I wish sophisticated communicators like Gates would skip the strawpeople arguments as setups; it's the end of any serious examination before it even begins.
> doomsday message
That term reveals a partisan position: it's a strawperson ridiculing those who talk about the great risks and harms of climate change. 'Don't look up!'
> Interesting and different perspective
It's an old, well-worn perspective, that is commonplace now - especially in American business and government, it's more common than the 'realist' perspective on climate change. It's incredible that they - the entrenched, very powerful status quo power structure - depict themselves as insurgents for advocating the same old climate denial policies.
IMHO: The entrenched capitalists (including Gates) and their power structure simply don't want to change - a bias of the status quo. They are asserting a reactionary conservative position - no change, no matter what, and hate those who want change - regardless of its validity in reality, with the idea that nobody can make them change. They make spurious arguments like Gates to divert people - a tactic they can do endlessly.
The idea that the answer to the enormous damage of the entrenched capitalists is empower them more is, when you think about it, laughable and absurdly myopic and self serving. They can't even carry out the charade for 10 minutes - now those entrenched capitalists are building massive power-consuming datacenters, eliminating ESG, destroying renewable energy in the world's biggest economy ... I'm sure they'll save us.
But notice I keep talking about entrenched capitalists. An essential of capitalism and free markets is creative destruction. These failed capitalists - and climate change is an historic failure, about which their predictions and decisions were enormous errors - should be destroyed (economically) and buried like Lehman Brothers, and new ones, who correctly anticipate it and deal with it, should be funded.
Really, all we need is to stop making taxpayers fund climate change - prevention, remediation, cleanup from disasters, etc. - and have a GHG tax that prices things according to their real cost, rather than subsidizing the current failures. Then real, innovative capitalists in a free market can thrive.
> doomsday message
That term reveals a partisan position: it's a strawperson ridiculing those who talk about the great risks and harms of climate change. 'Don't look up!'
> Interesting and different perspective
It's an old, well-worn perspective, that is commonplace now - especially in American business and government, it's more common than the 'realist' perspective on climate change. It's incredible that they - the entrenched, very powerful status quo power structure - depict themselves as insurgents for advocating the same old climate denial policies.
IMHO: The entrenched capitalists (including Gates) and their power structure simply don't want to change - a bias of the status quo. They are asserting a reactionary conservative position - no change, no matter what, and hate those who want change - regardless of its validity in reality, with the idea that nobody can make them change. They make spurious arguments like Gates to divert people - a tactic they can do endlessly.
The idea that the answer to the enormous damage of the entrenched capitalists is empower them more is, when you think about it, laughable and absurdly myopic and self serving. They can't even carry out the charade for 10 minutes - now those entrenched capitalists are building massive power-consuming datacenters, eliminating ESG, destroying renewable energy in the world's biggest economy ... I'm sure they'll save us.
But notice I keep talking about entrenched capitalists. An essential of capitalism and free markets is creative destruction. These failed capitalists - and climate change is an historic failure, about which their predictions and decisions were enormous errors - should be destroyed (economically) and buried like Lehman Brothers, and new ones, who correctly anticipate it and deal with it, should be funded.
Really, all we need is to stop making taxpayers fund climate change - prevention, remediation, cleanup from disasters, etc. - and have a GHG tax that prices things according to their real cost, rather than subsidizing the current failures. Then real, innovative capitalists in a free market can thrive.