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.