WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a House Republicans Conference.
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Bill Gates is worth $115 billion, made by founding and building Microsoft, one of the most successful companies in the world (net worth almost $4 trillion). He has been for many years a strong advocate for climate change. But Gates has softened his position. He now says the world needs to shift focus to improving lives by, for example, reducing poverty, improving health, and boosting agriculture. In a recent memo, he says its “time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies.” Gates has earned the right to make statements like this, as the Gates Foundation has worked hard over the years and poured in lots of money to improve health and development in poor countries. A prime example is reducing malaria in countries in central Africa, and saving over 12 million lives since 2000. Gates is veering toward adaptation.
Bill Gates’ New Perspective.
Gates wrote a book in 2021 called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. In 2021, he didn’t mince words. “If nothing else changes, the world will keep producing greenhouse gases, climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will in all likelihood be catastrophic.” His cry was for the world to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), and to do it quickly. Back then Gates was strong on mitigation.
But Gates also said the world could not decarbonize without innovation in low-carbon energy, and his book lists 19 separate sources that includes nuclear fusion, fission, and geothermal energies. Under fission, Gates asterisks Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). The list in the book is comprehensive, and many of these items were heavily promoted by President Biden in 2021 and 2022, to incentivize joint projects with U.S. industry.
Bill Gates, Founder of Breakthrough Energy.
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So what changed? Gates admitted that in his book he wrote five chapters on mitigation, but only one chapter on adaptation, and he wished he had discussed this more. In a piece Gates wrote in 2021, he said climate change affects more the world’s poorest people, and the biggest risk are populations near the equator. A large fraction of these people work in agriculture. An example is a farmer whose crops get wiped out every four years, due to climate change, instead of every ten years as it was before. This is more serious for a family living on the financial edge. Gates says in sub-Saharan Africa and even South Asia vast areas of farmland may move toward drought conditions.
Another impact is the health of a poor family. If money in the bank is reduced due to climate change, there is less to pay for medical treatments. The world needs to learn to adapt to climate change and the risks of agricultural, financial, and health failures amongst the poorest.
But Gates’ vision to address climate change is still very much alive—even though in March 2025 he made deep staff cuts in his umbrella company called Breakthrough Energy. His vision includes building new, advanced nuclear power plants. In his company, TerraPower, Gates has heavily invested in nuclear because it is a reliable, carbon-free, and scalable, and a perfect fit to work alongside renewables like solar and wind. His next-gen nuclear reactor called Natrium, started in 2024, is a joint project with the Department of Energy. The reactor is safer and more efficient because it uses molten sodium instead of water as a coolant, and will be able to supplement gaps in power supplied by wind and solar.
Chris Wright’s Pre-Government Perspective.
The Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, has written in 2024 his own book, called Bettering Human Lives, that calls for more energy to lift third-world companies out of poverty. In the book Wright argues that “Hydrocarbons are essential to improving the wealth, health, and life opportunities for the less energized seven billion people who aspire to be among the world’s lucky one billion.” What he’s referring to are traditional fossil energies.
Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy
Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia
As an entrepreneur, a big step was to co-found Liberty Resources in 2010, an E&P company that drilled and fracked wells in the Bakken in North Dakota. The shale technique of a long horizontal well fracked many times along its length was profitable in the Bakken. The next year, 2011, Wright bought and co-founded Liberty Energy, an oil and gas service company that moves immense frac pumping units to a wellsite to frac a horizontal well. Liberty Energy was valued at $2.8 billion in February 2023. These were two propitious investments just ahead of a massive surge in shale oil production across the U.S.—a revolution that made the U.S. self-sufficient in oil and gas in 2020, the first time since 1947.
Wright discusses in his book, Bettering Human Lives, three global energy challenges of today: 1) energy poverty, 2) secure supply of reliable, affordable, and clean energy, and 3) climate change. “There is no reason that we can’t master all three challenges,” he said.
Wright continues: “Energy poverty is today’s most urgent challenge and this report explains why the longer, healthier, opportunity-rich lives in the modern world are simply not possible without oil and gas… Liberty’s mission is to bring modern energy to the one-third of humanity that still lacks access…” How much is one-third of humanity? Approaching 3 billion people since the world population is 8 billion.
