Recently, in the run-up to COP30, Bill Gates weighed in on this topic. Specifically, he suggested shifting the emphasis from stabilizing the climate per se to reducing poverty and improving public health for those peoples and nations in greatest need. In this thinking, he hasn’t been alone.
Should we be dismayed? Or should we welcome these changes in perspective that Gates and others are proposing?
Some observers are appalled. They see climate change as an existential threat. They see efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change as already dangerously behind schedule. Now, in the face of these realities, they find national leaders worldwide seemingly throwing-in-the-towel versus redoubling their efforts. They view this as tragic.
But the shift in how the world sees this problem would be a hopeful sign, for two quite different reasons.
First, it lowers the temperature – of the global debate. Recall Steve Rayner’s 2006 Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global Environment: Wicked Problems: Clumsy Solutions – diagnoses and prescriptions for environmental ills.
(An apology: this is the point in LOTRW posts where I often say “the original paper is worth a thorough read in its entirety.” However, click on the above link and you’ll be taken to a web site that claims to offer a PDF of the talk, but click on that link and you’ll get a “page-no-longer-exists” message. Best I can do is offer you a link to an LOTRW post from 2010 that summarizes Rayner’s paper and gives some commentary from that time. A sobering reminder of the perishability of web links. If someone knows of an active link to Rayner’s paper, please let us all know.)
In any event, Rayner made a compelling case in 2006 (and in his other works) that climate change has the nature of such a wicked problem. Wicked problems yield (grudgingly at best) to coping strategies; they lack actual solutions. This lack forestalls needed cooperation. Instead, it motivates acrimonious debate. Factions holding entrenched interests, and fearing redistributive impacts, invoke contradictory certitudes. Meanwhile, nothing gets done. In the “clumsy solutions” part of the title and the paper, Rayner called for seeking and being content with “partial, not-quite” solutions – in essence, breaking up the holistic problem into pieces that individually are less value-laden. These bits submit to approximate fixes before the fixers have time to grow impatient and lapse into partisan-based recrimination. An important example? Current international public- and private-sector efforts to electrify as much of the global economy as possible and meet present and future energy needs through solar- and wind renewables. Initially, the switch to renewables was highly controversial. But the cost of solar energy is rapidly declining and production is ramping up. The profit motive[1] – not subsidies, not politics – has become the driver. In this instance, Bill Gates and others are recognizing a positive trend more than they are starting a negative one. We can only hope that similar opportunities will emerge with respect to other dimensions of mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
Second, it emphasizes the ends that matter most. A second reason for hope is the revival of interest in reducing poverty and improving public health as end goals. These dimensions of the climate challenge date back to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) or the “Earth Summit,” also held in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro). They form the starting point. Principle 1 of the Rio Declaration states:
Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.
The Rio summit is in the DNA of much subsequent progress. It established the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), initiating the current international efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions, and stabilize the climate. The United Nations sustainable-development Agenda 21 and the recent (2025) UN Convention on Biological Diversity also trace their origins to the Rio Conference.
Ethical and moral imperatives for coping with climate change have always been a focus for faith-based institutions. (Among these the Catholic church, first in Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ and then in his 2023 Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum, has provided a particularly compelling framing.)
Such motivations go back further – at least four centuries. Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism and the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and thus encumbering a political position between Parliament and royalty, had this to say about the purposes of science[2]:
“Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all — that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life, and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that the angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it.”
Hard to say it any better. Science, and policy, to be pursued for the benefit and use of life (not just human life, but all of life)? Bill Gates, Pope Francis, and Francis Bacon in agreement? Might be something to the idea. Spanning nearly half a millennium? Could prove enduring.
Time for us to do our bit.
[1] As well as the visible need for augmented energy sources to fuel the frenzied development and application of artificial intelligence now underway.
