(Daily Signal)—The world of climate realism just won a massive victory thanks to Bill Gates, and the long-term results are likely to be seismic.
Gates isn’t just the founder of Microsoft, he’s one of the most influential philanthropists alive today. This past week, he firmly rejected the climate alarmism that’s been so pervasive on the Left.
To be clear, I’m not saying Gates has rejected the—largely fatuous—idea that there’s a grand “consensus” in science that carbon emissions are warming the planet. I’m also not saying that he’s going to announce a large contribution to the conservative Heartland Institute tomorrow. Gates still seems to drink some of the Kool Aid—he has just significantly diluted his dose.
This past week, he openly called for the Climate Industrial Complex to stop obsessing over global temperatures and start to focus on what matters far more: human welfare.
If others follow where he leads, this could transform philanthropy in a positive direction, away from alarmist fearmongering and toward actual solutions that improve lives.
It may also spell doom for the climate activist groups that long ago abandoned a healthy focus on preserving the earth’s beauty for people to enjoy and instead embraced a worldview that sees human beings as a plague on the earth.
What Did Bill Gates Say?
Gates published a long essay Tuesday ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP 30, next month, presenting “three tough truths about climate.”
He explicitly connected his essay to the problem of ensuring that charitable spending is “delivering the greatest possible impact for the most vulnerable people” and he claimed that the money designated for climate is not being “spent on the right things.”
In this context, he delivered a three-part message:
- “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.”
- “Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate.”
- “Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.”
In his essay, Gates urges the climate community “to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare.” He says charities should strive to “ensure that everyone gets a chance to live a healthy and productive life, no matter where they’re born, and no matter what kind of climate they’re born into.”
In other words, we should stop trying to play God and start using charitable funds where they can make a concrete positive impact for poor people today rather than worrying ourselves silly over decreasing the global temperature 100 years from now. The current agenda of the climate movement often drives policies that make life worse in the here and now and make it harder for the world’s poor to achieve the prosperity that would actually protect them from the threats of climate disaster.
Gates rightly mentions the case of Sri Lanka, a developing country in Southeast Asia that “set out to cut emissions by banning synthetic fertilizers.” This policy sparked a famine, and Gates said tragedy resulted because “the government valued reducing emissions above other important things.”
The Microsoft founder also notes that “in the past century, direct deaths from natural disasters, such as drowning during a flood, have fallen 90%, between 40,000 and 50,000 people a year, thanks mostly to better warning systems and more-resilient buildings.” He also rightly observes that “excessive cold is far deadlier” than excessively hot weather.
Gates does not question the assumption that climate change is a threat, but he suggests that increasing the prosperity of the developing world is a far better solution than obsessing over carbon emissions. He also notes that countries like the U.S. have decreased emissions in recent years, and he celebrates that “green” technologies are becoming less expensive.
He suggests that innovation and prosperity, not artificial limits on energy, pave the true path forward.
What Does This Mean for America?
Gates’ essay poses a fundamental challenge to the massive sector of climate nonprofits. Organizations that once actually focused on protecting nature for human enjoyment now spend the vast majority of their time demonizing fossil fuels and advocating policies that restrict prosperity, not enable it.
Thanks to Gates, the donor class that keeps these nonprofits afloat will start asking uncomfortable questions, like how much does advocating for the Green New Deal actually improve the lives of poor people in the U.S. and abroad?
Environmentalist groups played a large role in the influence campaign I expose in “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” These groups fed staff and ideas into the Biden administration, weaponizing the administrative state to push climate alarmism on the American people and to fund their pet projects in the name of saving the earth.
Many activist groups will keep on spreading alarmism and advocating destructive policies, but Gates’ new direction will at least force these groups to reckon with the fact that your car isn’t causing the end of the world.
Earlier this year, the Gates Foundation distanced itself from one of the major arms of the Left’s dark money network, which funds climate activist groups. The foundation quietly began withdrawing itself from its partnership with Arabella Advisors, which provides services to a few influential leftist NGOs that fund a broad swath of activism on the Left. Now, Gates has launched a powerful salvo against the Climate Industrial Complex.
If his message resonates with donors, it may simultaneously weaken the Left’s climate activism and actually help people who need cheaper energy the most. Let’s hope America’s donors are listening.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