It’s well-recognized that burning wood or coal increases pollution at the surface, and GHG higher in the atmosphere. But why is energy poverty ranked number 1? One answer is that over three million deaths occur every year from burning wood, coke, and other fuels burned indoors that generates particulate substances. That’s not all. The same particulate material causes several million extra deaths from outdoor air pollution. Deaths from particulate matter are estimated at 5-10 million every year.
If there is a weak point in this worthy cause, it’s a 2023 study by CSIRO in Australia that found that generation and transmission of electricity by wind, solar, and batteries are now cheaper than new-build gas power plants, and much cheaper than nuclear reactors (even SMRs). And since 2023 the trend favors renewables that will become even cheaper. Costs of battery systems in China, according to Wood-Mackenzie, are expected to drop 50% by 2032.
Installing renewables instead of traditional oil or gas-fired power plants would still be consistent with Wright’s statement, “There is no reason that we can’t master all three challenges.” In fact, Wright has said it doesn’t matter where energy comes from “as long as it is secure, reliable, affordable and betters human lives.”
Wright’s book does address climate change. “The third global energy challenge, climate change, has become so politicized and emotionally charged that rational, calm, fact-based decision-making is too often displaced by well-intentioned but hasty and counterproductive measures.” There is reason for this skepticism, as, for example, his book reveals how some weather extremes such as hurricanes and wildfires have not worsened over the past 40-50 years while GHG from fossil fuels have risen multiple times. This critical data, including the “killer quad” of weather extremes that haven’t worsened when global temperature has risen by 1.0 C degrees, underscores a deficiency of climate modeling that has been analyzed in depth elsewhere.
Trump Administration Is Crimping Wind And Solar Renewables.
Bill Gates is hugely disappointed by the Trump administration’s actions to cut renewable energy grants and tax credits for wind and solar. A prime example is Esmeralda Seven, an enormous solar farm that would become one of the largest in the world. Except that… President Trump has canceled the project, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Esmeralda Seven was one of the renewable projects set up and supported by President Biden. Almost 185 square miles, outside of Las Vegas, the development would consist of seven solar farms, steered by NextEra Energy and Invenergy.
There are many other examples: On his first day in office, Trump froze all new permits for wind projects onshore and offshore.
- Out of eight east coast offshore wind projects in the U.S., in one construction has been stopped, and another three have been revoked or are under threat.
- Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has ordered all planned wind and solar projects on federal lands have to be signed off by Burgum. The bureaucracy is likely to delay such projects.
- The One Big Beautiful Bill has reduced tax credits for renewables, or shortened their lives.
- Although only 4% of US renewables lies on federal land, changes in processing of permits and other approvals are likely to lead to restrictions and delays for wind and solar projects on non-federal lands. Many restrictions and delays for wind and solar development apply to Republican-held states.
- Altogether, new investment, financing and appropriations for renewable energies (not including nuclear) are falling in 2025 compared to 2024. But on a worldwide basis, the opposite is occurring, as renewables are zooming ahead.
- The administration’s position of making things easier for oil and gas drilling, but harder for wind and solar, is peculiar in light of massive increases of electrical power that new data centers are demanding. In the past two years, wind and solar has provided over 90% of new energy in the U.S. Wind and solar in the U.S. now provide 15% of power in the U.S. What’s hard to understand is $22 billion of clean energy projects were written off or cut back in the first six months of 2025—more than 50% in red states.
Takeaways.
This study of three giant energy influencers is revealing. First, Bill Gates and Chris Wright have both expressed concern for the third world in regard to poverty, agriculture, and health. Second, their positions diverge on climate change. Gates wants to continue to address climate change, but not with such fierce determination as before. Wright early on said he would embrace all kinds of energy, so long as they are affordable and reliable, but as Secretary of Energy he has pivoted away from renewables. Part of the reason is he sees solar and wind as too expensive and too variable, although there is much evidence otherwise. Another part is Donald Trump’s denial of climate change, and his desire to restrict solar and wind renewables in the U.S.
Gates has pivoted towards adaptation to climate change. Wright has pivoted away from climate change and back to traditional energies. Trump has doubled down on restricting renewables. All have strongly pushed nuclear energy.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianpalmer/2025/11/04/what-energy-influencers-say-bill-gates-chris-wright-and-donald-trump/
