view.

But Gates makes clear upfront in his memo (and in bold type, no less) that climate change remains of vital importance:

“To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.”

There’s plenty else in the memo that makes patently good sense and is easy to agree with. It also shines a light on the importance of what Gates calls the green premium: that is, the cost difference between dirty and clean ways of doing something.

Beyond that, however, Gates makes several false distinctions and omissions that undermine his case.

“The global temperature doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of people’s lives,” Gates writes. He thus tries to separate emissions and temperature change from health and welfare. But these things can’t be separated. On the contrary, they go hand in hand: it’s precisely because of the impact emissions and global heating have on people’s lives that so many people are concerned about climate change.

Gates also oversimplifies economic development in order to minimize the impact climate change has on quality of life. To hear Gates tell it, increasing economic prosperity in the developing world stands to do more to improve the quality of life there than climate change stands to reduce it. Yet this ignores piles of evidence (here are just two of many from the World Bank and the World Economic Forum) that climate change poses a serious threat to what economic prosperity the developing world has attained.

Gates also fails to offer much in the way of recommendations for how policy needs to change to reflect his new views.

I’ve written before about the limitations of Bill Gates’s faith in technology and his optimism that tech will provide the climate solutions we need. Unsurprisingly, much of this new memo details the progress the companies Gates has invested in are making reducing emissions in the most important energy-consuming sectors: electricity generation, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture and buildings. One has to give enormous credit to the man for the size and breadth of financial commitments he has made. Gates has put his money where his mouth is in every key area of energy.

But the evident potential of those technologies begs the question: what’s the best way to turn them into reality?

“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,” Gates says. Where should the money come from? What kinds of investments should be reallocated to fund these technologies? What kinds of policies should be put in place to enable them? Gates is silent on those questions.

In the same way that climate activists’ vague calls of “something must be done!” are inadequate, it’s not enough, as Gates does in his memo, to throw those questions back to investors and policymakers in general.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Gates memo – at least from a communications perspective – is that much of the good sense contained within it will inevitably be lost in the way that it’s being covered in the media. Portraying the piece as the recantation of a “doomsday view” was bound to lead to one-sided coverage with such headlines as “Bill Gates soft pedals on climate,” “Bill Gates makes a stunning claim about climate change” (thanks, CNN) and, depressingly if predictably, “Trump is already using Bill Gates’ climate memo to claim victory.”

As a communications professional, I’ve spent a career advising (and often imploring) clients to create a sense of drama in their content. I’m guilty in my own writing of setting up tenuous distinctions to draw readers in. But for a public figure such as Gates – like Blair before him – in today’s attention-challenged environment, a more measured slant may have been more helpful. Fewer eyeballs, yes. But much more constructive.