Bill Gates raised hackles recently by flip-flopping on his earlier position that climate change was an imminent and existential crisis. Gates now believes climate change will not cause human extinction and that funding should go into health and other areas.
Gates has also invested in geoengineering experiments to cool the climate by spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere. The so-called Solar Radiation Management, or SRM, involves imitating the cooling caused by volcanic eruptions that spray aerosols into the atmosphere. But volcanic eruptions also cause droughts and crop losses—SRM is therefore controversial and will need legally binding guardrails to protect against unintended consequences.
In any case, what gives Bill Gates the standing to make news about climate advocacy? Is it simply because he is rich? Or because he wrote a book titled, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster? Or is it because his foundation has funded many global health programmes? Incidentally, controversies dog the funding of these programmes and potential conflicts of interest, where his investments stand to benefit from the influence his funding gets him with organisations such as the WHO.
Saviour complex
Climate change is an ideal bounty for people with a saviour complex. Gates is hardly the only one causing ripples about climate change and the actions needed, while also investing in personal benefits and controversial solutions. Grassroots climate activists can also grow into name brands and start commenting on all issues from farmers’ strikes to global conflicts without any deep expertise or knowledge.
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Within the climate science community itself, the talk of a climate crisis and other alarmist messaging are too common for comfort or scientific rigour. Especially since nobody lives like the world is in crisis. But who is to decide whether climate change is a crisis or simply a lack of collective will?
Climate change is definitely an issue about global commons such as the atmosphere, the oceans, forests, and fisheries. The lifelong work of Economics Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom beautifully showed how sustaining the commons is quite feasible up to a certain scale in terms of geographical extent and the number of stakeholders. But after decades of work, she conceded that climate change is too large in scale and her approaches fail to address issues at that scale.
But do solutions need to be at a global scale? Climate mitigation might be a global problem, and it is local efforts that can add up to global-scale greenhouse gas reductions. Nearly all countries are at the table under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and have committed to reducing emissions. But co-benefits such as energy security drive increasing deployment of renewables in growing, high-emission countries such as China and India.
Energy-rich, affluent countries (such as the US and Saudi Arabia) or affluent but energy-dependent countries (such as the EU members) are hardly leading climate mitigation by example. But the saviour complex is obvious even at country levels in the preachings offered to developing countries on phasing out coal or not buying oil from sanctioned countries. The EU has been backtracking on its own climate commitments while all attention is on the climate action chaos in the US.
The Gates reversal
The lack of scalable climate solutions allows the Gates of the world to reverse their positions.
There appears to be an unholy the confluence around exploitation of climate change since it is a perfect and perpetual newsmaker. No other issue produces news every day in every corner of the world. The media loves it, climate scientists love it, climate activists love it, and the Bill Gates of the world, of course, love it. The annual circus of COPs takes place with tens of thousands of lobbyists trying to make progress.
People walk during the COP 30 Local Leaders Forum at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 4, 2025. As rich nations backtrack on commitments, the global South continues to innovate quietly—without the fanfare of reversing billionaires.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters
What is noteworthy, however, is that many science papers and reports are released like clockwork just ahead of the COPs, with scary messages about tipping points, accelerating warming, and such.
The good news is that climate change is, in fact, an evolutionary timescale opportunity to make money while delivering solutions to save lives, livelihoods, ecosystems, and biodiversity. Decarbonising energy, sustainable food production with all those smart agriculture solutions, clean water, energy-efficient buildings, climate-resilient infrastructure, and you name it, are all leading many bright and entrepreneurial minds to innovate solutions.
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As Steve Jobs said, the people who will change the world for the better are the ones who are crazy enough to think they can do it. Ultimately, the design engineers who solve problems or design things to be cool as well as functional are the ones who will get us safely to a sustainable world. The descriptive scientists may add value in terms of accumulating scientific understanding of the problem, but they also can be easily tempted by the saviour complex or driven to fear-mongering despite their good intentions. Design engineers, on the other hand, tend to be motivated by building things that work, solving problems, and innovating ideas that everybody wants to buy and use.
Fortunately, climate change is enticing more and more design engineers to attack climate issues. For them, climate change is a problem to be solved, not the end of the world. We need to train more design engineers. We need to stop cloning the scaremongering descriptive scientists or giving airtime to reversing billionaires and politicians.
Raghu Murtugudde is a Visiting Professor at IIT Kanpur and Emeritus Professor, University of Maryland.
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