Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder who has served as a prominent advocate for prevailing narratives that fuel the climate alarm movement, set the climate debate on fire this week with a long essay signaling a major shift in direction.
Rather than continuing efforts to use atmospheric content of carbon dioxide as a global thermostat, Gates now advocates a refocusing on efforts to mitigate for the impacts of climate change and dedicate more funding to “the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
Gates’s belated endorsement of an alternative approach long advocated by many critics of climate alarmism is laudable. But one must wonder what took him so long.
One argument Gates puts forth to justify his shift in narrative is, as he puts it, “surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier, killing nearly 10 times more.” But that only comes as a surprise to those who haven’t been paying attention to data that has long been in the public domain. Australian analyst Bjorn Lomborg, himself a believer in man-cause warming theory, has regularly made the same point for years now.
Gates also veers away from climate alarmist dogma with the recognition that “using more energy is a good thing,” because it means economic growth, slamming efforts by alarmists to deny companies the ability to produce more fossil fuels. Noting that such “keep-it-in-the-ground pressure” “has had almost no impact on global emissions,” Gates writes, “but it has made it harder for low-income countries to get low-interest loans for power plants that would bring reliable electricity to their homes, schools, and health clinics.”
More than any other aspect of Mr. Gates’s change in narrative, this statement reveals a divergence from the central goal of the climate alarm global religion. It has long been obvious that the goal has been to intentionally and massively raise the cost of all forms of energy to force the world’s masses to consume less of it, not more.
Some of the most prominent climate alarm advocates, like Bill McKibben, have long railed against affordable energy and continuing economic growth as inherent evils that must be ended to save the planet. So, this is a real bit of heresy by Gates, and it will be interesting to observe how this part of his message is received at the upcoming COP 30 climate conference and the annual World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland next January.
Gates also diverges from a prevailing alarmist talking point when he writes, “Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat,” he writes. “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.” Again, true, but we must wonder why Gates remained silent about this reality when Joe Biden spent four years repeatedly claiming that climate change was our most existential threat?
In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright noted Gates’s change of narrative, saying he has had “multiple great dialogs with Bill Gates over the last year multiple times and at some length,” adding that Gates has “done fabulous stuff in public health around the world, and I’m thrilled to see him talk in a more candid way about this issue.”
Wright added his own view that, “climate change is a real thing. It’s a real challenge. It is just not remotely close to the world’s top challenge.”
Former World Bank Group President David Malpass told me in an interview he also views Gates’s shift favorably. “I was very happy to see (Bill Gates’ new view), of course,” Malpass said. “Wouldn’t itbe good if we saw Antonio Gutierrez, the head of the United Nations, John Kerry or Al Gore understand the logic that Bill Gates is laying out? Whatever people think about the warming of the planet, what was so harmful in the climate fanaticism was they didn’t care at all about the cost or about the opportunity cost.”
It’s hard to know what motivated Mr. Gates’s sudden narrative shift on this crucial topic. Regardless, his reconsideration can only help efforts to adopt a more serious, reality-based approach to addressing the problem.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
A professor hailing from China with a World Economic Forum (WEF) background is behind critical race and gender theory research on children at two of Arizona’s taxpayer-funded universities.
Sonya Xinyue Xiao teaches psychological science and performs developmental research on moral and gender development at Northern Arizona University (NAU). Xiao was a postdoctoral scholar at the Arizona State University (ASU) T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (SSFD) from 2020 to 2022, where she taught until last year. NAU has Xiao on a tenure track.
Presently, Xiao is also an affiliated research fellow for the Cultural Resilience and Learning Center (CRLC) in California and a member of the Diversity Scholars Network in the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan (UM). Xiao’s UM profile declares her social priority on children, youth, and families, with her specific focus pertaining to that priority on gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, social class, and socioeconomic status.
“[Xiao] is investigating how early adolescents’ multiple intersecting identities in gender and race/ethnicity are related to their prosocial behavior toward diverse others over time, with youth from diverse ethnic racial backgrounds,” stated her UM profile.
Additionally, Xiao has served as the programming committee member for the Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIE) Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) since 2021. The SRCD has repeatedly opposed efforts to restrict or ban gender transitions for minors.
Xiao’s published research papers have declared the need for parents to raise their children to embrace gender theory in themselves and their peers, under the claim that rejection results in poor social and emotional outcomes later in life, as well as to engage their children in diverse friendships, under the claim that those as young as preschoolers can be racist.
Characteristics aligning with progressive critical race and gender theories are what Xiao defines as “prosocial behaviors” throughout her research.
Finally, the last paper I started in grad school class on #gender is out in time for #PrideMonth! I was auditing carol's gender class, and that was the semester when covid hit….The paper has been in submission for 14months! Nonpaywalled version here: https://t.co/VEHUH7WEtN
— Sonya Xinyue Xiao, Ph.D. (@SonyaXinyueXiao) May 30, 2023
Last year, Xiao contributed to a chapter entry in a book, “Gender and Sexuality Development.” The chapter expanded the understanding of gender to many gender identities.
