https://www.thenation.com/arti…/bill-gates-climate-book/
During the pandemic, Bill Gates’s personal fortune has increased by an impressive $20 billion, but even these gains pale in comparison to his soaring political influence—as the news media has widely trumpeted his leadership on Covid-19, praising his charitable donations or extolling him as a “visionary” who predicted the outbreak.
It’s a highly questionable narrative, one that ignores widespread controversy over the way Gates made his fortune and how he chooses to spend it, but which nonetheless has delivered a windfall of political capital for our philanthropist in chief—which he is now spending down.
“I expect to spend much of my time in 2021 talking with leaders around the world about both climate change and Covid-19,” Gates notes in his new book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster, which seems destined to be a best seller.
Even before the release of his book this week, Gates’s move into climate change has made waves—an interview on 60 Minutes, op-eds in Time magazine and The Guardian, and a podcast with actor Rashida Jones. Given Gates’s track record of success inserting himself into other policy debates—everything from US education to global health—it seems likely he will continue to take up oxygen in the climate discourse going forward.
ARE BILL GATES’S BILLIONS DISTORTING PUBLIC HEALTH DATA?
WHILE THE POOR GET SICK, BILL GATES JUST GETS RICHER
BILL GATES GIVES TO THE RICH (INCLUDING HIMSELF)
If so, he proceeds from a precarious position, not just because of his thin credentials, untested solutions, and stunning financial conflicts of interest, but because his undemocratic assertion of power—no one appointed or elected him as the world’s new climate czar—comes at precisely the time when democratic institutions have become essential to solving climate change.
In his book, Gates several times praises the young people and activists who have energized climate politics—even drawing parallels to successful protests against the Vietnam War and divestment campaigns against South African apartheid. Yet Gates doesn’t seriously engage with these political movements, and seems oblivious to ways that they’ve pushed the mainstream conversation on climate change beyond the technical question of how to reduce carbon emissions—Gates’s narrow focus—to interrogate the political systems and economic models that, for example, channel climate change’s greatest impacts toward the poor and people of color.
Anthony Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice for the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, notes that even Joe Biden—a “centrist, neoliberal president”—understands that issues like equity and justice are central to climate change, as is evident in a recent executive order that mentions the term “environmental justice” 27 times. In Gates’s 250-page book, the term is completely absent.
“These billionaires, the best they could do, some would say, would be to be stop their foundations and pay their fair share of taxes,” says Rogers-Wright, noting how new tax revenues could help fund democratically devised solutions. “If Gates really wants to be effective and in a way that lifts up equity…[he should be] really listening to people who are being impacted the most and scaling up their solutions, rather than coming in with a parachute and with an air of white savior-ism that actually in some cases causes more harm than good.”
Christine Nobiss, founder of the Indigenous-led Great Plains Action Society, points to recent reports that Bill Gates has become the largest farmland owner in the United States, holding 242,000 acres—a larger area of land than Bahrain or Singapore or Barbados can claim. Nobiss says this speaks to the Manifest Destiny mentality that has to be challenged in the political fight around climate change.
“Bill Gates is smart enough to understand—he’s smart, he can do the math—that no one single person needs that amount of land,” notes Nobiss. “He’s basically participating in the never-ending cycle of colonization.”
And Gates’s landholdings, Nobiss notes, are intrinsically linked to climate change because agriculture is a leading source of carbon emissions. Nobiss and Rogers-Wright both proposed that Gates give away his farmland—as an act of reparations and to ensure that the acres are put into sustainable food production.
