Bill Gates’s Controversial COP Challenge

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Bill Gates, Shohei Ohtani, and the Wrenching Judgment Calls of Climate Policy 

Last week, tech titan and clean energy mega donor Bill Gates offered some surprising advice. Writing ahead of this month’s United Nations climate summit, Gates argued that the world was paying altogether too much attention to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change, he contended, does not pose a threat to human survival. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” he wrote. By focusing too much on near-term emissions reductions, he continued, policymakers are “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” including fighting poverty and improving human health.

The essay generated shockwaves in the climate community. It strains credulity, advocates point out, to claim that the world is doing too much to curb emissions. Global average temperatures hovered more than 1.5°C above the preindustrial average for all of 2024, and even the world’s highest climate ambitions—to say nothing of its actual policies—fall far short of what’s needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Gates knows this, of course; indeed, he spends the middle third of the piece talking about the necessity of emissions cuts across various critical economic sectors. The argument he really seems to be making isn’t so much about trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation as such, but rather about trade-offs across time.

Cutting an additional ton of carbon will make a marginal contribution to improving lives in the future. Vaccinating a child will protect a life now. The choice between spending a dollar on vaccination versus a dollar on cutting emissions, therefore, comes down in large part to how you value a life today relative to one tomorrow.

Ghoulish though this may sound, economists routinely convert lives into dollar values to calculate the costs and benefits of a particular policy. Future costs and benefits are generally valued lower than those incurred today, in part because inflation lowers the value of money over time. The key question, though, is by how much. Different assumptions about the future can generate substantially different values. 

Consider, for example, the contract of professional baseball player Shohei Ohtani. (Stick with me.) 

Ohtani is an exceptional player, possibly the best ever to play the game. When he became a free agent after the 2023 season, the ten-year, $700 million contract he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers was the largest ever signed at that time. Interestingly, however, he elected to defer almost all of his actual income, receiving only $2 million per year for his ten years of playing time and $68 million per year for the decade after that. (This was ostensibly so the Dodgers would be able to afford both his contract and the rest of a dynasty-worthy team and not, say, for advantageous tax purposes.) 

Whatever the rationale, with so much of Ohtani’s payday slated for the 2030s and beyond, expectations about the future matter a great deal. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis walks through two different scenarios in this helpful primer. If the future looks like Ohtani’s native Japan, where inflation and interest rates are low, the real annual value of his contract in those later years would be $66 million rather than $68 million: lower than the nameplate value, but not by much. A dollar tomorrow would be worth about as much as a dollar today.

If, on the other hand, the future looks more like the United States, where inflation and interest rates are higher, he would be sacrificing a great deal. In that scenario, the bank estimated his real annual earnings would be $46 million—nice work if you can get it, to be sure, but substantially less than what it looks like on paper. Tomorrow’s dollar would be worth far less than today’s.

For someone like Bill Gates, a relentless techno-optimist with deep visibility into the frontier of energy innovation, future emissions reductions carry an air of inevitability. Sure, he argues, the world needs to continue innovating and deploying new technology, but the general trend is clear. It’s easier, with that perspective, to heavily discount the value of spending on future lives; the returns are, in a sense, already baked in. And, if tomorrow’s dollar is less valuable than today’s, as Gates implies, it’s far better to spend that dollar immediately, on sanitation, vaccination, family planning, and other interventions that will improve lives now.

As another baseball legend once reportedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But, as climate negotiators descend on Belem, Brazil, this week, that is exactly what they must do. Allocating limited funds across mitigation and adaptation—future lives and present

ones—demands that they make judgments about the relative value of those lives. They may not have the same starting assumptions as Bill Gates, or come to the same conclusions. But they will, without doubt, be participating in the same exercise.