by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Daily Caller
Bill Gates’ renunciation this week of his past climate doomsaying has drawn a lot of attention and a wide range of responses. President Trump posted on social media: “I (WE) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax.” A prominent climate doomsayer reacted by saying: “Bill Gates doesn’t have any expertise in climate science.”
Gates wrote that he still believes that “climate change” is a “very important problem” and it will have “serious consequences.” It’s just that he now believes those consequences won’t be catastrophic and people will be able to thrive in most places. The focus on emissions and temperature change should shift to “improving lives,” he wrote. But he nevertheless added that: “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.”
Gates also stated: “I know that some climate advocates will disagree with me, call me a hypocrite because of my own carbon footprint (which I fully offset with legitimate carbon credits), or see this as a sneaky way of arguing that we shouldn’t take climate change seriously.”
While Gates is certainly a climate hypocrite (even with whatever dubious climate credits he purchased), that’s not really his problem.