Check out this new meta-analysis on understanding predictors of prejudice toward trans individuals 👏 The authors tested 15 predictors, all but one are important (e.g.,political orientation, social dominance orientation, religiosity, gender essentialism) https://t.co/Q16biGeq2m
Xiao’s work includes “gender integration,” which studies the differences between genders with the ultimate goal of total integration. Xiao’s team with the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (SSSFD) holds the belief that gender is fluid and not binary; they receive federal funding through the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
Xiao’s research has also relied on participants’ self-reported gender identities. Elsewhere, her current research team’s most recent release of preliminary findings asked children “how much they think they look like girls and how much they think they look like boys,” and reported that 10 percent thought they looked like both genders, and nearly one percent believing they didn’t look like either gender.
we are doing school-based research in AZ now and ask an open-ended question "what's your gender?” and the reader/experimenter says "for example, I am a girl."
In May, Xiao’s work on gender integration was featured in an IES blog series focusing on “research conducted through an equity lens.” SSSFD professor Carol Martin said that their work aims to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. Martin further insisted that teachers need to break up naturally-occuring gender segregation in their students to encourage diversity.
“We study the importance of having diverse classrooms (mixed-gender in our case) and breaking down barriers that separate people from each other but stress that this diversity matters only when it is perceived as inclusive and fosters a sense of belonging,” said Martin. “For some students, additional supports might be needed to feel included, and we hope to identify which students may need these additional supports and what types of support they need to promote equity in classrooms around issues of social belongingness.”
— Sonya Xinyue Xiao, Ph.D. (@SonyaXinyueXiao) May 6, 2023
According to her LinkedIn, Xiao attended Tianjin University of Science and Technology before beginning her career as a teacher at Zhenguang Primary School in Shanghai, China. While at Tianjin, Xiao had two notable back-to-back volunteering stints in 2010: first, a two-month gig at the Shanghai World EXPO 2010, then a month-long gig at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Summer Davos. For the latter gig with the WEF, Xiao reported providing document and verbal translation at the Lishunde Hotel, as well as assistance to conference attendees.
China’s practice of its cultural subversion tactics on U.S. soil, especially involving children, have been widely reported over the years, most recently concerning TikTok. While the Beijing-based company behind the app pushes content ranging from the mind-numbing to dangerous to foreigners, it restricts Chinese youth to a domestic version, Douyin, which contains only educational and inspirational content. In its short existence, TikTok has become a major influence in American children’s development.
Papers published while at ASU or NAU where Xiao was the principal author are listed below:
Xiao has also contributed in over a dozen other research papers uplifting critical race and gender theories, as well as promoting “nurturant parenting,” described as inductive discipline and punishment avoidance, versus the disciplinary model of “restrictive parenting,” described as punitiveness, corporal punishment, and strictness. That paper on nurturant versus restrictive parenting further advised that white parents should avoid restrictive parenting to ensure their children behaved better toward non-white peers.
Other papers to which Xiao contributed argued that white parents who claimed to be color-blind or were displaying evidence of “implicit racial bias” caused their children to have less empathy toward Black children.
During her May 15 speech to The Beyond Growth Conference held by the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, citing a 1970s de-growth plan published by the Club of Rome, made reference to the European Union’s “social market economy” five times in a span of less than 150 words.
A “social market economy,” of course, is a reference to the sort of central economic planning engaged in by authoritarian socialist governments throughout history. “And this is exactly why we put forward our European Green Deal,” Von Der Leyen told the conference. “Building a 21st century clean-energy circular economy is one of the most significant economic challenges of our times.”
The agenda of the Beyond Growth Conference focused on devising plans to manage the destruction of economic growth that is a centerpiece of the real agenda of the energy transition. Limitations on energy minerals and other resources required by wind, solar and electric vehicles, and on the ability to continue printing trillions of debt-funded dollars and Euros in a vain attempt to subsidize them to the scale required to displace fossil fuels inevitably means the forcing of common citizens in the Western world to scale down their standards of living and limit their mobility to meet the net-zero by 2050 goals being dictated at the global level. Thus, the need for the EU to move “beyond growth” and back to a more primitive mode of living.
Rising recognition and acceptance of these limitations, along with the success by Western governments in enforcing authoritarian edicts on their populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now leading to a rapid evolution in the overarching narrative and talking points related to the energy transition. The former energy transition narrative of “we will scale up renewables and EVs and you won’t even notice the difference in your daily lives” has been transformed to “we will scale everything down and you will just have to live with it” with stunning speed during 2023.
