Michael Mann To Bill Gates: What World Are You Living In?

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Bill Gates pictures himself as a technology and system innovator. In October, the billionaire philanthropist recontextualized climate action, global health, and development as mutually exclusive and in competition with each other in advance of the international climate summit, COP30. With his status as one of the original Silicon Valley tech bros, Gates wrote a memo that minimized the inevitable consequences of climate change, saying, “It will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” Climate scientist Michael Mann disagrees heartily.

“What world is Gates living in?” Mann asks. “The idea that climate action must come at the expense of efforts to address human health is a provable fallacy.”

A Pre-COP30 Memo with Ripple Effects

Perhaps you recognize the name Michael Mann but can’t retrieve why? Envision the iconic “hockey stick” image that demonstrated the unprecedented nature of contemporary, human-caused warming from the burning of fossil fuels. Mann is the one who created the analogy so everyday people like me and you would have a better grasp of the climate crisis.

But Bill Gates doesn’t want to accept the devastating nuances of a warming world. Instead, he boasts about small and rather tenuous technological fixes. Mann argues that Gates’ 17-page memo dismisses the seriousness of the climate crisis.

Here’s the thing, Bill Gates. There is no ‘patch’ for the climate crisis. And there is no way to reboot the planet if you crash it. The only safe and reliable way out when you find yourself in a climate hole is to stop digging—and burning—fossil fuels.

Gates speaks from a position of “arrogance,” according to Mann, in which the Microsoft founder actually seems to think “something as conceptually basic as decomposing carbon emissions into a product of constituent terms had never been attempted before.”

As Gates downplays the role of clean energy and rapid decarbonization, Mann advises us that, “for those who have been following Gates on climate for some time, his so-called sudden ‘pivot’ isn’t really a ‘pivot’ at all. It’s a logical consequence of the misguided path he’s been headed down for well over a decade.” What Gates paints over is his investments in fossil fuel-based infrastructure (ie. natural gas with carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery) through his venture capital group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. He has financed what he positions as profitable geoengineering interventions like spraying massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and cool the planet.

Gates chooses to target sectors that face numerous decarbonizing challenges, like steel or air travel, instead of acknowledging the energy infrastructure that can readily be decarbonized now. He favors hypothetical new energy tech, including modular nuclear reactors that Mann says “couldn’t possibly be scaled up over the time frame in which the world must transition off fossil fuels.”

Gates’ “latest missive,” Michael Mann states, “plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo.”

Duh, Poverty and Disease are a Subset of Climate Change

In his memo, Gates asserts that climate activists should slow down their focus on near-term emissions goals — what he refers to as a “doomsday outlook” — and, instead, work toward improving life in a warming world. He insists that “efforts to fight climate change detract from efforts to address human health threats.”

Michael Mann’s new book, Science Under Siege, co-authored with public health scientist Peter Hotez, explains that climate and human health are inseparable, with climate change fueling the spread of deadly disease. Mann refutes Gates’ assertion that “the poor and downtrodden have more pressing concerns.” Instead, data consistently shows the opposite: it is the impoverished and powerless who possess the fewest means to fight climate change “because they have the least wealth and resilience,” says Mann.

Yes, poverty and disease need to be addressed systemically as basic human rights, but Mann argues that addressing global warming and global health is not a zero-sum game. Instead, climate change intensifies pandemics and vector-borne diseases, such as malaria. “Every fraction of a degree of warming we prevent means tremendous amounts of avoided damage,” Mann clarifies.

But the “’tech bro’-centered thinking so prevalent today in public environmental discourse” masks the importance of clean energy. Gates is complicit, embracing a “consistent pattern of downplaying clean energy while promoting dubious and potentially dangerous technofixes in which he is often personally invested.”

Such technofixes for the climate, Mann continues, “lead us down a dangerous road, both because they displace far safer and more reliable options—namely the clean energy transition—and because they provide an excuse for business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels.”

Why decarbonize, he parodies, if we can just solve the problem with a “patch” later? “What could possibly go wrong?” Mann laughs. “And hey, if we screw up this planet, we’ll just geoengineer Mars. Right Elon?”

Gates has insisted a “premium” must be paid for a clean energy buildout. In actuality, clean energy “has a lower levelized cost than fossil fuels or nuclear and deflected the questions with ad hominem swipes,” Mann reminds us.

The Peril of Focusing on Fossil Fuels

Mann acknowledges that “we’re certainly facing adversity when it comes to a clean energy transition in the US right now, what with the current administration and congressional Republicans working together to advance what’s essentially a fossil-fuel agenda.” However, Gates fails to identify the real “miracle within our grasp.

It’s called the sun, and wind, and geothermal, and energy storage technology. Real world solutions exist now and are easily scalable with the right investments and priorities. The obstacles aren’t technological. They’re political.

Gates seems to be feeding into a misconception that Biden administration Inflation Reduction Act benefits to red states would influence politicians to embrace every more clean energy initiatives. “We’re learning that it’s far more important to (politicians) to do the bidding of the powerful vested interests that have taken over,” Mann describes, “in particular the fossil fuel industry, which has a stranglehold over today’s Republican Party.”

Has Gates succumbed to a reality that rising global temperatures are inevitable? Big Media seems to be following his lead. “The legacy media is apparently more interested in the climate musings of an erstwhile PC mogul,” Mann muses, “than a sober assessment by the world’s leading climate scientists.”

Instead, Michael Mann calls out Gates and argues that there is only one way to solve the climate crisis. “Science is not just under siege — it’s being weaponized,” he delineates, pointing to coordinated campaigns that distort facts and sow doubt for political and financial gain.

Maybe—just maybe—we’ve learned an important lesson here: The solution to the climate crisis isn’t going to come from the fairy-dust-sprinkled flying unicorns that are the ‘benevolent plutocrats.’ They don’t exist. The solution is going to have to come from everyone else, using every tool at our disposal to push back against an ecocidal agenda driven by plutocrats, polluters, petrostates, propagandists, and too often now, the press.

Mann, instead, offers a strategic roadmap for reclaiming scientific integrity, emphasizing the power of education, transparency, and civic engagement. He has made fundamental contributions to climate science like the coming and going of ice ages; the role of both natural and human drivers on observed climate variability and change,;the impact that climate change on extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods; and the rising coastal threat from melting ice, increasing sea level, and greater storms surges.

Gates has complimented Mann, acknowledging he “does very good work on climate change.” He also accuses Mann of being “anti-innovation.” Nonetheless, Mann is engaged in extensive efforts to engage the public on the defining issue and challenge of climate change, seeking to inform scientists, policy makers, civic and environmental organizations and the general public with basic knowledge and understanding of Earth’s climate.

I consider myself privileged to have found myself in a position to impact the conversation about what is arguably the greatest challenge we face as a civilization.

Resources

• “About Michael E. Mann: Climate scientist.” The Explorers Club. 2025.
• “Bill Gates’s climate comments are a dangerous distraction.” Michael E. Mann. Nature. November 2025.
• “Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. October 31, 2025.
• Science Under siege: How to fight the five most powerful forces that threaten our world. Michael E. Mann, Peter J. Hotez. 2025.
• “Three tough truths about climate.” Bill Gates. Gates Notes. October 28, 2025.