Has Bill Gates bailed out on the climate crisis?

At the New York Post this week, the Blogfather, Glenn Reynolds, poses the question, “Has the air gone out of the climate crisis balloon?” He suggests that it’s at least deflating a bit, along with several other panic-inducing liberal themes of the moment. (I would argue that the “gun violence crisis” is still going full steam ahead on the left, but perhaps that’s the exception to the rule.) He points to a few examples where leftists seem to be losing their endless enthusiasm for screaming about climate change and making demands that everyone must sacrifice everything they hold dear to Save The Planet. Greta Thunberg doesn’t seem to be drawing the same rave reviews that she used to routinely enjoy. But perhaps more than anyone else, Instapundit points to Bill Gates, who has recently started saying some things that are very unpopular on the left. And almost nobody from his camp appears to be calling him out over it. It’s just strange.

Bill Gates, however, is pumping the brakes on climate panic.

Speaking at a New York Times event, he observed heavy-handed policies won’t work: “If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’”

As Gates noted, many of these people are in middle-income countries, like China and India, that are the biggest contributors to carbon emissions today and whose emissions (unlike those of the United States) have been growing.

All Bill Gates is doing here is speaking common sense, a practice that is typically verboten in his circles when it comes to climate change, but when you’ve given that much money to leftist causes, I suppose you get a pass. He’s pointing to basic human nature. If you push people too far over a subject they might not fully understand but might sympathize with you over, they’re going to buck sooner or later. He’s also bringing up something we’ve discussed here endlessly. No amount of tweaking of emissions we do here is going to overcome the impact (whatever that may or may not be) of the emissions of “developing” nations like China and India, who do virtually nothing while being among the biggest polluters on the planet.

Gates also went one step further and really burst the crowd’s bubble. He said that “no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable.” That should usually be enough to see you excommunicated from the Church of the Climate Goddess but, again, Gates will likely be given a pass.

I’m one of those people he was talking about who actually does care about the environment and wants to curb actual pollution but haven’t been impressed by the global warming alarmism. It just doesn’t make sense. But then again, maybe a change of one degree in the average global temperature over the next few decades will be exactly what it takes to unleash Godzilla from a volcano under the ocean so he can swim up and start flattening cities. What do I know? I’m not a scientist.

But there are a few things I’m pretty sure about even as a layman. I’m quite confident that removing twelve pizza ovens from restaurants in New York City isn’t going to do a damn thing. I know that if you try to force everyone into electric vehicles they don’t want and can’t afford, you’re going to be voted out of office and you’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing that happens to you. And if you come around and try to rip out our air conditioning while simultaneously lecturing us about how hot it’s getting, you’ll likely be met with the unpleasant end of a 12-gauge.

I’m not sure what’s gotten into Bill Gates, but perhaps he is the perfect person to let some air out of the balloon that Glenn is speaking of. Why? Perhaps he’s just realizing it makes no sense. Or maybe he didn’t get in on the ground floor of all the green energy technology grants, so he’s not as heavily invested in it (both emotionally and financially) as some of his leftist friends. But my hat is off to him, no matter his motives. We could use a lot more sanity given the current insane condition of the world, and perhaps this is a fair start.