A report titled “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility” issued by the World Economic Forum in May is another great example. Based largely upon a 2017 UC Davis report titled “3 Revolutions in Urban Transportation,” the WEF report advocates for authoritarian governments to force the reduction of the numbers of vehicles on the road from the current global estimate of 1.45 billion to just 500 million. The UC Davis report went largely unnoticed in 2017 because the climate alarmist lobby had not been sufficiently emboldened at that time to publicly discuss its real goals. But that mask is now coming off.
The authors of the WEF report claim citizens who can no longer own cars would still be allowed to move away from their planned cities of the future, but only via “shared transport,” i.e. electric buses and a new network of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. But California has clearly shown that thoughts of building a huge network of tens of thousands of miles of new high-speed rail in the western world in the next 27 years is a complete fantasy. California’s own high-speed rail boondoggle, originally proposed 27 years ago in 1996, has seen its budget blossom from $8 billion to over $130 billion, and still hasn’t managed to lay a single mile of rail.
The real world simply does not conform itself to fantasies like this plan, and everyone at the WEF is fully aware of that reality. Thus, what this plan really amounts to is a scheme to enable the speeding-up of implementation of socialist/authoritarian governments in the West to enforce the new restrictions on the lives of common citizens, an effort that began to accelerate during the COVID pandemic. Authoritarian governments always endeavor to restrict the free flow of information outside of approved propaganda, and restricting mobility is a key means of achieving that goal.
As we see the EU and the WEF now freely admitting, economic de-growth and forcing citizens of Western nations to live smaller, less prosperous lives are the real end goals of this energy transition. The narrative has officially shifted, and we would do well to take them at their word.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Americans are becoming neurotic worriers. COVID brought out the worst in us, as politicized medical leaders rushed us into a panic response that did far more harm than the disease itself without fundamentally affecting the net outcome of the pandemic.
But COVID is hardly the only example of Americans overestimating the dangers in their lives. We fret about everything from “Christian nationalism” arising due to court decisions protecting religious freedoms to alien-bearing UFOs.
Many Americans fear police officers kill unarmed Blacks by the thousands when the real number is about 10 to 20 annually. College students expect “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to provide protection from exposure to opposing opinions and the supposed physical harm they are thought to cause.
Part of the problem of imagining all these boogeymen is that real threats can get lost in the shuffle. Impending financial doom, a rapidly changing world order, and millions of unassimilated aliens crossing our borders could all use better focused attention.
There is no better example of the trivial deflecting us from the critical than climate change. Sixty percent of the developed world truly believes that it will spell the end of humanity.
The World Health Organization declared climate change the most important public health issue of the 21st-century. The savants of the World Economic Forum named climate action failure as the greatest policy risk of the next decade.
Third World countries, unfortunately for them, find most of their foreign aid these days linked with resources to address climate change, rather than more pressing needs like economic development, malnutrition, clean water, education, or healthcare.
The fact that some degree of warming is real and related to human activity hardly justifies the catastrophe narrative. Facts derived from official sources tell a different story, for example, that 98 percent fewer people are dying from climate related disasters than a century ago.
Those who express doubt about any aspect of the catastrophe narrative are dubbed “climate deniers” by the mainstream and depicted as science-adverse Neanderthals. Joe Biden claimed he could change their minds just by showing them the climate-related fires he had personally witnessed.
About those fires, Joe. The undisputed fact is that 4.2% of the land in the world burned yearly in the early 1900s. Today it has fallen to 3% due to less heating from open fires, better forest management, and more resources available for fire suppression. Tilting at climate change will produce far less harm reduction from fires than will common sense, risk management, and prevention.
Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist, gives other reasons to doubt that climate change deserves its reputation as an existential threat. Hurricanes, despite claims to the contrary, are not increasing. In reality, the number of hurricanes in 2022 was unusually low, the second weakest batch of hurricanes since satellite data became available in 1980.
Landfall hurricanes, the most accurate way of charting hurricane frequency, appear to have declined slightly since 1900. Hurricanes each year cost 0.04 percent of global GDP. Projections from the scientific journal Nature, taking into account changes in climate as well as improved ability to protect ourselves from hurricane harm, indicate that by 2100 the damage will be 0.02% even without new climate policies.
The WHO claims that 95,000 worldwide deaths annually from malnutrition will be attributable to unchecked climate change between 2030–2050. That sounds like a lot, but the global total of deaths from malnutrition is 30 million or so annually, a number that is sure to come down as crop yields increase and economic development improves.
Even polar bears, the subject of one of Al Gore’s apocalyptic predictions, are doing okay. Polar bear specialists estimate that, due to hunting limits, the worldwide population is 21,000 to 31,000, up from 12,000 in the 1960s.
Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus estimates that if we stand pat, climate change will cost 4% of GDP by 2100. But the UN predicts that global GDP will rise by 450% in that time, dwarfing the climate induced harm.
Big-government tyrants love crises because of the power and prestige they bring. Instead of impoverishing ourselves with impractical boondoggles, we need to bear down on economic growth and innovation to pull us through. That’s what Americans do best.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
