The Social World

Tag: Bill Gates

  • Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

    Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

    To his fellow high priests of the church of climate change, Bill Gates has just committed the ultimate heresy. He has told us that we are not all going to die from scorching temperatures, despite in the past having said “we are setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster.” In a new essay posted on his personal website, he has attacked the “doomsday view” that “in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” He writes: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”

    His rejection of catastrophism is no small matter. Next week, the world’s great and good will board their private jets and head off to the Brazilian city of Belém for COP30, an annual shindig that is very much based on the premise that the world is coming to an end unless we take drastic action. According to UN Secretary General António Guterres last month, climate change has pushed humanity “to the brink” – a variation on last year, when he told us we were at “breaking point.” Spewing out the superlatives has been an annual ritual since even before Al Gore told us in 2006 that we had ten years left to save the planet. The only variation is exactly how long we have left before we seal our fate, ranging from eight years (then-Prince Charles in 2009), to five years (the WWF in 2007 and again in 2024), three years (former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres in 2017) or two years (current UN climate chief Simon Stiell in 2024.) 

    As every doomsayer has discovered throughout history, it is one thing to gain attention with your grim prophecies before the hour at which you say they will happen, but it becomes a little harder once those dates have passed and we are all still living and breathing. Gates, for one, has realized that the hyperbole is starting to lose its effect. Anyone who wants to retain public attention on the issue will have to acknowledge that actually, no, we are not all going to die from climate change. Most won’t even notice.

    What the doom-mongers ever thought they would achieve was always puzzling. Telling people that they are all going to die is hardly the greatest way of motivating them. Set impossible deadlines for human societies to eliminate their greenhouse-gas emissions and you encourage them into apathy more than anything. You plant the idea in people’s heads: why not enjoy our last few years and go out in style? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry!

    Of course, many young people indoctrinated into the doomsday cult by their teachers and professors had just the opposite response. More than half of all zoomers and millennials report that so-called eco-anxiety distresses their mental health; 52 percent of them say the looming threat of climate change makes them less likely to have children. Maybe this is why Generation Z is so antisocial – no time to party when you’ve gotta save the planet! Will Gates and his jet-set peers apologize for creating a generation of childless neurotics? Probably not. Better just to bury your reversal in a bland memo.

    Note the timing of Gates’s newfound wisdom. Since President Donald Trump was re-elected, it’s become politically and financially inconvenient to be so green and gloomy. “Drill, baby, drill,” commands the President, and poof goes corporate America’s insistence that we all must buy overpriced, dumb-looking electric vehicles.

    President Trump has said his favorite architectural style is that of Louis XIV – think gold, grand, a bit gaudy. Hence his gilded plans for the White House’s new ballroom. Like that French monarch, nicknamed the Sun King, Trump has the nation’s oligarchs revolving around him. None dare stray too far from his light, as the President has no qualms about picking winners and losers among the titans of industry. Musk, Zuck, Altman and Bezos figured this out quickly, and soon after the election began making journeys to Trump’s palace of Mar-a-Lago to pay tribute.

    Gates is a late entry to this popularity contest, and we’re not likely to see him riding shotgun in a golf cart with the President around the links. But his defection from the progressive orthodoxy bodes well: other billionaires will surely follow, and the ruling class may finally begin to respond to Americans’ needs rather than what that class thinks those needs should be.

    But it’s not just Trump who should be thanked for the billionaire red shift: New York’s incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani deserves some share of the gratitude as well. No city has more billionaires or millionaires than New York. As Heather Mac Donald explains in our cover story, that economic boon may not survive Mamdani’s reign. Mayor Mamdani is committed to making the rich “pay their fair share,” whatever that means, and to fighting the 1 percent. There’s a word for this: extortion. Fortunately for the city’s many business leaders, plenty of low-tax, red-state promised lands across the country will welcome their exodus.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • King Charles and Pope Leo share the same religion

    King Charles and Pope Leo share the same religion

    The historic meeting October 23 between Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III – the first between a pope and an English monarch since before the Reformation – goes beyond the obvious religious significance. It suggests future cooperation in promoting an entirely different religion, one favored by most of the world’s elites.

    That religion preaches environmental sustainability through draconian measures that demand humanity’s submission at the expense of common sense and science. Not for nothing did Leo and Charles meet less than three weeks before the start of COP30, the United Nations’ annual conference on climate change.

    Throughout his public life, Charles positioned himself as Defender of the Environment. His portfolio supports replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, farming without nitrogen-based fertilizers and instituting carbon taxes and carbon credits. His Majesty even advocates radically changing international economics to achieve environmentalist goals.

    “We must recognize that our economic system is at the heart of the problem precisely because it is at odds and not in harmony with nature’s own economy,” Charles said in 2022. “This situation is indeed dire and the consequences of inaction and business as usual are unimaginable. However, this same economic system of ours, if retargeted, is key to the solution.”

    Charles’ rhetoric and actions match what Pope Leo’s predecessor produced. Pope Francis made environmental activism his papacy’s hallmark when he wrote in 2015 the encyclical Laudato Si, in which he demanded radical, immediate change to avert an environmental collapse that would devastate social and political systems and wreak havoc on the poor.

    “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster,” Francis wrote. “Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress. A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress.”

    Francis solidified his agenda in 2021. On May 14, the Vatican held a one-day conference on environmental and economic issues. John Kerry delivered a keynote address for a panel on “Integral Ecological Sustainability” regarding energy and food.

    Eleven days later, Francis announced the Laudato Si Platform, a seven-year campaign to implement the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Francis described it as belonging to a thrust toward what he called “green economics,” “green education” and “green spirituality.”

    Francis and Charles thus forged a close relationship. In 2017, Francis hosted Charles and his wife Camilla for a papal audience In April, the king and queen made an informal visit to Francis 12 days before his death.

    Most importantly, both backed the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, part of its Agenda 2030. Charles lent his voice to a video introducing the WEF’s program in 2020.

    “We need nothing short of a paradigm shift, one that inspires action at revolutionary levels and pace,” Charles said. “We simply cannot waste anymore time, and the time to act is now.”

    Four months after issuing Laudato Si, Francis addressed the UN. He called Agenda 2030 “an important sign of hope” because “a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged.”

    Tellingly, the Vatican entitled its 2021 conference on environmental and economic issues, “Dreaming of a Better Reset.”

    Leo intends to continue Francis’ activism. The new pope indicated that commitment clearly as the Vatican commemorated Laudato Si’s 10th anniversary October 1.

    “We inhabit the same planet, and we must care for it together,” Leo said. “I therefore renew my strong appeal for unity around integral ecology and for peace! We must shift from collecting data to caring; and from environmental discourse to an ecological conversion that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles.”

    But the European Union’s focus on solar and wind power makes it dependent on energy sources that are more expensive, less reliable and counterproductive to economic growth. Italy, Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark pay the highest electric bills yet the EU wants to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2040.

    Meanwhile, such developing nations as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia invest heavily in fossil fuels despite emissions.

    “This climate crusade is a masterclass in self-sabotage, chaining its economy to ruinous policies while preaching moral superiority,” said environmental analyst Bjorn Lomborg. “It is economic suicide dressed in eco-virtue.”

    Even Bill Gates believes the panic ranges beyond overstatement.

    “Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

    Given such problems as clerical sex abuse and the breakdown of societal order due to unchecked Muslim immigration, St. Peter’s and Buckingham Palace, respectively, abandon their responsibilities and identities for the sake of intellectual fashion.