Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes on climate change: If Trump’s denialism is dangerous, Bill Gates’s complacency is more so

Given the fatigue surrounding collective action on climate, these sentiments are unsurprising. Gates is not wrong that alarmism can be paralysing. But the alarmism that did exist was not the cause of inaction; it was a response to the complacency that Gates is now reenacting. There has always been some gaming of climate discourse, but this new downplaying of risk — the retreat into techno-solutionism — is attractive for psychological, not scientific, reasons. It offers a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.

Technological progress, especially in China, has indeed been remarkable. But this new soft-pedalling on climate is dangerous. Gates’s argument fails to reckon with the already serious effects of climate change, or with the high risks that even a three-degree world would pose. Saying climate change will not lead to humanity’s demise is a nonsensical response to Weitzman’s central concern. The prudential reason climate change matters is that it makes every other challenge — health, poverty, insurance, inequality — harder to solve.

Innovation is essential, but history shows it is never sufficient. Consider the very causes Gates champions: Poverty and health. The technological prerequisites for abundance and welfare have existed for a century. Yet the institutional, social, and ideological barriers that prevent technology from serving the poor remain stubborn. Technology is never free-standing; it is always embedded in political and financial structures that determine who benefits. The attack on climate preoccupation, for the most part, shields those structures — from the nation-state to global finance — from scrutiny.

This is precisely the conversation Gates’s intervention threatens to shut down. He claims that attention to climate change diverts resources from combating disease and poverty. The idea that there is a trade-off between preventing malaria and preventing climate change is, to put it mildly, bizarre. Gates writes, “if we stopped all funding for vaccines and saved 0.1 degrees, would that be a smart trade-off?” Good public policy, he says, must focus on smart trade-offs. But this is surely one of the most absurdly posed trade-offs imaginable. For one thing, we do not know what disease profiles we will face with more warming. (A better question might be: If we increased taxes on the rich by three per cent to fund all malaria research, would that be worth it?) The framing of the trade-off is itself ideological myth-making, deflecting blame from the real causes of poverty and ill-health. Our global systems of finance, taxation, and public investment are not designed to address these problems. Climate policy is not what holds them back.

Countries like India are deeply torn on climate and the environment. Our rhetoric is pitch-perfect, but our practice is marked by what might be called growth fatalism — the belief that growth will take care of everything. This, too, is the meta-premise behind Gates’s memo. It echoes the Western experience, where there appeared to be a U-shaped relationship between environment and growth. China followed a similar trajectory — first exploiting the carbon economy to its fullest, and now attempting the most dramatic energy and technology turnaround in history.

India, as a latecomer, hopes to leapfrog into clean technologies. But time may work against us. Gates is not wrong that humanity will persist, and parts of it may even flourish. Yet at 3 °C of warming, organising economic and social life may become far more difficult than technology can compensate for. Imagine societies where monsoon patterns are radically altered, extreme weather more frequent, forests burning, floods intensifying, and glaciers disappearing. This vision of human flourishing is wilfully blind to the profound, irreversible transformations already underway.

Some of these are ordinary governance failures, not specific to climate change. But the underlying fatalism — that growth and technology will solve everything — will only be reinforced.

More troubling is the way elite opinion now pivots with political shifts. These convenient reversals are debilitating for truth and democracy alike. Establishments everywhere — from corporations to universities, the World Bank to bureaucracies — are using the fear or cover of Trumpism as an excuse to slow-walk climate commitments. There is nothing wrong with revising one’s views when new evidence emerges. But when truth-seeking institutions pivot opportunistically, the damage to public reason is incalculable. Gates may not realise it, but this retreat will also affect his cherished field of global health, where the same dialectic of alarmism and complacency, of “hoax science” and “true science”, is beginning to play out in American politics. What matters here is not only the truth or falsity of claims, but the opportunism of those who rally behind them.

There is also a striking lack of reflexivity. Even the technological innovations Gates celebrates occurred because climate change was treated as an urgent problem. He is right that emissions projections are going down — but that is partly because temperature rise was once regarded as a very serious threat. Moving from “we need a Green New Deal” to “climate is no big deal” will have major consequences for investment and innovation.

Where does this leave the world? The United States is officially in denial — a denial that will seep downward and outward to elites across the globe. China is betting on massive techno-solutionism, but it still does not add up for the planet. Countries like India and Brazil are caught in performative environmentalism: Pitch-perfect plans, but an inability to save their own environments. In this context, if denialism was dangerous, complacency may prove even more so — especially because it now wears the garb of reasonable trade-offs.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express